29 thoughts on “Eevblog #40 – dilbert and the world of micro managed engineering”
Mechanical engineer here. Before starting my career I was ignorant enough to think that maybe I won't run into terrible managers. Well as it turns out I've been sent through the washing machine of mismanagement just like everyone else. Worked on doomed projects, worked on projects that were progressing well but got rug-pulled, being told to push for deadlines that I knew were impossible, all that fun stuff. But the most valuable lesson I ever learned was to keep my own head on while everyone else was losing theirs…..you never want to let emotions get the better of you (and ruin your reputation) when things inevitably go pear-shaped. You're ultimately there to get paid.
I was the one chosen to design a thermometer(first medical project) for a tier-1 automotive design corporate….and they just wanted to make something to start the medical department , with managers having no medical standard knowledge and instead of requirements,I had to go with assumptions.The design sustained jobs of managers,but never came back to me after first proto….
11 years later and we're still fighting the same work-efficiency degrading issue: (µ)management… This video at least reassures me that I'm not the only one having these problem…
I found a lot of managers are former engineers that were not happy at being an engineer so they went the management path. And the reason they were not happy at being an engineer was because they sucked at it. So now they are sucky managers.
Just take home your paycheck and be happy livening in stupid high roller wast is the hard life of a design engineer to see good men and great ideas wasted so it was hard for me , politics take president over product performance and to design with a set and short life is criminal and standard procedure
You forgot another big one, during lean times fire all the engineers with 10 or more years of experience and hire new grads to replace them. Manager is a hero for saving a bundle in salaries gets nice bonus and jumps ship before the $hit hits the fan because all the projects are stalled, over budget and very late.
I am 60 years old and have worked 35 years in electronics for many different companies. I have seen everything Dave mentioned. It is all true. Engineers laugh at Dilbert to help dull the pain of the truth. I sat through a meeting with a customer and our chief engineer. After the customer left he told me don't worry about what the customer asked for, it can't be done. So even though he knew it couldn't be done we worked on it for another year before it "dissipated".
e-fucking-xactly. Engineers have no power and no voice in most modern day business, and therefore no financing. 10 million really isn't a lot of money for any of these corporations. Hell, I can guarantee you that each of the board members of the companies who Dave is talking about were probably making 3-5 million a year, EACH. And that isn't even going into the profit resource pool that is meant specifically for expanding business. This is exactly why what can seem like a fortune in millions can be pissed away and engineers payed shit; because so many resources in the past have been spent into making the processes more "efficient". Do you know what efficiency means? More work, less pay. Therefore you lose perspective on what "a lot of money" really is, because you are seen as a necessary evil, and at best, an expendable resource. Furthermore there are so many people out there who will tell you that the pay of an engineer is great, say $100,000. Let me be the first to tell you- in the professional world, THAT. IS. NOTHING. Engineering has evolved into a farce of its original glory days and has been essentially knee-capped to the point where any new players trying to enter the arena need to sell their soul to even have a chance to make a decent living. Let me tell you, if you want to make something cool with your engineering degree, do it on your own time as a hobby. Otherwise I can tell you for a fact that if you want to do it for any pay, fun, or even RESPECT, you will get none and shoveled shit in return.
Years ago I wrote a job management database for the electronics workshop I was a bench eng in. It was written in FoxPro and despite being on a low-powered computer of the day it was really effective.
Then, the workshop got taken over by another outfit, and they wanted the database translated into Paradox for Windows. I told them I hadn't a clue about that product, and they got a guy who apparently knew it to try to code a replacement for my FoxPro application. He found that the form designer had an insurmountable bug (Once a form had been published it could not be re-edited) and gave up.
I'd thought this might be an opportunity to suggest going back to stuff that was an industry standard and known to work… but no.
Next, the manager came in and boldly announced that' "All computer work shall henceforth use "Microsoft Office Professional!" This of course meant using Access, which in those days was so puny you'd be lucky to knock the skin off a rice pudding with it, let alone run a workshop.
