Bonus for engineers, is that done?

But I care. I don't want to be told exactly what to do, by people who often don't know themselves. I want to understand the customer's systems and problems and make suggestions. As EEs, we presumably understand electricity, control theory, signals and systems, transducers, and we took physics so appreciate some optical and thermal issues; what we don't know we can cram for before we meet the customer.

It's fun to go to oil refineries and jet engine manufacturers and enormous lasers and IC fabs and cookie factories and brainstorm with people.

Precisely.

The key point of a successful relationship of any sort is that you try to understand what the other party needs, and try to supply it.

In a professional role that means you understand the value that your customers give /their/ customers.

Or, going the "other way" in the "value chain", you understand what makes it easier for your suppliers to give you what you need.

Yes, provided all parties understand and appreciate the "game" you are "playing" while poking their concepts with a stick.

It is also necessary to have some humility about what you really /don't/ understand about the complexities and subtleties of their position. Often, they haven't articulated those to themselves, so it is unsurprising that they don't always articulate them to you.

Most people like to talk about their science or processes. Ask a few interested-sounding questions to get them going.

I find it hard to sell to organizations that have in-house EE. The inside guys don't want competition, have managements' ears, and can make ludicrous promises about cost and performance. I've has such people wait until I deliver, and then steal the design. I won't name names.

The people who appreciate good EE interaction are generally not EEs but have a complex problem that we can really help with. They generally don't know exactly what they need, or what's possible.

I had one customer that, doing what the journals said, was firing their process at 10 Hz. We got them 100K.

A really small percentage. When I worked for Boeing, we had a reward program which paid in Best Buy gift certificates. Saved the company a few hundred million dollars. Got a desktop LCD TV set (3" screen).

I have never said that you are not allowed to prepare the specification together with the customer in a way you like, or not have any other form of activity you consider fun. But later failing to provide a product that meets the agreed specification is exactly that -- a failure, which makes all the fun irrelevant. I just claim that if the engineer succeeded, but is unable to sell as much as the company wishes, it's not his fault. Blame your sales team or any other employee that is supposed to sell.

Best regards, Piotr

That's exactly what we have in our company and is pretty typical here. We have full-time analysts that work together with a client and try to extract as much information as possible. Our engineers digest that and tell the analysts the next batch of questions to ask, be they technical or legal. On top of that there is a dedicated sales team that makes sure the process goes smoothly.

But nobody in their right mind would punish an engineer for a sale opportunity failure or a salesman for a solution that does not work as advertised. The very next day they would be working for our competitors. There are designated employees to handle all the aspects of the process correctly, blame them -- this is a serious and heavily regulated business, not a one man show.

Best regards, Piotr

This is good for short term, but can raise your maintenance costs enormously. "No" is often a good answer.

Best regards, Piotr

I beg to disagree, the purpose of a job is to make money. You basically sell your time, of which you have limited amount, so you are interested in selling it at the highest price you can get. True, this is not the only factor that matters, but one of critical importance.

Indeed, good engineers design stuff for its own sake, but not necessarily during their office hours.

Best regards, Piotr

If they like their job, then not necessarily. Once upon a time I made some shitload of sterlings from our stock options, but modestly continue my employment. My retirement period was then secured, I hate watersports.

Best regards, Piotr

Lessons learnt?

Best regards, Piotr

I still disagree. The purpose of a job is to make a life. If all I had wanted was money I would have made a living, but not a life.

I've been fortunate enough to choose jobs that I care about. Mostly by inventing things that inspire other people to build a business around. I found most of those around me also cared to be doing something worthwhile.

You only get one life. Most people have at least some desire to make it matter.

Clifford Heath

o the trouble of demonstrating that they don't need it.

It wouldn't have, in the case I had in mind. We gave them a floating video output from the actual detector - floating so that they wouldn't inject cur rent into the instrument ground. A sufficiently ham-fisted customer could p erhaps have blown it up, but that wouldn't have been the only thing that su ch a customer would have destroyed.

