The Christmas break was nice. It was filled with food, family, and lots of socializing. My original plan was to take a trip to Niagara Falls, but canceled those plans at the last minute in order to relax at home. But holidays aren't meant for relaxation, even when I do stay at home. Instead, I completed a couple of minor projects around the house, bumped into an old friend at an ice rink which led to more socializing, and stayed up way past my bedtime on many a nights. Now that the holidays have wound down, I'm ready to relax. That's why I'm heading to work tomorrow. My American colleagues are still on holidays on Jan 3. This means I'll be able to do a bit of light housekeeping chores (work-wise) without the constant interruptions and distracting meetings of a regular work day. It'll be a nice relaxing time.The rest of 2011 is shaping up to be an uncertain year. Having been promoted last year due to two straight consecutive years of excellent reviews, I can't say that I've repeated that performance for a third year in a row. 2010 was filled with bug fixes, more bug fixes, and even more bug fixes. Management hate bugs, so much so that they've mandated a zero-bug policy in our circuit designs -- perfect prototypes is what they expect. I've ranted on about this before, but 2011 is shaping up to be the year of "follow-the-process". What management cares dearly about, from my vantage point, is a bunch of new formal processes that creates busy work, but not useful work. And it's nowhere close to creating a zero-bug design.
It reminds me of the collective farming practices in Stalinist USSR and the Great Leap Forward period of China. This policy was unequivocally a major catastrophe for both nations, resulting in famines that cost the lives of millions. But while millions were dying, the nation's management team were nevertheless telling its workers that everything is going just swell. I mean, just look at the size of these melons (Chinese propaganda poster from the 1950's):
So while we engineers on the ground can see the utter wastefulness of these new processes thought up by our management comrades, we are nevertheless told that things will be not only be swell, in fact, things are going to be greaaat!
So for 2011, I'll be busy filling in check-lists, preparing forms, writing up formal declarations, and doing all the dog-and-pony show presentations that keep management happy, but nothing to actually make my circuits work any better. But they'll only be happy for a short while, because in the long run, when they've seen how utterly they have failed, they'll be in for a long period of reflection. And when they've finished reflecting, I predict they'll blame the engineers for doing such a poor job. Because if their collective wisdom tells them that zero-bug prototypes in circuits of our complexity can be the norm rather than the extreme exception, then surely, their collective wisdom will tell them that nothing that they ever do is wrong.
Posts
2 comments:
I hate that the more I "move up" the more it seems I have to do those dog and pony shows myself. I feel like I used to do real work, but the more important you get the more you rely on others to do the real work for you. Or it just never gets done and you're writing reports on a bunch of problems and mistakes no one will ever bother fixing! Maybe you can move into management this year, and at least cash in on the money aspect of it. I suspect there must be a point after so many years where the tradeoff becomes worth it.
I think moving into management is the logical next step for me. But it certainly won't be this year and probably not the next either. There is no internal openings for that and I don't see anyone looking to retire or quit in this economy. There isn't a whole lot of monetary incentives though. Technical managers are pretty low on the totem pole. To really cash in, one needs to have a 'VP' in one's title, or be one of those C*O's.
Post a Comment