What Makes an Effective Engineer?
broman.blog
What Makes an Effective Engineer?
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Re: What Makes an Effective Engineer?
#2I am a former engineering operations manager with 30+ years of high-tech product development experience in both hardware and software. I would define an effective engineer as one who can:
A) work together effectively with other engineers, scientists and team leaders;
B) define the problem being solved in detail (requirements) through thorough investigation and analysis;
C) devise a safe, cost-and-time efficient solution (design) that addresses a majority of the requirements using fundamental knowledge of math, science, logic and prior engineering solutions;
D) carefully estimate the cost, schedule and labor/expertise required to build the proposed solution;
D) document and articulate the design and cost/labor estimates for others to review, analyze, and provide feedback and expert opinions so the design may be improved and the cost/labor can be minimized;
E) build rapid prototypes for part or all of the design to reveal hidden requirements, flaws and/or potential design nuances that can be better understood by engineers and the customer;
F) devise a way to test the proposed solution so that all requirements can be demonstrated as complete;
G) build and/or manage the labor team required to build the solution with an eye for quality and maintenance of cost and schedule limits;
H) test and/or manage the testing of the as-built solution; and
I) be able to communicate effectively during the entire engineering process with the customer, other stakeholders and corporate management.
This is what is required to be an “engineer,” whether that be an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer or a software engineer. Anyone not meeting these qualifications is a technician and not an engineer.
Re: What Makes an Effective Engineer?
#3I always got rejected by big tech, even when I passed their algorithm questions. They said I’m not there yet on leadership stuffs.
Now I work in a private trading firm instead. The best company ever I’ve encountered, and really smart people that I’m sure could run around in circles against big tech employees.
Good work life balance. Can do WFH whenever wherever. Good food. Less bureaucracies, less meetings. No middle managers. No PMs. Just work directly with the traders and implement what they want. I get to see my creation goes live and make money for the company. Priceless.
Oh, and the pay is nice too. Pays better than big tech. One dude making $400k as a 21 year old engineer here lol. Full cash.
Re: What Makes an Effective Engineer?
#4The truth? A team player.
That’s the number one thing.
Primadonna? Not interested.
Re: What Makes an Effective Engineer?
#5The truth? A team player. That’s the number one thing. Primadonna? Not interested.
A team player who can do the work. "Team player", by itself, is not enough.
And, to be a team player, they have to be able to communicate technical information, reading, writing, and speaking.
Re: What Makes an Effective Engineer?
#6I always got rejected by big tech, even when I passed their algorithm questions. They said I’m not there yet on leadership stuffs. Now I work in a private trading firm instead. The best company ever I’ve encountered, and really smart people that I’m sure could run around in circles against big tech employees. Good work life balance. Can do WFH whenever wherever. Good food. Less bureaucracies, less meetings. No middle…
Except you're producing nothing of value to humanity. 400k a year to waste your life enabling the vampires to keep playing zero-sum games. Not a good bargain.
I've worked in fintech for a few years and I consider it one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made.
Re: What Makes an Effective Engineer?
#7I always got rejected by big tech, even when I passed their algorithm questions. They said I’m not there yet on leadership stuffs. Now I work in a private trading firm instead. The best company ever I’ve encountered, and really smart people that I’m sure could run around in circles against big tech employees. Good work life balance. Can do WFH whenever wherever. Good food. Less bureaucracies, less meetings. No middle…
Except you're producing nothing of value to humanity. 400k a year to waste your life enabling the vampires to keep playing zero-sum games. Not a good bargain. I've worked in fintech for a few years and I consider it one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made.
most of us like playing games. and the stock market is not zero-sum. Forex is, not the stock market.
I would rather play money games than status games and spend my life virtue signaling to climb the status hierarchy. Status is zero-sum in case you didn't notice.
Re: What Makes an Effective Engineer?
#8Pragmatism and understanding your purpose is to drive value for the business.
When an engineer understands their job is to deliver value to the business as oppose to fussing over the pedantry of a specific style or framework or “perfect solution” or inventing problems that don’t exist. When they understand they can negotiate the deliverables to minimize time and maximize impact to the product while maintaining an extensible code base. That’s what makes an effective engineer. They are nearly unicorns.
Re: What Makes an Effective Engineer?
#9I am a former engineering operations manager with 30+ years of high-tech product development experience in both hardware and software. I would define an effective engineer as one who can: A) work together effectively with other engineers, scientists and team leaders; B) define the problem being solved in detail (requirements) through thorough investigation and analysis; C) devise a safe, cost-and-time efficient solut…
A very traditionalist view. Close to the mark, but also impractical.
I manage a small but very cross-disciplinary R&D team (also hardware/electronics/software) and do not expect people to execute on all of those capabilities. It would surely be a great help if they could, but it's just unrealistic to find people who are that well rounded.
I find that engineers are often domain-specific and their thinking may be clouded by a core or familiar domain. For example in cross-domain problems you'll often see software engineers who want to solve everything with a stack they're familiar with, mechanical engineers who reach directly for industrial automation components, and electronics engineers so stuck in high-cost-of-iteration or large production mentalities they are unable to operate in high-iteration modes with alternative tradeoffs.
In general, I would say that: (1) engineering process management is a different discipline to most domains of engineering; (2) competency at generalist or cross-domain engineering is a relative rarity in those identifying as engineers; (3) R&D engineering is a different skillset (both engineering and management process wise) to production engineering (and the magnitude of these differences is often related to the fabrication/iteration processes and associated costs and timelines in the domain in question); (4) Engineers who excel at cross-disciplinary thinking and novel problems tend to be those without overly formal engineering backgrounds; (5) In some ways, all management is human process engineering, and it's simply unrealistic to expect all engineers to be effectively multi-domain.
Re: What Makes an Effective Engineer?
#10I always got rejected by big tech, even when I passed their algorithm questions. They said I’m not there yet on leadership stuffs. Now I work in a private trading firm instead. The best company ever I’ve encountered, and really smart people that I’m sure could run around in circles against big tech employees. Good work life balance. Can do WFH whenever wherever. Good food. Less bureaucracies, less meetings. No middle…
Except you're producing nothing of value to humanity. 400k a year to waste your life enabling the vampires to keep playing zero-sum games. Not a good bargain. I've worked in fintech for a few years and I consider it one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made.
I used to think like this, until I realized Facebook as a big tech created more damage to society than me.
Also, our trading firm provides liquidity, so it is not not providing value.