标签: work

The Wharton School recently published an article that examines how the youngest full professor at Wharton got that way . Adam Grant's secret is to publish 5 to 10 papers a year. A book that gets on the New York Times best seller list helps as well. The article features an excerpt from the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World that could be called "In praise of binge work.” Tim McCune is the guy that taught me the term " binge worker ." I have always been a binge worker, but this article and book bother me on several levels, as does binge work itself . First is this whole data-driven fallacy that the only figure of merit is how many papers you publish. A recent data-driven exercise was the Vietnam War, where " body count " was the metric. News flash, we lost that war. Next was my stint at Ford Motor, where the same McNamara Whiz Kids that gave us Vietnam decided "design cost" was the only pertinent metric in building a car. They demanded we engineers give them a cheap car. We did . Nobody bought the cars. The single metric was so data-driven and official. Management could amount to picking the cheapest cost out of two columns. In Web publishing, the metric is clicks. All that matters is how many clicks you get, or Facebook likes. There are click farms in Romania that will give you as many of either as you pay for. Besides this data-driven madness the whole world is descending into, there is the concept that binge work is preferable. I do it because I must. I have ADHD; it’s easy to get distracted. The way I compensate is by having OCD. I can't multitask, so I jump from binge to binge. When I told Jim Williams that my mom used to give me grief because I ate one thing at a time--first corn, then salad, then meat, then potato--he laughed, and said "My wife still gives me grief because I eat that way!" We should be careful about praising a coping mechanism. The first problem is that this "lock yourself in the office and don't pick up the phone" only works for a very narrow type of work. If you are writing the Linux kernel, or a paper that has no dependence on other people, I guess it is OK. But quite often the highest form of work is interactive, where you have to answer the phone and interact with people and stay social. Ed Fong told me that his systems work was much more social than his IC design. My dad tried to help me with my binges, saying I had to learn to multi-task. He told me, "You never get a spare 40 hours," in which you can accomplish some big task. I admit that there is a penalty to stop and restart work; you have to "pop to the stack" a bunch of stuff, and then pull it back down when you re-start. But I have learned that good documentation and notes can make this really easy. The last problem I have with binge work is that it is selfish. It means to heck with your wife, or your co-workers, or your boss. You are holed up and everyone has to leave you alone. The movie Where the Buffalo Roam shows Hunter S. Thompson shooting a fax machine that is asking when his article is going to be done—it’s way past deadline. When I saw that 30 years ago, I thought he was cool. Now I see he was a jerk. Now I am writer too. I know that there are copy editors, and managing editors, and art directors, and layout people, and they all depend on knowing when I will be done. They might accommodate me if I call or write and explain why I am late, but to just hole up and ignore the world is the sign of a narcissist sociopath, not a super-productive star. Heck, we're the analog crowd and I think there needs to be some gradient in this theory of productivity. I have dreamed of a workplace where you have to sit at picnic tables in the morning, no laptops or phones permitted, and then go into a private office with foot-thick concrete walls for the afternoon. It would combine the necessary day-to-day social interaction with the lack of distraction people like me need to get things done. I haven't read Deep Work , so maybe that is what he is really saying. "When I teach, I teach, when I write, I write, and never the two shall intermingle." It still seems like a pretty strange way to live. I have wondered if management is really being a SerDes (serializer-deserializer) , where you take a parallel requirement, like a multi-faceted project, and convert it into several serial streams to individuals who only have to worry about that one stream as it comes in. When all the individuals complete their streams, you put it back together into "parallel" form and see if it works. When I sent this post to several friends, Linear Systems president Tim McCune, who hosts the Analog Aficionado party noted, “ James Michener locked himself away in a cabin when he was serious about finishing writing a book. Shelby Foote wrote his million and half words on the Civil War with a nib pen. I'd probably be done writing a magnum opus if I'd stuck with my electric typewriter, I do feel diluted with a half-dozen screens up.” Fellow Analog Aficionado and successful author Ron Quan said, “When I write the books, I definitely become a binge worker. But after that I kick back. It is true that to get things done keeping focus is very important. However, when working with a team, it's more like what can we all do to pitch in.” How about you, are you a binge worker? Do you think it helps or hurts your design productivity and relationships with others?   Paul Rako  