I declined to get involved, so again a guy who knew a bit about programming but had never used Access took over the task. After about three months of trying (and repeatedly asking me how to do things with databases!) he admitted defeat.
End result, we had to go back to paper job tracking.
Turned out the reason management didn't like the FoxPro database (which was reliable, easy to use and really fast) was that it printed in fixed-pitch fonts. Unbelievable. Basically they couldn't care if it worked, so long the output looked posh.
I totally feel your pain, Dave! I left my previous job because I could not take the management incompetence any more. We had a graphics debugging app, built on a crap subsystem, using a crap programming language, running on the shittiest operating system (despite my repeated protests on each of those choices). On top of that, the core libraries (developed off site) kept changing, breaking everyone else's code a couple of times a week. For a long time, they didn't even tell us what changed and how to adapt our code. Imagine trying to develop a product while on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, you are debugging your 'scope and your power supply, instead of your project…
For a while, I bit the bullet and tried to make at least my part high quality. I was progressing slowly, but my code had no known bugs, a term pretty much unheard of in the software world. Our QA department literally told me to stop bugging them because my stuff just worked, and they were overwhelmed with the bugs in the rest of the system. You would think management appreciated my quality work, right? Wrong! I got a so-so annual review for not producing "enough" code. If I gave up quality, I could have produced ten times as much code. I chose quality. Others chose quantity. As a result, the whole thing was a huge pile of crap. Completely unusable. Upper management was screaming at my boss. The customers were screaming at my boss. Eventually, engineers started leaving. No one was happy to be forced to produce shitty code, just to meet the insane deadlines and they couldn't just say "slow down and focus on quality" to the boss, like I did (they had kids and mortgages. I was single at the time). Guess what? To add insult to injury: I ended up being tasked with fixing their shit! It did not take long for me to leave too. After I left, my manager was finally "reassigned". You are so right! Engineering companies don't get rid of a bad manager until all the engineers leave and the manager has literally no one left to manage! You would think that they finally fired the guy, or reassigned him to a shitty project, right? Wrong again! He was reassigned to the department's dream project that every engineer wanted to work on! No manager screw-up goes unrewarded!
Same crap no matter where you go. I am currently struggling with a micromanager that "listens", but doesn't listen. Says he does not have the technical knowledge, but keeps telling us how to do things in technical point of view. I knew that I cannot get away from the crap that you see in the IT without changing profession, but then again maybe that solution isn't so good.
Doesn't help sometimes when your customer's project managers play musical chairs. It doesn't bode well when you go to meetings with the project manager of the day and you have to tell them some of the issues that are costing them millions in fines to regulatory bodies and to their customers. In the end the project got canned because the customer deemed it to be too expensive, yet they are still having to dish out millions in fines and compensation.
This concept doesn't exist only EE. I have seens at different occasions, upper management purchase (read at 6-7 figure high prices) solutions that could be developed in-house, that did or would perform better than the hig price solutions. Just because it looks good on the CIO's resume that he ok'ed a 15M$ software ERP solution, that is total crap and backward.
I've figured out that we never leave high school. The popular kids grow up to become management because throwing the bull convincingly is the talent that made them popular in the first place. Engineers by design are realists and nobody likes reality because when compared to the bull, reality just sucks.. lol
sounds like my experience at State Farm as an IP design analyst for 9 years. As an internal engineer, it wasn't clients demands so much, it was fresh faced college mgmt grads and their inane ideas of what a network does, and worse, learning early how to blame the network for ALL systems problems. OK i'm getting exasperated just thinking about it. Different layers, but I feel your pain!!!!!
Mechanical engineer here. Before starting my career I was ignorant enough to think that maybe I won't run into terrible managers. Well as it turns out I've been sent through the washing machine of mismanagement just like everyone else. Worked on doomed projects, worked on projects that were progressing well but got rug-pulled, being told to push for deadlines that I knew were impossible, all that fun stuff. But the most valuable lesson I ever learned was to keep my own head on while everyone else was losing theirs…..you never want to let emotions get the better of you (and ruin your reputation) when things inevitably go pear-shaped. You're ultimately there to get paid.
