qetuo13579

I didn’t get asked if I wanted to become a manager. It just happened because my boss moved overseas to head up a new team and I was made team leader amongst my peers. A year later I was given the job title Engineering Manager to acknowledge the work I was doing. I’m now an Engineering Manager at a different company and getting paid more than I would be as an individual contributor.

We call them “Engineering Notebooks” and after 5 years at a company they tell an interesting story of the projects worked on. I’m often reviewing notes from the past couple of months and occasionally have to go back a year or two to dig up some information that I know is there somewhere.

At my workplace we use lots of different tools and systems. No one has access to everything because of licensing costs. SAP Business One is the main ERP but to have part numbers added to the database, engineers use a separate ticket system like Jira to instruct the finance people how to do the data entry in SAP. Code is in Gitlab. Docs are in Sharepoint. Every department has their own kingdom and manages documents in Sharepoint differently with access restrictions frustrating everyone. Some documents are too sensitive to be put in Sharepoint, which makes for even more frustration.

My team of hardware and software engineers is relatively new to Git. I’m trying to get them to commit and push small changes daily to a shared personal branch e.g. james-wip instead of one monster commit every 2 or 3 weeks. I encourage them to rebase their “named” personal branches so they’re easier to review and merge into master when they’re ready.

I fell into management because my boss moved overseas to set up a new team and I was asked to ‘supervise’ the team left behind. No pay rise, no title change but extra reporting responsibilities with a weekly evening phone call. A year later my boss pressured the CEO to give me a title, an office and send me on a 1 day management training course. The pay rise eventually came through another 6 months later.

I enjoy my work and put in extra hours because I want the business to be successful. Sometimes there’s an interesting problem that’s keeping me up at night. Sometimes there’s a deadline for an important customer I don’t want to let down. Sometimes I’m working on a side project to improve tooling that will make my colleagues and me more productive. Sometimes I just want to impress my boss and earn another pay rise or promotion. I’m now working for my third employer, each boss I’ve had have been workaholics and high achieving. I guess I look up to them as mentors and try to emulate them. Also I’ve never been very good at starting my own business on the side. I can never seem to come up with a good enough idea or stop myself from going above and beyond at work to free up time for entrepreneurial activities.

The AU engineers have all the existing product knowledge. The US is hiring for multiple positions to work on new products but US HQ doesn’t want there to be a distinction between the two teams. The plan is for both sites to be involved in all projects.

Two got spooked and were nervous about their future with only 13 months tenure. The third is a senior dev with more than 10 years who’s disgruntled and convinced he’d only be kept on to tidy up loose ends and then discarded. Of the remaining engineers some have 18 months tenure and others 8 years.

Software. It’s not Android, just Linux developed with Buildroot. We do have a web interface with a remote control feature that displays the screen and allows us to trigger buttons. I’m thinking we can use that interface to automate some basic tests but it might need to involve some image pattern recognition to test the output of an operation.

We have a handheld product (custom hardware) that we struggle to test. Currently it’s all manual testing but lately I’ve been wondering how to increase test coverage and automate it too.

I work for a small electronics design and manufacturing company. All our documents are allocated a number with a prefix for the document type: drawings, assembly procedures, manuals, reports, forms, standard operating procedures, job descriptions, etc. Docs are controlled in our custom built ERP which uses Subversion in the backend.