Earlier this year, Juan Pablo Dellaroquelle, vice president of engineering at the Silicon Valley software company Medallia, made waves when he claimed in a blog post that good engineering managers don't exist . According to Dellaroquelle, engineers who aspire to “move up” into management aren’t good engineers -- otherwise they would have been happy in their roles -- and make even worse managers. Conversely, the best engineers may exercise influence through informal channels, but have no interest in becoming managers.   Certainly, nobody would aspire to be the pointy-haired boss from Scott Adams’ Dilbert comic strip, and as Alex Wolfe pointed out in a Design News blog, most engineers are happy in non-management roles. But is there such a thing as a good engineering manager? If so, do good engineers have the qualities necessary to be one?   I believe that good engineering managers really exist, because I’ve worked for them. (In fact, I happen to work for one right now.) I’ve also known people who were great engineers, but not-so-great engineering managers. And, of course, I’ve seen people who weren’t much good in either role.   One important thing to remember is that there’s a big difference between an engineering manager and a senior engineer. An engineering manager isn’t, or shouldn’t be, directly involved in detail-level design work. If you enjoy detail-level design work -- which you presumably do, since you chose engineering as a profession -- making this transition may be difficult. In fact, it’s the main reason why most engineers try to avoid management roles: you have to spend a lot of time doing things you don’t like (i.e. going to meetings), and little or no time doing things you like (i.e. designing innovative technical solutions).   It’s also one of the main reasons why some engineers don’t succeed as managers: the temptation to get involved in detail-level design is too great. You may be extremely bright and technically knowledgeable. However, if you’re in a management role, it’s unlikely you’re as well versed in the details of a project as the engineers who are working on it every day: they’re the ones who actually do the work. If you try to micromanage these details, not only will your engineers resent you, but, more often than not, you’ll make bad decisions. Furthermore, your engineers will make bad decisions, as they try to follow your (real or imagined) “mandates” rather than their own engineering judgment. You’re not the expert anymore, so don’t try to be.   So what should an engineering manager do? - Provide your engineers with high-level direction on project goals. - Empower them to make good decisions on their own - Don’t second-guess them, but challenge them to explain their thought processes to you. - Most importantly, find out what non-technical obstacles they’re facing, and work to address them.   Another important function of engineering managers is to communicate engineers’ work to upper management and other departments. There’s a persistent stereotype that technical people have poor communication skills, and there’s a good case to be made that engineering schools need to do a better job teaching these skills. However, good communication skills, by themselves, aren’t enough. When the 19th century Russian biologist Peter Kropotkin conducted field expeditions in Siberia, he would often take the time to explain his research to curious peasants. His aristocratic colleagues ridiculed him for trying to explain advanced biological concepts to illiterate villagers. Kropotkin replied: “You can explain anything to anyone -- provided that you understand it yourself.” As an engineering manager, you won’t be able to accurately represent your engineers’ work to upper management unless you have a strong technical understanding.   For this reason, being a good engineer is a prerequisite for being a good engineering manager. However, it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition: not every good engineer will make a good engineering manager, or even want to be one in the first place. This is why good engineering managers are few and far between. The good news is that they really exist. Furthermore, it’s something you can get better at. It’s a myth that some people are simply born to be managers. Like anything else, management and leadership skills are learned. The best engineering managers, like the best engineers, spend time trying to get better at what they do.   Readers, what do you think? Let us know in the comments section below.   About the author Dave Palmer is a licensed professional metallurgical engineer, specializing in failure analysis and materials selection. He  works as a metallurgist for a major marine engine manufacturer.  He holds a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and is completing his MS thesis at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Just like many of us these days, I've grown used to multi-tasking. In my case this involves writing articles while answering telephone calls and handling email. Perhaps I'd be more efficient if I multi-tasked less and focused on individual tasks more. When I'm ensconced in my command chair I'm surrounded by a wall of screens. Two of these screens are predominantly devoted to displaying the status of my two main email accounts. I typically receive a couple of hundred emails a day, so there is a steady stream of bing! sounds indicating new arrivals. On the one hand I pride myself in answering incoming emails as quickly as possible, and also to responding to anyone who emails me, even if the answer is "No, I'm terribly sorry that I can't do your student project for you." (LOL!) On the other hand, every time I glance away from whatever writing project I'm working on to look at what just binged, it takes me a few seconds to regain my train of thought, even if I decide that particular email can wait until later. Things are worse if I decide to respond to an email, because it can take at least a minute to regain my stride with regard to my main project. Interestingly enough, my chum Jay just emailed me a link to "An Empirical Study of Work Without Email." The creators of this study cut off email usage on five workdays for 13 information workers in an organisation.   