The parallels to software are staggering.
I'd like to speak to some greybeards in machining, see if the stories are the same there.
É luto no planeta inteiro amigo, você esta discutindo comigo política, Eletrônica ou filosofia ? Tudo bem ? Avisa eles, é luto em escala planetária
Smart AAA battery for vibrators. My happy dead prj
Sadly sculptors are mistaken for masons….
I was the one chosen to design a thermometer(first medical project) for a tier-1 automotive design corporate….and they just wanted to make something to start the medical department , with managers having no medical standard knowledge and instead of requirements,I had to go with assumptions.The design sustained jobs of managers,but never came back to me after first proto….
11 years later and we're still fighting the same work-efficiency degrading issue: (µ)management…
This video at least reassures me that I'm not the only one having these problem…
its wierd to see a video in my recomended that is one decade old 😀
I found a lot of managers are former engineers that were not happy at being an engineer so they went the management path. And the reason they were not happy at being an engineer was because they sucked at it. So now they are sucky managers.
Eleven years later: you just made my day, I had a laugh 🙂
Universities are run like that now, when business schools bloat & expand engineering faculties go down the pan…
Just take home your paycheck and be happy livening in stupid high roller wast is the hard life of a design engineer to see good men and great ideas wasted so it was hard for me , politics take president over product performance and to design with a set and short life is criminal and standard procedure
You forgot another big one, during lean times fire all the engineers with 10 or more years of experience and hire new grads to replace them. Manager is a hero for saving a bundle in salaries gets nice bonus and jumps ship before the $hit hits the fan because all the projects are stalled, over budget and very late.
I am 60 years old and have worked 35 years in electronics for many different companies. I have seen everything Dave mentioned. It is all true. Engineers laugh at Dilbert to help dull the pain of the truth. I sat through a meeting with a customer and our chief engineer. After the customer left he told me don't worry about what the customer asked for, it can't be done. So even though he knew it couldn't be done we worked on it for another year before it "dissipated".
"oh well, what's 10 million bucks"
e-fucking-xactly. Engineers have no power and no voice in most modern day business, and therefore no financing. 10 million really isn't a lot of money for any of these corporations. Hell, I can guarantee you that each of the board members of the companies who Dave is talking about were probably making 3-5 million a year, EACH. And that isn't even going into the profit resource pool that is meant specifically for expanding business. This is exactly why what can seem like a fortune in millions can be pissed away and engineers payed shit; because so many resources in the past have been spent into making the processes more "efficient". Do you know what efficiency means? More work, less pay. Therefore you lose perspective on what "a lot of money" really is, because you are seen as a necessary evil, and at best, an expendable resource.
Furthermore there are so many people out there who will tell you that the pay of an engineer is great, say $100,000. Let me be the first to tell you- in the professional world, THAT. IS. NOTHING. Engineering has evolved into a farce of its original glory days and has been essentially knee-capped to the point where any new players trying to enter the arena need to sell their soul to even have a chance to make a decent living. Let me tell you, if you want to make something cool with your engineering degree, do it on your own time as a hobby. Otherwise I can tell you for a fact that if you want to do it for any pay, fun, or even RESPECT, you will get none and shoveled shit in return.
Years ago I wrote a job management database for the electronics workshop I was a bench eng in. It was written in FoxPro and despite being on a low-powered computer of the day it was really effective.
Then, the workshop got taken over by another outfit, and they wanted the database translated into Paradox for Windows. I told them I hadn't a clue about that product, and they got a guy who apparently knew it to try to code a replacement for my FoxPro application. He found that the form designer had an insurmountable bug (Once a form had been published it could not be re-edited) and gave up.
I'd thought this might be an opportunity to suggest going back to stuff that was an industry standard and known to work… but no.
Next, the manager came in and boldly announced that' "All computer work shall henceforth use "Microsoft Office Professional!" This of course meant using Access, which in those days was so puny you'd be lucky to knock the skin off a rice pudding with it, let alone run a workshop.
