Comments on: When Engineers Should Embrace Change

By: Cultivate Innovation: What Companies, Managers, and Engineers Can Do

Cultivate Innovation: What Companies, Managers, and Engineers Can Do — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:28:52 +0000

[...] past blog posts (here and here), I discussed change in the high-tech design workplace. Today’s blog is about [...]

By: Ron Amundson

Ron Amundson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:25:16 +0000

I expected my guys to put in at least 100 hrs a year on professional development, some of it on the companies dime, some on their own. If an engineer is not personally investing in their continuing ed, they will get left behind one way or another.

As far as making the call, an engineering manager should build in some level of pioneer time during planning stages. Such calls come up on nearly every project… it is errant planning not to set aside at least a portion of the project timelime for such.

Cash cowing the engineering staff via dumping all pioneer time to their personal hours makes for high turnover and low morale, even more so if the pioneer change/skill set is not fungible across a sector.

By: Gerald

Gerald — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:03:50 +0000

“causing the engineer to burn up a lot of personal time in the process”
This is where I want to jump in. Engineers are often very company loyal and will invest personal time in these kind of things. But I think it is absolutely wrong for a company to demand or expect that.
Where I currently work it is expected of engineers to put in at least a couple of hours of work in the evenings (while the other departments are not) and not get paid for those. When I refused I got repremanded.

“it should be evaluated in detail by the company’s best engineers”
Actually it shouldn’t let us take the example of a new programming language. A good programmer can use many languages to do the same (syntax is not as important), he may have a favorite. A lesser programming god has problems with this, suddenly the things don’t work as he expects because now Integer has to be defined as int16 etc… I would let an mixed group of engineers evaluate the new programming language