Yes, but a life in general, not only to cover your current spendings. IOW, you need to think about securing your retirement expenses, medical expenses, unemployment periods, etc. Only after reaching this level of security you can start making a life in a responsible way. Reaching it requires sufficient stream of money, which means a good job. You can also win in a lottery, but it doesn't exactly sound like a plan.

But why "only", I really don't understand. Salary and satisfaction are completely orthogonal entities, you can make any linear combination of them (if lucky enough). You can have a satisfying and well-paid job, as well as a well-paid dull job and a very satisfying hobby. It's your life, optimise the proportions!

And why shouldn't such a job be well paid?

Again, worthwile and interesting are orthogonal. Garbage disposal is vital, yet not extremely inspiring.

Best regards, Piotr

require both parties involved receive "consideration" meaning something tan gible of worth. A contract can't only be about one person promising someth ing to someone else. To make sure no one can claim there was no "considera tion" and so making the contract invalid, the party getting all the signifi cant "consideration" promises to give the other party valuable consideratio n of $1.

it that way.

Correction: In the US, consideration in contract law does not have to be money, or even something tangible. A simple promise to do something (or to not do someth ing) very often constitutes consideration sufficient to bind a contract, so long as that promise has value to the parties. Same thing with actions.

That said: Yes, it has to be a two-way street to be a valid contract in the US. There must be consideration (in whatever form) for both parties.

in contact with potential customers, because they didn't want the customer s to hold off buying an existing product in favour of waiting for the new p roduct coming down the pipe-line. There was also the problem that at least some of the engineers knew a lot more about the product than the marketeers , and made them look under-informed from time to time.

stomers really wanted, letting them talk to customers is an excellent idea, but it's a two-way street.

"I deal with the god-damned customers so the engineers don't have to.

Link:

I've seen many people spend almost all of their vital years trying to reach that level of security, and then die without having really lived. Life is what you happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

In my case it was quite adequate. I considered becoming a violin maker at one point, which might have been satisfying, but not in the same way.

To me, something matters if it makes a difference. Some people have more opportunity and ability to leave the world a better place than others do.

CH

Sometimes it happens in unexpected ways. Australia has plastic banknotes (a nd invented the idea). One of their security features is a hologram printed onto the plastic by squeezing it against an etched pattern written onto m etal block by a Cambridge Instruments EBMF 10.5 electron beam microfabricat or, which we sold the Victoria Mint.

That machine had a long history, and included roughly a hundred 200mm x 200 mm printed circuit cards. In order to get its writing speed up to 10MHz (t he 10 in the 10.5) three of them had to be quite extensively reworked, whic h kept me busy for nearly a year.

What really entertained me was that the idea of replicating diffraction gra tings in that way had been invented by Allan Walsh for some atomic absorbt ion spectrometer or other.

When I met him - around 1968 - he'd shown me his little ruling engine for m aking diffraction gratings. Writing the grating onto a metal block and repl icating it by pressing the metal block up against a plastic film was defint ley a way of making a cheaper grating spectrometer.

One of the worst jobs I ever had was in a commercial park. Just down the s treet in one of those buildings put up with concrete slabs in sections was a violin maker working in front of a glass window. I remember watching him work and wondering if he got more satisfaction from his job than I did. I wondered if he felt violin making is a performing art. It worked for me.

That can happen. But I've seen many people who had never cared about their future and then the future came. Total panic is an understatement.

True, I can be hit today by a car and die suddenly, absolutely plausible. Should it prevent me from planning my future and securing me and my family?

The plans are pieces of a global optimisation algorithm -- it just pays off to spend some time working on not exactly the most exciting thing here in order to get very significant gain there. Yes, I may be wrong or I may not survive to enjoy the gains, but it may happen to all of us.

Heck, even education is an instance of the above. Studying is a total waste of time in the short term, as it distracts you from earning money. But once completed, magic happens and suddenly you are able to negotiate completely different kinds of jobs. At least in my part of the world.

So it has almost always been in my case. But I would have not been doing that job for 1/3 of the salary. I would have been doing completely different things for 3x the salary if I had the opportunity. I can sell different services at different price. I will do my best to ensure superior quality in all cases, but well... I'll not design you Taj Mahal if you are willing to pay for a cottage. Adequacy, as you said.

Best regards, Piotr