During the course of the study, the researchers observed and classified a total of 5,643 activities carried out by the 13 participants. They recorded millions of sensor readings, including things like window changes on computer screens and the heart rates of the subjects, during more than 700 hours of data collection. This data collection encompassed both the baseline condition (with email) and the no-email state. Perhaps not surprisingly, the study revealed that, when without email, the participants multi-tasked less, focused longer on the tasks at hand, and experienced lower stress. (It wasn't all good news, because some of the participants reported feeling a sense of being "cut off" from their colleagues.) Now that I think about it, I realise that having my email systems up all of the time is actually putting me under some amount of stress. There have been numerous bings while writing this column, for example. Many of these, upon inspection, I've subsequently realised lack importance (especially in the case of spam). Some have caused me to utter words of which my mother would certainly not approve. Thus, for the remainder of this week, I am going to perform an experiment on myself. (I'm a professional. Don't try this at home without medical supervision.) I'm going to power-up my email systems only three times a day—once when I first come in in the morning, once in the early afternoon, and once just before I head out of the door in the evening. The idea is to see if I feel as though I'm being more productive and under less stress. Actually, I just took a moment to close down both of my email systems. I have to say that I feel under less stress already. I shall report back further at the end of the week. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on this?

I recently had to deal with a work-related ethics issue. I am going to leave out the details, but I thought it was worth sharing the general case with you and to see what other types of issues you have to go through as part of your modern-day work environment. As background, I have done quite a lot of work in the area of patents over the past 15 years, as an author and as an assessor, I have worked with legal teams to both prosecute and defend patents, I have helped create patent strategies, and I have been an expert witness. So I do get asked to do various patent-related things as part of my consulting business. A couple of months ago I was approached by a lawyer representing a non-practicing entity (NPE)—something that is sometimes labelled a patent troll. These companies buy patents with the intention of suing other companies. In some cases these companies are less than ethical in that they will go after innocent companies and propose a settlement that is less than it would cost the targeted company to hire a lawyer and defend its position. It is cheaper to pay than to fight even if they are not guilty of infringement. Anyway, what these NPEs are willing to pay for patents depends on what they think is the likelihood of a pay-out and its size, and so a lawyer commissioned me to assess the validity of a couple of patents and the likelihood that the company he represented would be able to sue certain specified companies on the grounds of patent infringement. The patents were originally granted to very respectable companies, and I am sure the originating companies were just trying to monetise the intellectual property portfolios they had—especially those patents that were no longer in their primary areas of business. In this respect, the sale of those patents would be helping one set of companies. But what about the companies the NPE wished to sue? The NPE would not do this unless it thought it could extract more from them than they were paying for the patents. It had clearly defined large companies as targets and products that it believed might infringe, so this was, dare I say it, an ethical troll. A number of questions crossed my mind. First, do I want to do business with anyone I do not have the highest moral regard for? Second, if I do accept the assignment, do I give an honest opinion? I could stick it to the lawyer by saying the patents have lots of value and thus cause the NPE to lose money. Or, I could go the other way and tell the lawyer they have no value and thus stop the NPE from buying the patents in the first place. Of course, if it was ever discovered that I had done either of these things it would destroy my credibility. I did take the job, and it turned out to be an easy assignment because it was very easy to show how the patents would have no validity against the products the NPE wanted to target, therefore placing a low value on the patents in general. I felt I had done my job well, but I still wonder if I did the job for an ethical company. When I had completed my assessment I offered to send in a report. The lawyer declined. He only wanted to hear my findings verbally so that there was less evidence or paper trail. I am still not sure if I made the right choice. Interestingly enough, we never established a rate for my services before I started this work. I sent in an invoice and it got paid. What ethical issues do you face in your jobs as engineers today? No specifics necessary, and if you want to send stuff to me for anonymous responses that is fine. Brian Bailey EE Times