I declined to get involved, so again a guy who knew a bit about programming but had never used Access took over the task. After about three months of trying (and repeatedly asking me how to do things with databases!) he admitted defeat.
End result, we had to go back to paper job tracking.
Turned out the reason management didn't like the FoxPro database (which was reliable, easy to use and really fast) was that it printed in fixed-pitch fonts. Unbelievable. Basically they couldn't care if it worked, so long the output looked posh.
In the light of this, I have abandoned my ultra-light paperweight and chocolate teapot projects.
Hearing this and reading all these comments… makes me very happy that I don't have these issues. =3
Basically, Dr Murphy rules again!
I totally feel your pain, Dave! I left my previous job because I could not take the management incompetence any more.
We had a graphics debugging app, built on a crap subsystem, using a crap programming language, running on the shittiest operating system (despite my repeated protests on each of those choices).
On top of that, the core libraries (developed off site) kept changing, breaking everyone else's code a couple of times a week. For a long time, they didn't even tell us what changed and how to adapt our code.
Imagine trying to develop a product while on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, you are debugging your 'scope and your power supply, instead of your project…
For a while, I bit the bullet and tried to make at least my part high quality. I was progressing slowly, but my code had no known bugs, a term pretty much unheard of in the software world.
Our QA department literally told me to stop bugging them because my stuff just worked, and they were overwhelmed with the bugs in the rest of the system.
You would think management appreciated my quality work, right?
Wrong!
I got a so-so annual review for not producing "enough" code. If I gave up quality, I could have produced ten times as much code. I chose quality.
Others chose quantity.
As a result, the whole thing was a huge pile of crap. Completely unusable.
Upper management was screaming at my boss. The customers were screaming at my boss.
Eventually, engineers started leaving. No one was happy to be forced to produce shitty code, just to meet the insane deadlines and they couldn't just say "slow down and focus on quality" to the boss, like I did (they had kids and mortgages. I was single at the time).
Guess what?
To add insult to injury: I ended up being tasked with fixing their shit!
It did not take long for me to leave too.
After I left, my manager was finally "reassigned".
You are so right!
Engineering companies don't get rid of a bad manager until all the engineers leave and the manager has literally no one left to manage!
You would think that they finally fired the guy, or reassigned him to a shitty project, right?
Wrong again!
He was reassigned to the department's dream project that every engineer wanted to work on!
No manager screw-up goes unrewarded!
Watching all of them.
Thanks.
Same crap no matter where you go. I am currently struggling with a micromanager that "listens", but doesn't listen. Says he does not have the technical knowledge, but keeps telling us how to do things in technical point of view. I knew that I cannot get away from the crap that you see in the IT without changing profession, but then again maybe that solution isn't so good.
You're describing my company, and we're in food products manufacturing. It's a universal trait of all corporations.
I am very familiar with this crap… white collars always win without question…
Doesn't help sometimes when your customer's project managers play musical chairs. It doesn't bode well when you go to meetings with the project manager of the day and you have to tell them some of the issues that are costing them millions in fines to regulatory bodies and to their customers. In the end the project got canned because the customer deemed it to be too expensive, yet they are still having to dish out millions in fines and compensation.
This concept doesn't exist only EE. I have seens at different occasions, upper management purchase (read at 6-7 figure high prices) solutions that could be developed in-house, that did or would perform better than the hig price solutions. Just because it looks good on the CIO's resume that he ok'ed a 15M$ software ERP solution, that is total crap and backward.
Hehehe, thats being an engineer.
I've figured out that we never leave high school. The popular kids grow up to become management because throwing the bull convincingly is the talent that made them popular in the first place. Engineers by design are realists and nobody likes reality because when compared to the bull, reality just sucks.. lol
sounds like my experience at State Farm as an IP design analyst for 9 years. As an internal engineer, it wasn't clients demands so much, it was fresh faced college mgmt grads and their inane ideas of what a network does, and worse, learning early how to blame the network for ALL systems problems. OK i'm getting exasperated just thinking about it. Different layers, but I feel your pain!!!!!