What to do with this silly assignment?

Sounds like where I work.

Just stop wasting time here and get back to work and at least finish something! ;)

Really, you just describe mostly how things get done where I work.

They assign me special projects and only a few of them get done because they keep taking me away from them so I can bail out some one that is having issues resolving their problems.

Our group used to be much larger than we are now, its all about bean counting. They think contracting jobs out that seem trivial to them is the way to go. You must remember that these are people that don't actually do the work but make the decisions, they seem to have a problem separating critical skills and simplistic functions.

It's not a good idea to give your bean counters the elusion that some of your duties are easily replaced by a brainless contractor/consultant.

Times are rough and too many pencil pushers out there gambling your job away. It's then, is when you need to defend your bread and butter.

Now the producers and engineers need to save the asses of the bean counters, because there isn't enough cushion of jobs out there , even for the highly skilled to fall back on when their attempts to promote themselves higher up fails and takes you with them.

Jamie

I think the guy who creates the Dilbert comics works in your company and modelled Dilbert after you :-)

Seriously: you should say you are busy doing the projects you are working on. Perhaps they could get some intern for the job?

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------

I made the argument that the job is best done by someone with fairly decent knowledge of NEC, NFPA70E, and UL "1010" standards, ie., not a person with no experience, but neither a circuits designer and embedded programmer like myself. They didn't listen.

The problem is that upper mgmt. has gotten it in their head that I am the electrical safety expert, simply because I actually decided one day to do a full-on demonstration of what was involved in properly following the letter of the law regarding LOTO on a pulsed laser power supply.

To figure out all the contradictions and ambiguities in our safety manuals, then write the LOTO procedure, set up stanchions, limited approach bounds, arc flash bounds, procure rubber insulating gloves, set up the job, and perform the work took about 2 weeks vs. 2 hours of actual "work." It was quite the drama. It doesn't take nearly as long since then, because the bulk of the time was spent understanding the rules. No one really understands the rules at all after they take LOTO training. So most people just don't do it (I suspect) when they are working behind closed doors. It's quite a problem.

Fortunately with the current situation, my boss decided to intervene and had me contract the guy who did this job at a different site of our company. He is coming next week. Trouble is, I have to supervise and host his work, which will still take a lot of time, and I will still have to deal with the fallout of failed equipment.

Worse, the upper mgmt. folks are continuing to insist on following their plan of using the electronic technologists at the same time as we are running the contract guy, because some assistant managers to the site director have found the opportunity to start a little fiefdom here.

So we have people with no knowledge of our skills, no knowledge of what is necessary to do the job correctly, pushing around 5 techs., without ever assessing the impact on current projects. And the PIs who we actually work for don't even (yet) realize what's going on.

My boss is hoping that our efforts will prove that the contractor is more efficient and less expensive than us, then they will give up using us and just let this guy do the work.

We have 20 different people persuing 5 different strategies, and little coordination. My boss and I are just trying to save ourselves from having my time massively hijacked.

They have tried in the past to make my job centered on electrical safety, though it is insane because I am the only electronic technologist who can do the kind of engineering work I am doing, and I have developed some innovative real-time algorithms that nobody understands and which are critical to the scientists to be able to do the next generation of engine experiments, yet they want to have me do this stuff that is far outside of, and quite frankly beneath, my skill set.

I got so stressed by electrical safety assignments a year ago that I was beginning to have to go home quite frequently with literal chest pain. At that time they got worried about me and removed that assignment.

Now it's starting all over again.

--
_____________________
Mr.CRC
crobcBOGUS@REMOVETHISsbcglobal.net
SuSE 10.3 Linux 2.6.22.17

Are you in NY? Sounds like the company I'm currently "training". ...Jim Thompson

--
                  [On the Road, in New York]

| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I have a long weekend, then I'll try to re-group Monday.

Interesting. The only bright side for me is that it is never detrimental to my performance reviews that so many things keep not getting done. They don't blame me for that and I get "outstanding contributor" evaluations.

What I fear is that they are clueless enough about what I am doing that they would suggest having a brainless other employee or contractor try to do my real work! That would be totally backwards. It gives me shudders.

Thanks for the input Jamie. You've been around here a long time and I always appreciate what you have to say.

--
_____________________
Mr.CRC
crobcBOGUS@REMOVETHISsbcglobal.net
SuSE 10.3 Linux 2.6.22.17

What kind of "training" is a chip designer of your calibre doing?

--
_____________________
Mr.CRC
crobcBOGUS@REMOVETHISsbcglobal.net
SuSE 10.3 Linux 2.6.22.17

Analog design techniques. ...Jim Thompson

-- [On the Road, in New York]

| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

One thing about engineering is that you eventually have to get good at presenting business cases if you want to have any freedom of action.

That is, you figure out the right thing to do, and make estimates of how much it will cost, how long it'll take, and what the payoff will be. Then you make a realistic plan for how to do it, with milestones that your managers can check up on, to give everyone an idea of how the project is going. If you and your management pick your projects that way, then when their attention span gets exceeded and they try to pull you off to do something else, you can fish out the business case and remind them.

