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I think its prudent for a company to be skeptical of people who want to get into management without clear reasons. They understand that people wanting to get into management for the money or advancement are a dime a dozen. You need to identify specific issues within the group you see going to manage and how you will fix them. That's what they want to hear. The bottom line of the company is to hire who is going to perform the best, and having ideas before even getting the job is a great way to show that you are the best. As for the above poster, if there are a plethora of options get involved with the most visible ones. Its a nice intention to try and help everyone's project but at the end of the day you need to make sure you do quality work. Always take quality over quantity.
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Feb 20, 2013 14:39
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ProFootballGuy posted:Paradoxically, that usually does not mean being the hardest working, most dependable guy at your job. You don't want to be irreplacable as a worker bee or fit *too* comfortably in your niche. Soft skills and a dynamic personality come into play majorly here. Bahaha oh boy am I feeling the burn of this now and feel foolish for my comments earlier. 7 months ago I went back to my previous company and made it explicitly clear I wanted to advance into either role A(Jr. Systems engineer) or role B(test manager), I was told both were feasible goals. So I worked my rear end off and everyone seemed to be endorsing me for these position. In that 7 months I interviewed for A and was told to take 1.5 years of classes, worked as the manager alternate but was not selected to take the place of my boss who would move(in the end they kept him as manager after telling him he would be changing roles), found out A was being turned into an entry level position and was turned down once again. Why you may ask? Every single time I got passed over it was because I am too crucial in my current role(aka the best goddamn tester they have) and can't afford to move me. Except instead of working with me to develop a timeline everyone has said "we will keep you in mind". Hell its the same project and split time was even discussed and they still didnt bite. For reference the manager I was going to replace had been a stopgap manager for 9 months now, being told every 3 months "you only have to do this for 3 more months, we will keep you in mind", and has seen two new hires fill the role(s) he intended to originally transition to. Now they tell him he will be stopgap manager for the rest of the year. What a joke. This is a 400 person company so its not like everyone is handcuffed. I bet they have me train the new hire too, what a punch in the gut. Remember folks you can't fix a poo poo company. E: \/\/ Yeah have been since the manager fiasco. Being refused the first position after it was downgraded to more entry level is a nice cherry on the top my sundae of disappointment. Crazyweasel fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Mar 13, 2013 |
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Mar 13, 2013 19:51
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Hey folks just wanted to pop in and give some advice about salary negotiations. It still doesn't follow exactly what you should do, but its a bit encouraging I guess. I just had a phone screen and at the end I was asked the "how much do you make and what are you looking for" question. I responded with a longer form of "I think that is something we can discuss if I get further in the process, what is the intended salary range?" I was told that they are hiring from technician to senior level and its based on experience, so he said it could be anywhere from 40k to 100k as well as a note that he wasn't trying to devalue me or anything. I responded that I was looking for 65k and that the number was dependent upon if I find out there are more responsibilities in an interview. Notice I steered the entire conversation away from the first question, "what do you make now?" Which truth be told is 30% less than what I should be making, so I got to avoid answering that question! So if you are like me and too timid to wait until offer is in hand, but also don't want to let yourself get steamrolled, at least attempt to steer the conversation away
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Mar 20, 2013 22:11
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Your resume isn't working for me. You should look into getting into a company as a Test Engineer or in Quality Assurance. It's usually in demand because people don't go to school to be Test Engineers, but it might just be able to get you in to a company and you can work your way up from there.
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Apr 17, 2013 23:52
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Pollyanna posted:
I remember seeing you post before and I know where you are geographically, which is near me. Go to Indeed and type engineering in for *YOUR STATE*(maybe also medical device) and apply to anything that requires 4 years or less experience. Anecdote: I've applied for about 20 jobs in the past 2 months in a similar field as the one you are looking for(unless you want biomedical chemistry, can't see your resume so don't know). Doing this found me a company that likes me so they are knocking the 4 year experience requirement down to 2 years so I can get in. Don't be scared. Also don't tell me all QA and Test engineer positions need MS or higher, most minimum requirements are recent grad at best, for test engineer at least.
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Apr 18, 2013 12:07
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Jet Set Jettison posted:I'm about to apply for an engineering position without an engineering degree. I have a science degree in a field completely related to the job but with out an engineering degree (or real experience mind you) am I just wasting my time? C'mon dude, what is the position, what is are your skills, how do you think you fit in? Yes if they want someone to make CAD models of plumbing fixtures and you have a degree in material science then maybe you don't have the right skillset. If you can give some info, I can throw in my thoughts. My credentials are having a Physics degree but working as a Quality Engineer.
