Working with others is easy for some, difficult for others.  Engineers, in particular, often have a difficult time communicating clearly.  For many firms, the end goal (a finished product) isn’t finished until many, many engineers get their hands on the design.  Naturally, in the corporate world, this mandates that teams of technical gurus are created under the glorious umbrella of hierarchical chain of command. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone has had that detached-from-the-world feeling while traveling.  Whether it’s no cell phone service, no internet access, no smartphone apps, or using a paper roadmap instead of GPS.  It’s almost surreal to think about what life was like before these gadgets existed.  How on earth did people plan something as simple as a dinner date without a cell phone?  I guess people checked their home voicemail machines a lot?  The only thing I remember about those things is the miniature tapes that would always run out of time during important messages.

What can you not live without nowadays?  What has been so ingrained in your daily routine that it would be difficult to go an hour, a day, or a week without?  Here’s my quick list (trying to be specific, not just ‘internet’, ‘iphone’, etc.)

1. Google Maps/iPhone Maps App
I use this religiously.  It’s replaced roadmaps, yellow pages, radio traffic reports.  It’s particularly useful while traveling and looking for the nearest coffee shop.

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I won’t pretend to be an expert on this topic, as one can google any number of articles, papers, and blogs on how to write the most effective emails.  I am interested in learning what engineers and high-tech salesman think about this topic.  What’s the ideal length, focus, level of detail, subject matter, time to send, etc.  As an engineer, here is what I like to see out of an email:

1. No wordy paragraphs

If there are long-winded paragraphs of text trying to describe something technical, something is amiss.  This is particularly true if there are questions and/or action items sprinkled throughout.  These emails are never clear, and their wordy nature indicates that the sender is confused about something.  These will result in either a) no response, or b) a multiple day email back-and-forth that accomplishes nothing.  Phone calls work better when this is the case.

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Today’s topic is an interesting one, and depends largely on personal preference.  It’s something that comes up for engineers every day:  Be decent at many things, or be the absolute end-all-be-all expert in one thing?  Some might respond with, “Well, how about being an expert at everything?”

Aside: It sounds funny, but this should probably be the goal for every engineer.  I got great advice from my first manager:  create a skill matrix.  It was essentially an organized goal table consisting of career goals, skills, techniques, subject matter to learn, etc. that I wanted to accomplish.  Being an expert in all of them is optimal, but time and job constraints often prove this difficult.

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