Of course, when you do that you become responsible for managing your own milestones, which is a curse as well as a blessing. Some folks like to do that, others don't, but it's the best way to have a bit of control over your working life.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Can those be done in a NY minute?

Cheers

NP.

When they start expecting too much from me at work, I just act natural "Stupid" :)

Jamie

You're still here? You got to enjoy our first noticeable earthquake in 25 years and our first hurricane in 35 years. Anything interesting happen in AZ?

--
Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

Shook my boody ;-)

Lots of rain, not much else.

Several Haboob... which my wife was not happy about... she rolled down the Rolla-shields and sat in the hallway :-( ...Jim Thompson

--
                  [On the Road, in New York]

| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

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Keep looking for a better one - if one exists.

Unfortunately, there's nothing silly about inspecting pieces of electrical equipment for safety compliance. What is silly is that it hadn't been done before. Management is probably worried that their insurance policies won't pay out if there's an accident before the inspections have been done, and - if they've got anything approximating to a sense of responsibility - they may be worried by real safety risks.

I got stuck with a similar job in Cambride UK around 1992, and everything passed. In an earlier job, that kind of inspection had followed someone getting a nasty electric shock from a mis-wired bench, which had prompted me to go for earth-leakage trips on every bench in a subsequent job, which had revealed a bad - but not actively dangerous - transformer in one of our high-voltage power supplies.

The odds are that you won't find any problems, but it's much nicer to find a problem by inspection than it is to work out why someone has had a nasty electric shock or worse.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

25

in

We had an earthquake in Nijmegen last night - at 4.5 on the Richter scale it was noticeable, but there doesn't seem to have been any damage.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

On a sunny day (Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:24:40 -0700) it happened "Mr.CRC" wrote in :

I think the usual procedure is that you ask for more men. This helps everybody. First you are now promoted to a boss of nnn people. Second your boss now is promoted .. and his one, and the company grows. It also shifts the problem upwards, because if the big boss cannot come up with the resources HE has a problem. It also helps the job market.

If that strategy fails, consider going into politics. You can then tax the company, and give yourself a raise.

Omaba

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Gee, that stinks. I've always got what looks like a mountain of work in front of me. But I still try to carve out a bit of time on Friday afternoons, to work on something that I want to do. Rather than what 'has' to be done. Of course this doesn't always pan out. But sometimes just the thought that I'll try this little something on Friday, can keep me sane.

George H.

A massive power outage.

--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

In the past I had much freedom of action, and the management supported me in two ways. First, they regularly challenged me with new difficult problems. Sometimes they were projects that were given up on a long time ago because the existing staff didn't know how to solve them, or some special thing, like the time I got to "compete" with another team on how to develop a wireless data transmission scheme that could transmit strain data off a moving engine piston. I chose optical, they chose RF. Mine worked more reliably.

For the first few years, I also managed to come up with 1-2 hours a day to study circuit analysis and other technical subjects that I wanted to understand. And they paid for some outside courses. They are still generally willing to do the latter.

Eventually I said that I was bored of lasers and wanted to develop electronics, so they switched my job title to that, but I still got to do lasers, because we have struggled to find a competent replacement.

Well in this case, that's exactly what I did, minus perhaps one important thing, the impact on existing projects.

I expect from your field of expertise and impressive background, that you have some idea of how government research labs function. Because my facility does mostly open science rather than producing physical product, there is often little project management. I am the project manager for my projects. The trouble is, my responsibilities make it extremely difficult to quantify time allocations, because in general I have to "support researchers" which means I am always on call to respond to some new development. At the same time, I have to manage to complete lengthy complex design projects.

The main problem here is that even though I have ventured further into quantitative explanation of the business case for employing a contractor, and my boss has already been persuaded, the upper management and their assistants seems to have latched on to their way of doing things, which involves no interest at all toward understanding impact on projects. They don't even know what projects I am doing or how I differ from any other worker with the suffix "Elec" in their job title.

Seriously, I doubt they even understand the difference between an electrician and an electronics engineer.

If you and your management pick your projects that

I think at this point the only hope is to get the PIs to realize just how much of the technologist time that they pay for is being hijacked, just how great the risk is that a vast store of undocumented knowledge is about to walk out the door, and see if they can "reclaim" me.

One interesting way to look at it is what steps they would have to take if I did leave, and how long it would take before meaningful progress would resume on my design projects. Since much of my claim to fame in my facility is the ability to bring real EE methods to projects that were in the past attempted with "hook, crook, and cookbook" approaches, my sense is that a horrible loss of time and capabilities would result.

I work for primarily MEs, with almost no EE background whatsoever in a facility of 30 laboratories. The closest they come is quite a number of good physicists, but they are all Ph.Ds and don't operate at this level of instrument design.

Thanks for the input, Dr. Hobbs.

--
_____________________
Mr.CRC
crobcBOGUS@REMOVETHISsbcglobal.net
SuSE 10.3 Linux 2.6.22.17