Is my career Legendary?

I’m beginning to believe our business management philosophies have changed us for the worse over the past 20 years. The more professionals I meet, the more I am convinced that most of us are waiting for our respective employers to give us the axe when we are deemed “too expensive” or “less than a valuable commodity”.

In direct response, our professional goals have become short-term and narrowly focused on what’s on our plate on a given day. We aim for the highest salary and hope to cash out on investments sooner than later. We tend to do our jobs very well but don’t take many risks with the extra effort required to make corrective changes to our work culture and philosophy. We dare not indulge in responsibilities from which we will receive little to zero praise from our managers.

The results risen to a dangerous state and I hope all of you all take heed to what this continuous cycle has caused. High Quality products have become a dying breed. Engineering in general has lost its romance. Far gone are the Cold War days when great engineering was responsible for most honored treasures of modern American culture. Space Travel. We no longer have ready-made engineering heroes to grow up to on TV beyond the technical staff of a great Sci-Fi flick. Your standard, every-day product is severely flawed with defects, bugs and user acceptance deficiencies.

 Today’s industry standards are forever altered to a dissillussioned state. The few companies that do persist in maintaining a high standard in product quality are forced to raise the entrance requirement bar to a cultural standard and severely limit the field of applicants for their positions. Mid-Tier engineering schools no longer retain the value and reverence of their respective programs in the industry. An employee’s drive, determination, creativeness and capability for success are now based on how much they spend for their education as apposed to the technical education they received.

Because of this state of affairs in our industry, we need to re-define the value of our engineers in the industry. We need to start from scratch and we need to start small. Small is the new big because everything an individual does on their job can be the difference between saving or costing a company thousands of dollars in operation cost fixing and updating software/products. It’s essential that each engineer have the ability to continually improve the processes and skills of all team members to truly add value to their work efforts and deliverables. Spending time hammering out code is great, only if you have spent a sufficient amount of time in planning stages making sure you and your entire team is on the right track.

Business Managers need to be kept in the loop and they need to keep you aprised of the business side of things because they change so drastically and so frequently.  If you can come up with a solution that can save money, the business teams need to know right away and help facilitate a decision. Most time, less is more. Cutting out features and assuring quality will always save the company money. Marketing teams need to understand this value  directly coming from engineers.

All in all, if you are finding that your role at work allows you to interface with all team mentioned above and have to cross-company impact that I have spoken of, I think you can categorize your career as legendary.

 - Gary -