What to do with this silly assignment?

"If one exists" is the main challenge here. While I might appear to be complaining, I actually have it pretty good, and work with very great people in a very professional environment.

Agreed. I have begun to formulate a position about this: "I am very serious about working safely, but I am not interested in making safety my job."

The situation is a little different. The government labs had been exempted for many years from OSHA rules. Now they aren't. So we have a huge backlog of equipment that was procured or custom built which is not NRTL certified, and must either be, or get internally certified.

They had resisted doing anything about this until higher levels of the government ordered them to deal with it.

All of the labs have approached the problem in different ways. LLNL harnessed a group of technologists who seemed willing and able to devote

Since my job classification is at the bottom of the stream where the sh*t rolls, we are the ones that get to deal with it. The only exception is my boss has literally sidestepped the plan (with a wink-wink from the center director) and is trying to work with me to find a more efficient solution, based on his authority to disburse department funds as he sees fit. After all, we are going to pay for it anyway if I do it. So might as well seek the most economical solution.

Fortunately there have been no incidents with existing equipment.

However, when I did a single lab pilot project to determine statistics on how long it would take to inspect items and how many might have issues, the results were not great. I failed about 25% of very old COTS equipment which typically had problems like degraded power cords or loosened internal ground wires. Worse, almost 50% of the custom equipment that had been built before I came failed.

In my department there is a large amount of 208VAC and some 480VAC equipment built near the time when I started in 1999 that was built by a couple of guys who were very good at producing results, but very clueless about any sort of electrical standards. They at least had a modicum of best practices understanding, and grounded almost everything.

But the tape heaters and other sorts of heaters are where things get messy. There are many uncovered junctions (insulated, but not armored) all over the place. I am rather worried that a great deal of re-work is going to be needed to put these connections in junction boxes, or else create lengthy technical work documents requiring formal review and approval processes to document auxiliary grounding schemes, etc.

Well if I go along with all this at least I am not in a position where my efforts are not in demand. Actually, that's the case even if I don't go along with it.

Thanks for the comments.

Good day!

You and I think alike! I am now aggressively re-evaluating my time-management strategies to accomplish just this sort of thing, for the same reason--to maintain my sanity.

It seems that creative people can literally sink into depression and not be able to function unless they are creating. Our modern management ideologies I doubt have even a clue about this.

We have a guy who has done a lot of work on just this subject, I call it "meta-knowledge" ie., how to manage people to foster revolutionary innovation by understanding a great deal about the creative process and the human brain, psychology, etc.

But at the end of the day, the question is going to be "Got it done yet? "

Jamie

Hey, I like your way of thinking! :)

Jamie

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Causing massive power outage in California, due to poor "training". Get back there to train them.

Have you kept the boss informed as to the status of your workload and the impact that these assignments have on delivery dates?

If so, its not your problem. In fact, it increases your value to the company (you are in the critical path of more projects).

If not, you could be screwed. Keep the boss up to date and document your inputs. Not that this will help much. If it comes you a confrontation of "you said, he said" its a losing proposition to fight management.

I see. Yes, big labs don't have the same sort of market pressures as businesses--you argue for your budget, and then you have to spend all of it or you won't get as much next year. IBM Research was like that back in the day too. You have to optimize over a different set of criteria.

At IBM, before about 2001, my main annual deliverable was a writeup, due around Hallowe'en, which justified my existence by summarizing what I did that year and why it was important. Its official name (believe it or not) was a 'brag sheet'. We RSMs were ranked from 1 to 2000 (or however many RSMs there were at the time), and it was done on a three-year cycle, so you didn't get your head kicked in if you were working on something with a lead time longer than a year, or if the latest gizmo didn't work. That encouraged innovation and risk taking--you could try something wild, and if if failed, do something safer next year. (A lot of wild things wound up working.)

Of course it didn't make perfect sense to rank physicists, MEs, and computer scientists in the same sequence. Probably no two of us made exactly the same amount of money, though, so that's implicitly a unilinear ranking scale anyway, and they at least tried to make it less of a random number generator than it would have been otherwise.

I switched departments in 2001, after being told that the computer science department, where I then was, wouldn't be doing any more hardware projects--"How are the mighty fallen." That's when I went into the packaging department and did antenna coupled MIM tunnel junctions for on-chip optical interconnection. (A bit of a weird thing to be doing in a packaging group, but never mind.) That was about when they started getting rid of all the technicians, because the fully-burdened cost of a technician and a young Ph.D. weren't that different. Thus we all started doing our own technician stuff, which was very inefficient--it's hard to keep up momentum when you've got too many balls in the air, and having a string of degrees doesn't necessarily mean that you're good with your hands.

In the new department, everything was done on a one-year rating cycle called PBC. It might as well have been PHB, it was such a nasty contrast to the old ranking system--you could go from golden boy to bum in a year, just because your project didn't produce results during the summer. At that point everybody was watching his back rather than concentrating on the work, which eventually became miserable.

I had a great time at IBM Watson, except right at the end, and I'll always be grateful for the opportunity, but I'm much happier out on my own. I probably wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't worked there.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

George Herold wrote: [some stuff]

I find it interesting that in my newsreader's "messages" window, with the indentation inherent to threading, the subject line says, "Re: What to do with this silly ass"

;-)

Cheers! Rich

Yes. But discretely inquiring among friends about other jobs may not hurt.

Consider going to work for a company that's significantly smaller, or that's known to be good to work for -- smaller companies either keep their eyes on the ball or they die; departments of big corporations have the luxury of spinning company wealth away with unproductive behaviors, at least until they're noticed.

That's an image I don't need.

Lots of wind, which I like. We've had more rain in the past few days actually.

Haboob could be Osama's brother.

The cleanup after those must be worse than a hurricane cleanup for most people (excepting people who had trees fall on their houses and such).

You know, those mini tornados called Dust Devils are caused by genie's stirring the wind. Haboob said so. Or maybe it was Skybuck.

I don't think so. AFAICT only Yuma in Arizona was involved. I'd ask my wife but today is "spa" day ;-) I can remote access my office PC's just fine, so I know we have power in Ahwatukee. ...Jim Thompson

Um, I've never been to California.

On that covers an area from San Diego, Ca. to Arizona is pretty massive failure.

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That's for JT to return to AZ to train them. It was caused by one single AZ employee, probably with little educations. Perhaps they need chip designers with logical thinking to man the system.

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Looks like it mostly took down SoCal... so no big deal...

Wait until the AZ law comes into play that says APS can only sell _excess_ power to Californica ;-)

Sounds to me like "linnix" is a Californica fairy. ...Jim Thompson

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That would be fine, if we know that we can't depend on AZ. The connection to AZ is as much liabilities as benefits.

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We (AZ) also own water rights to the Colorado River... Californica suckers ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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We are all jointed at the hip. Hurting CA will end up hurting AZ as well. You don't want us all moving to AZ, do you? Actually, i might move to Vegas, NV and start complainting to our King Harry.

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OK. Just knock off the BS. AZ DOES have all those rights, and if CA gets snotty, you'll lose. Although I certainly think selling electricity to CA at