Notes from a Fiery Nest

There are always lots of good TED talks, but here are two that have struck me particularly:

Simon Sinek on leadership. (12 minutes) This is what I strive for as a manager; I want to be part of an organization that supports me in it.

Guy Winch on emotional self-care. (17.5 minutes) Help yourselves; help each other. More people than we may know need this.

Three of four new circuit board designs completed on time or close enough as makes no difference (no change to delivery date of assemblies), and the fourth well under way, despite late-breaking changes to the specifications for all of them. It's been a busy week for my little band of merry men.

The Expert: a 7.5-minute comedy sketch depicting something which is excruciatingly familiar to most tech-employed folks. Neither soul_diaspora nor I could watch it all the way through on first viewing, so painful was it.

I'm back on the R&D side (which is in the North building), having served a bit more time over in Manufacturing than planned. I did a detailed analysis of the process involved in building one of our products, and provided a report on it which will be used to develop a plan to restructure our Manufacturing floor.

It's quieter here, which has its pros and cons; it's somewhat gratifying to have people seeming sad to see me go over there, and happy to have me back over here. I guess I do something useful, anyhow!

I can't give out a lot of info on what I'm doing in development, since it's of a somewhat sensitive nature... it's challenging stuff, though!

Spending a fair bit of time at work reaming out holes of varying tightness.

XKCD: so true! It's posted on my office door.

Also, here's the reference for the alt text!

My one-year stint in Manufacturing is over, and I'm back in R&D!

Manufacturing was very interesting and useful experience. I wouldn't have minded staying there another few months to get into some of the initiatives we had originally planned, but that were superseded by new product introduction activities.

There's a perception in some circles that manufacturing engineering is less prestigious or desirable than design, that it demands less creativity and "real engineering". It's wrong. Manufacturing is often quite tactical, since small problems on the line have to be addressed immediately, but it's not all about that, and even that can be pretty challenging stuff. The biggest difference I found is that while design is about things, manufacturing is about processes, and that means that it's about people. Nothing is more complex than a person, except a group of people. As a result, manufacturing engineering usually finds solutions that are incremental improvements but fall far short of hypothetical optima. That can be frustrating, but seeing immediate results from one's work makes up for it!

My new assignment is to lead a hardware design group in a major new project, really a program which will involve multiple projects. (The details, of course, aren't public!) My opposite number in software and I seem to be getting along, and we've tentatively divided the high-level stuff with him taking more of the project management and me taking more of the product management, which suits me well. It's an exhilarating time to be on the project, because only the loosest sketch of the direction is in place. I'll be making the early decisions (in collaboration with others, of course) that will shape the project and product(s), rather than being saddled with a project in which all of the strategic directions have already been set.

This involves more "things" work than my manufacturing gig did, but there's a lot of "process" work too: we're trying to be much more intelligent and disciplined about specification design and project management, and that doesn't just happen by itself because someone issues a directive. I'm also trying to build manufacturing involvement into the process early on, which is important but challenging. Primarily, my work is about people here too, but now in a more directive than consultative role.

There are some things I'm not 100% satisfied with about my company, but there are a lot of really good things about it too, and many of the negative aspects are showing signs of improvement. The good points tend to be, as described in the video linked from my previous post, intrinsic motivators. Autonomy is probably the toughest thing for a small company with a few really bright people at the top to grant, but it seems to be coming, albeit not blindingly quickly.

I could make more money elsewhere, but it will take more than that to extract me from this job... I may be tired at the end of the day, but I'm seldom disheartened!

I think this expresses my new job, at least as I see it currently.

( Hymn of Breaking Strain )

A watershed performance test on my latest new product prototype passed on the first attempt last night!

Not that there weren't hassles in getting ready for the test, or that there aren't any design changes to make, but a hyooge part of the project just became a fairly straightforward project management exercise, rather than a science project.

Last week, I mentioned that I was gearing up to run a test of my product at work, and that the necessary outdoor activities would be more challenging given the weather. Even with the snow, we got our unit out and on the air on Thursday afternoon; it worked overnight, and it's still working! This is essentially the "alpha release," in that a separate group within the company is now using the product to support their own independent development project!

Between this and releasing a hefty stack of design documents yesterday, and then getting to go home early, yesterday was a pretty good day at work!

It worked! Yes, I know this is coming out late; the delay is in me posting, not in the test being successful. Over half the company came by to see it, all the way up to the co-presidents. People are starting to believe that it'll be a real product, me included.

The surprising thing was really that there weren't any surprises. The only problems that arose were a matter of a connector not being tightened quite enough (mea culpa!) and things we already knew to expect.

As for why I haven't posted before this, I've been busy at work with pushing hard towards the next stage, and over the weekend with Easter Triduum services and family gatherings, and with creating a character for ms_danson's role-playing game. I also got my performance and salary reviews last week, and was much happier with one than the other; more than that, I won't say here.

Every Easter is different for me; this year, I served in some liturgical capacity on all three days. Last year, I preached at the Vigil; in previous years, I simply participated as a member of the congregation or served on one or another day; one year, I fasted for the duration (from Eucharist on Maundy Thursday to Eucharist at the Easter Vigil on Saturday night). That last was a year that soul_diaspora was away at Easter: fasting, for me, calls for solitude.

The role-playing character needs some finishing touches, as is unavoidable in a carefully-constructed campaign, but is mostly complete. Building a mage in the HERO system in a weekend is a not inconsiderable accomplishment, I think! The character sheet isn't online, but I also wrote some longer-than-usual backstory, which is posted here in the game lj, ratcatchers. Yes, I've tried to write something approximating fiction, in dialogue no less; expect rains of frogs soon. The character was inspired somewhat by a song on a CD that I got recently (sorry, no "New Music" posts lately, too busy!) by Cheb Mami and K-Mel called Parisien du nord ("North Parisian"), about the situation of North Africans living in the Paris suburban ghettos.

You know it's a major milestone when achieving it means that everybody on the project has to meet to decide what the new priorities are.

I think the software team is gonna have the heat under their chairs turned up a few notches.

Work expands to fill, then overflow, the time available.

My primary project at work was essentially complete. It appears to do abc and def just fine, faster than anyone imagined, and using much less space than originally envisioned. Then someone said something like, "wouldn't be great if it did xyz, qrs, uvw, and lmnop too?" If they'd said this a few months ago, this would have been much easier.

Now, well... so much for specification-based top-down design.

Salmon day: Swimming hard upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

*vent open* The Quartus simulator (not my design, the simulator) has crashed out 5 times in a row, despite everything I've tried so far.*vent close*