Bonus for engineers, is that done?

Same here and perhaps everywhere else on the planet. But hey, as an engineer you are supposed to be intelligent, so why not draw the inescapable conclusions? Discover the criteria, learn them by heart and adapt yourself. Survival of the fittest in the purest form. If your bonus is mostly attached to the average, become a role model of the average. Only a company privately held by you deserves exceptional performance.

In a company I had worked before the management decided that it is worth paying an employee for a patented idea. So they set the rate to 1 EUR per patent. Guess how many patent applications were issued afterwards.

Best regards, Piotr

Sales pays for all your fun engineering. Sale forces are very important, so they get The Cash Commi$$ion.

I do not to be polite to rude customers, so the sales team does the unpleasant work, engineers do the clean work. Enjoy your cocoon.

Logic 101.

Saying "X does not cause Y" does not imply that Y can not happen while X is the case.

It does say that to motivate Y, X might not be helpful.

CH

If the value of your work did not exceed your cost to the company, why would they employ you?

CH

BIT etc. But it is quite low and not something we are in full control of

I don't think that was about motivation. Contracts (at least in the US) re quire both parties involved receive "consideration" meaning something tangi ble of worth. A contract can't only be about one person promising somethin g to someone else. To make sure no one can claim there was no "considerati on" and so making the contract invalid, the party getting all the significa nt "consideration" promises to give the other party valuable consideration of $1.

Likely that is what the 1 EUR was about, they just didn't want to explain i t that way.

Some engineers enjoy designing cool stuff, for its own stake. That's a different motivation than money.

Of course, salaries need to be competitive, or they will design that cool stuff for somebody else.

We've had wives send in long complex justifications for raises, when their engineer spouses were apparently content.

My first engineering job paid $400 a month. That seemed OK to me. I wouldn't do something boring for any amount of money.

What's worse, the 1 euro (or one dollar) is seldom actually paid.

Of course not, but after that there was no motivation. People would gladly give their ideas for free, as they were inventing things for fun in their paid time ad it was kind of natural that the results belong to the company. But 1 EUR was a grave insult.

Shortly after there luckily was nothing calling for an explanation. The Monty Pythons were deadly serious compared to what that management was capable of.

Another example from a different company: there was a project which turned out to be such a massive (massive!) failure and so many senior staff folks were involved that it was absolutely impossible to kill it. Because then the even more senior folks would have to start asking questions and nobody, including them, was interested in finding the answers. So the only option left was to trumpet success, give significant awards and safely "discontinue" the project.

Best regards, Piotr

Fixing is obvious, by why should an engineer be punished for low sales? They design stuff that meets, I presume, the specification, so their job is done here.

Best regards, Piotr

While I was MIT, I got a fairly useful patent. MIT payed me $1.00 for it.

At Memorex I got a patent that saved them hundreds of millions of dollars. Memorex payed me $1.00 for it.

I then started my own company, and kept the millions for myself.

Exactly. If you have to patent, patent garbage and keep the real breakthroughs well hidden in your head.

In fact, paying an engineer for patenting an idea is not an award, but a form of compensation: by doing so the engineer will be prevented from using his own idea in his next job. So you pay him for *not reusing* the idea, not for his creativity.

Best regards, Piotr

Our few engineers usually invent the specifications for the things they design. And imagine features beyond what we or a customer first envisioned.

We don't have "marketing" as such, but if we did, how would marketing droids know what is possible or what might be useful?

"Meeting the specification" sounds dull. One common problem is the opposite, surrendering to featuritis and including too many ideas.

Only the good ones :) That's why they became good at it!

To such an engineer, money is not a motivation, so much as inadequate pay is a demotivation. Money matters, but only if there's not enough.

CH

Tom Peters 1982 book, "In Search of Excellence"

makes this point with some enthusiasm. Sadly, one of his "excellent" compan ies was IBM.

The places where I worked, the marketing droids didn't want the engineers i n contact with potential customers, because they didn't want the customers to hold off buying an existing product in favour of waiting for the new pro duct coming down the pipe-line. There was also the problem that at least so me of the engineers knew a lot more about the product than the marketeers, and made them look under-informed from time to time.

