How to escape the engineer trap

赵玉田

How to escape the engineer trap [Copy link]

Reposted from the official account: Lao Xu's Technical Column

In the minds of our parents, "Learn math, physics and chemistry, and you will not be afraid to travel the world." As long as you master a skill or a craft, you can make a living anywhere, and engineers are the ideal profession for our parents. However, as time goes by, with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that has lasted for several years and the downward cycle of the global economy, major companies have begun to reduce their burdens and layoffs have occurred one after another in the manufacturing and Internet industries. People from all walks of life outside the system are on edge.

As engineers, due to the rigidity of their daily work, they are usually only familiar with the knowledge of a certain part of their company's business. For hardware engineers, RF engineers working in the walkie-talkie field may have little understanding of RF in the mobile phone field. In large companies, due to the segmentation of business, RF is divided into main transmission, short distance, interference and other modules. An RF engineer who has worked for several years may have only adjusted Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS. When he changes industries or companies, the content of his work may change dramatically. If he has not made preparations for this dilemma before, he will be at a loss.

How to get out of this dilemma and avoid getting narrower and narrower on the road of technology is what this article discusses.

First of all, the strategy for any problem can be analyzed from both strategic and tactical perspectives. This is even more true for your own career, and you must pay attention to both strategy and tactics.

Tactically, there are the following points:

1. Improve the depth of your expertise

One's own profession should be a personal ability to make a living, and practicing one's own professional skills well is the most basic requirement. When we are doing a project, we must consciously improve our abilities so that we can make continuous progress. Therefore, when encountering practical problems, we must know the reasons and the reasons. If we confirm that it is a problem worth studying, we must understand it thoroughly, and then we can use the form of document summary to solidify our understanding, and constantly review the old and learn the new, so that the knowledge summarized is our own.

I believe everyone has encountered a very typical phenomenon. Some engineers claim to have many years of work experience, but their abilities are mediocre. Their 10 years of work experience is just the repeated application of their first two years of experience for another 10 years. The fundamental reason is as mentioned above: there is no summary, no in-depth study, no system , and when encountering a problem, they always deal with it with only a half-understanding. Next time they encounter a repeated problem, they are still at a loss.

Such engineers will eventually be washed up on the beach by the waves behind them and eliminated by the market.

2. Expand your skill set

If you want to go further in your career, it is necessary to expand your skills. The reason is that sometimes, integration and promotion are more important than pure technology, especially for large companies and platforms. The premise of integration and promotion is to understand the work content and processes of other fields and other parts.

With the development of technology, the complexity of products continues to increase. Taking mobile phones as an example, it requires cooperation among multiple departments such as structure, antenna, RF, baseband, audio, BSP, upper-layer software, marketing, products, and projects. In actual projects, only by being more familiar with the content of other fields can we effectively reduce communication costs and take a more comprehensive perspective when conducting risk assessments and decisions.

It is necessary to explain that the technical breadth required here does not mean how proficient we are in the complex technical details of other fields. Today's project development is getting faster and faster, and most people do not have the time and energy to learn. Therefore, the most basic requirement is to be able to understand the workflow and key concepts of the field that is most closely related to you. Of course, if you are particularly capable and can really master multiple fields, that would be even better.

3. Improve your soft skills

Ability is your capital. Improving your soft skills means learning how to use your soft skills well and maximize their value. What you show them to are your customers, leaders, colleagues, and even your competitors.

The soft skills that I think are more important are as follows:

PPT skills

Influence

Leadership

(1) PPT skills

PPT ability certainly does not refer to how cool your PPT is. The core is how to show that you have a very good analytical logic for the problem and present it clearly. If you try to do everything at once, the report you write will be nothing but a donkey dung egg.

In addition, PPT skills are also a way to showcase your work results. For some engineers, they may work very hard in their daily jobs and do a lot of work, but the reports they write are very bad. For leaders or companies, the window period for observing the work results of ordinary engineers is a certain report. A PPT that has no logical system and cannot grasp the key points will directly wipe out all the efforts of the engineer.

As for how to improve PPT skills, I personally advocate four basic principles: conclusion first, logical progression, deductive reasoning, and argument from the bottom up.

I recommend "The Pyramid Principle" here. The above four points are also the core ideas of the book.

(2) Influence

Influence is the infectious power in the team. In daily work, you should let others know you quickly. More importantly, you should let others know your strengths quickly and show them appropriately. In this way, when others encounter problems, they can think of you first and feel that you are reliable. This is influence.

(3) Leadership

Leadership is not something that only leaders need to care about. It is the ability to lead others to charge forward. Leadership can be generally divided into downward leadership, upward leadership, and peer leadership. At the critical moment of encountering problems, even if you are not in a leadership position, you can give full play to your overall coordination ability and lead your colleagues to charge forward. Of course, leadership cannot be simply understood as commanding others to work, which will cause big problems.

The choice of strategy is more important, because if the direction is wrong, no matter how hard you work tactically, it will be in vain.

1. Improve your thinking level

There are two aspects to improving your thinking:

(1) Think about the problem from the perspective of a manager

When you encounter a problem, imagine that you are the leader and think about how you should deal with it. You can write down the action items on paper. If you have the power to coordinate and promote it at this time, you can feel free to step out of your own field to practice. Of course, you need to be careful in the process and pay attention to the process to avoid taking the blame (the people who need to be coordinated must be in place). If you are a newcomer and have no power, and your leader is an excellent manager at this time, you can compare the action items you have thought of with the action items coordinated by the leader. This way you can know the defects and shortcomings of your thinking, and the next time you encounter a problem, you will know what routine to use to deal with the problem.

(2) Understand the fundamental logic of analyzing problems

In the course of work, we are bound to encounter difficult problems one after another. For the deconstruction and analysis of difficult problems, we must establish a mature methodology. I personally advocate the first principles, breaking down the problem in different dimensions, tracing back to the most basic components in each dimension, and then going back to analyze the deconstructed components to confirm whether we can find clues to the best solution.

2. Set goals that match the actual situation

No matter what the circumstances, you must set a goal for yourself that suits the current environment. This goal can be a short-term goal or a long-term goal. Five years can be a long cycle, which is a personal five-year plan, and half a year can be a short cycle. In this way, you can quantify your goals.

The reason why I emphasize conforming to actual conditions is that many engineers can easily fall into the dilemma of being an idealist. For example, when communicating with many friends, there are always friends who ask me if I can be a technical person for life. In my personal opinion, if you do not have super abilities, strong energy, and a good reincarnation, I can only say that this shows that you do not have a clear understanding of domestic society.

For most ordinary people, technology can only be a means, not a goal.

After setting goals that suit actual conditions, the strategic and tactical measures mentioned above will serve this goal. If you stick to them, one day you will achieve your own success.

吾妻思萌

It is both pertinent and true, and the PPT is the highlight

se7ens

PPT presentation requires rigorous logical ability and clear expression skills, which is a way to assess the comprehensive ability of engineers.

学无止境02

Well, what the host said is very real and practical.