| robert casey 2007-06-30, 5:25 pm |
| The care and feeding of managers
Once you graduate college and get your first “real” job, you’ll run into
situations they never prepare you for in college. Oh, you’ve had
classes in circuit design, computer programming, calculus and such, but
nothing that would tell you how to keep the boss happy. It’s just
assumed that you know.
Don’t be fooled by statements that engineers (and other technical types)
don’t need to be good with “politics”, social skills or people skills.
Here “politics” doesn’t mean running for elected government office, but
the social interplay and negotiation with other people. Your new manager
is a “people” and he decides if you get a good raise or if you will
survive the next layoff. And managers are usually the ex-engineers who
are good at these skills, and convinced other manager types to make him
a manager. And he may not realize or understand that some engineers are
weak at such skills, and that such people weak in these skills are in
fact not trying to play flawed politics instead.
One thing that is hard for engineers and scientists to handle at first
is scheduling. Your boss asks you how long it will take you to complete
a project, and usually there are several unknowns that would make
calculating a completion date impossible. Things at college were
predictable, like how long a lab class experiment would take, as it has
been done hundreds of times before by other students. But in industry,
you’ll be working on something that’s never been done exactly that way
before (or else why would they have you repeat something that’s been
done before). So it’s very hard to come up with a time or date that
you’d feel absolutely confident that everything has been solved and
completed by. What the boss wants is a reasonably optimistic answer,
something that gives you about 30% confidence of being able to make
happen. But don’t worry if you don’t get it all done by then, you
won’t get canned over it, as things usually crop up to slow things up.
Oh, the boss will try to identify segments of “high risk” (something
that turns out to take longer to debug, troubleshoot, or turns out to be
a showstopper), and it would be a good thing to discuss with him the
parts that trouble you the most (usually done in his office behind
closed doors, so neither of you can lose face in front of others).
This is an important thing here. You don’t want to embarrass the
manager in front of his boss, a customer or just the other guys that
work for him. If you think that he made a major mistake, discuss it in
private in a conference room with the door closed. That way, he’s not
threatened by embarrassment then at a dept. meeting or just with other
people within earshot. “I think there may be an error in the
specification, that X can’t lead to Y. Or did I miss something?”. You
don't want to be confrontational with him, even behind closed doors. You
can then either learn what you missed, and how and why what the boss
said before does make sense, or the mistake can be identified and be
corrected. He’ll think well of you, that you want to learn what you
missed, or that you want the project to succeed, and not embassies him.
Oh, later he may claim that he himself found and corrected the error,
but let it slide. Don’t say anything to anyone about it. After all,
the boss is the one who does the yearly reviews and decides who gets the
good raises and such.
And managers try to plot out the sequence of events in a project (Gant
Chart is one scheme) to figure out who does what when. This can make
for some bizarre looking decisions. You’d think that you need to hammer
out the design specifications and block diagram first before starting on
detailed design of the blocks. But you’d have some people sitting
around doing nothing, and besides, you know that there’s good chances
that the project will need say digital adders, filters and multipliers,
but you don’t know how many just yet. So you have some people work on
that stuff while the block diagram is being finalized, and if it turns
out a circuit isn’t needed after all, no big loss as the guy who
designed it would otherwise have sat around and did nothing anyway.
A somewhat related topic here are yearly reviews. That bureaucratic
process personnel dept. make managers do for deciding how big a raise
you’ll get, or if you get put on an informal “can first” list come the
next layoff. There’s usually five vague and “warm and fuzzy” described
levels for several areas of performance, also usually vague and
subjective. The usually five performance levels, or “grades” are pretty
much the same as grades you could get in school, (A, B, C, D, and F) and
have pretty much the same meaning. “Far exceeds expectations” = “A”,
“exceeds expectations” =”B”, “meets expectations” =”C”. Obviously you
want As and Bs. Mostly Cs would mean that you should start looking for
a new job, but you probably won’t get canned just yet, so you have some
time yet. ”. “D” and “F” pretty much means “you can expect to be canned
immediately, or the boss hates you”. You might get put on “probation”
with a few months time to improve, but forget it, the political
environment is hopelesssly posioned, so just start looking for a new job
aggressively. Oddly enough, it’s much easier to hunt for a job at a
separate company then to try to do an internal transfer to another dept.
That’s because most companies make you get permission to try a
transfer from your current boss, and do you really want to tell your
current boss that you want out from under him? Job hunting at separate
independent companies requires no such permission, and you definitely
should not say anything to your current boss about it until after you
have the offer letter from the new company in hand and did the acceptance.
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