From the point of view of getting the engineers to understand what the cust omers really wanted, letting them talk to customers is an excellent idea, b ut it's a two-way street.

Too many bells and whistles, and the wrong bells and whistles, is a route t o making a product that is hard to use and costs too much.

Hearing from the customers about what is important to them tends to kill of f the more bizarre bells and whistles.

The first electron beam tester I worked on had a beam blanking system that could deliver a 0.5nsec wide pulse of electrons at any beam voltage from 30

I had to invent a special set of beam-blanking electrodes that could be lon g enough to move a 15kV beam of electrons right off the target aperture, an d short enough that a 300V electron could get through them in in less than

The 15kV electron beam was only required for EBIC (electron beam induced cu rrent) testing, where the electrons got into the conducting channel and pro duced charge carriers. Nobody used it.

The next machine didn't go above 2kV, and normally ran at about 700V. It di dn't incorporate my patented scheme.

e:

your company +20 million dollars per year

examples of engineers getting a percentage of the savings?

pen for employed engineers?

to

all

That doesn't follow. Motivation is only one of the factors that influences competence. Intelligence and conscientiousness are other factors, and money doesn't influence either. Being depressed about your place in the pecking order can come into it, and endogenous depression never helps.

An additional motivation. You can have several different motivations for do ing a particular task.

There's quite a bit more going on than that. A high salary is a feature tha t gives you a higher status in your work environment, which means that othe r people are more likely to be helpful, and makes it a nicer place for you to work. Inadequate pay is humiliating, even if it is quite high enough to pay the bills and support your lifestyle.

Knowing what is useful or needed and being punished for the inability of the employing company to sell its own products are two completely different issues. Being punished for designing crap that the company did manage to sell is legitimate.

As a customer I don't care if you enjoy your job or hate it. All I am interested in is if your product work as advertised, that is if they meet their specification.

Sure, BTDT recently. I needed a SIMPLE yet up to date forward controller chip thay would have predictable overcurrent handling behaviour. Simple peak current limiting would perfectly do the job. Unfortunately, the tons of the newer "smart" controllers that I had evaluated turned out to be so smart that in the case of a mild overload they attempted to earn a PhD and publish. It took several days to find the LM25037, which has the magic knob "don't try to outsmart the designer". For a moment of a nervous breakdown I even had warm feelings towards the LM3845 -- designing with it is nauseous, but it is at least completely predictable. A known foe syndrome of a sort...

Best regards, Piotr

Ah yes, the book that took 400 pages to state successful companies boiled things down to two-page memos :)

I read it while at CCL and before joining HP; it confirmed my opinion of HP.

Yes. That was a principal attraction of CCL to me. The engineers elicited what the customers wanted, wrote the proposal including legal clauses, then did the work and delivered it.

Inside HP there was a strong culture of getting people to talk horizontally across any divisions that happened to be part of a solution/problem. Management was limited to ensuring the relevant conversations took place.

It paid dividends.

I'm not sure how much HP divisions' engineers talked to their customers.

It can do the opposite; some customers want Heath Robinson solutions to simple problems, often non-technical problems!

I should have said "hearing from a number of customers about what is important tends to kill off the more bizarre bells and whistles".

Individual customers frequently want to keep on doing what worked for them on their crude experimental lash-ups.

Sometimes it's cheaper to give them what they want, rather than going to the trouble of demonstrating that they don't need it.

I've seen some customers add baroquely complex bells and whistles, because that's what their marketing thought they could sell to their end users.

When in the position of being their end user, I wanted simplicity. But the salesmen like having strange alternatives to give the man in the street the illusion that they are making a useful choice.

To be contrary...

I've even seen marketing say "do what you did before (sotto voce: whatever that was because we don't know) but add X", when the customers were saying "don't do what you did before, we only put up with it because there was no alternative back then".

Yes.

Summary: if an idiocy is possible, it will happen.