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Nov 1, 2013 00:31
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Take like 30 min this weekend to work on your resume and cover letter and send it in. Then forget about it until you get a call or a rejection e mail. If you lose its 30 min lost, if you win it could be the most profitable 30 min of your life. At the very least you work in a related niche, food, and that may be enough!
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Nov 1, 2013 20:04
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Slimchandi posted:Posted this in the physics thread in a/t but no response there. This is tough because its vague, but as a Physics grad who somehow found my way into Aerospace Quality Assurance I can sympathize. I too use almost none of the hard skills I learned. Doing an Excel macro and fumbling through databases has gotten me numerous kudos from my colleagues(average age in the industry is like 55+). Why bring it up? I think I might see a bit of what I found success in in your desires. The Quality position I was hired into had such breadth and depth(and teammates with kinda low expectations) that I was able to take time and think about problems and run what are basically six sigma projects on them. Finding a problem, building a team, getting resources, and solving it. This got me a good name and now I'm in a development program where I do much the same but get some insight into executive level meetings and projects. Its probably only 25% of my job, but its enough that I'm not bored with the "day job" aspects. In the end, its not what I want to do long term, but its good pay and I'm learning a lot about what I think I want to do, while still feeling that in my next career move I can either jump back to technical or go to management. So if any of this sounds useful, I can go on in more depth.
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Feb 13, 2015 22:38
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So I had a longer post but I'll keep it short. Physics has a really poor professional noon academic support structure. In the US we don't really have the professional societies engineers do and all that trade research that goes along with it. So how do you find options? 1. Talk to any alumni/colleague/vague acquaintance you have who came from physics. You'll have to send out blind emails and do a bit of investigation on line, but I've gotten a lot of great feedback from alumni who were in the same spot as me except 10-20 years ago. 2. Unsure of its use in UK, but I go to Indeed/use the app and just continuously look at listings ranging from technical skills to soft skills. Keywords: physics, engineer, medical device, computer science, science, strategy, development Whatever tickles you, apply. At this point you'll probably have to jump in and interview to at least get am idea of of the work environment and job duties are right for you. I think there are a few professional physics societies and they may have some job analysis so you could look at that to. As physics major we are essentially jack of all trades. Curious enough to always want to learn and smart enough to solve complex problems no matter the type, we just need to build on the area of expertise and my advice is jump right in to something new
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Feb 21, 2015 17:48
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ThePineapple posted:Hi, I think this is a pretty common Millennial problem, something with how we are wired. I went through it myself (26 yr old) and am actually probably halfway through the phase. I like what I do, am getting an MBA, but starting to think of the long game while not letting it devour me. I was talking to a mentor and he said this early on in our careers, try not to always think about 20+ years out, you are probably better served by thinking about jobs or positions as assignments where you can pick up a skill or a knowledge that points you in the right direction. That is, don't commit to something like a PhD because in 7 years you think you want to work in an Econ think tank. Instead, see if there is an aspect of your work or another job if you have to that will let you peek into that world and get you some experience in it. I don't really know what type of consulting you do, but I've seen people at my company who work with our systems, then go to a consulting firm because they have the experience. I guess I don't see why you couldn't reverse that, and if you've done consulting in a field you think you may be interested in, look for jobs and leverage your experience. You are young enough that the world is your oyster, don't do something totally stupid and you will end up alright. Don't try to control all the variables for a dream 30 years down the road, you'll kill yourself trying and you'll probably want to make twenty career moves before then anyways (oh my god what have the Boomers done to me...) e: also, you need to be careful, when I hated my last office job, my brains reaction was to convince me that I wanted to fix cars(I did this as a teen). If you are like me, sometime your brain tricks you into something comfortable, not something smart (this may be school in your case...) Crazyweasel fucked around with this message at 03:29 on May 11, 2015 |
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May 11, 2015 03:27
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I think an "intangible" a lot of people miss out on is just being proud of their work. Was there anything unique that you did in those 7 years you are proud of, did you perform better than your peers? Did you expand or improve a curriculum? were you able to influence others in the department in a positive way? I mean maybe the best you get is "I'm a hard working dude" but its better than trying to sweep anything under the rug. Be proud of what you did and show it off! Researchers are discovering that the most successful people "disrupt" their careers and go into totally unrelated fields several times in their life, and the good ones know how to recognize the good work they did and sell it to their next employer.
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Jan 7, 2016 12:38
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GAYS FOR DAYS posted:
I said this EXACT SAME THING when i was uber stressed at a new job and ended up quitting. Through some lucky breaks I managed to straighten out my career but ive realized that if I was able to better handle the stress I would probably be excelling at the job i quit and be doing just as interesting work as I do now. And I totally prove myself wrong because I enjoyably work 9+ hours a day. You need to take some time this weekend or whatever to sit in a coffee shop or outside in the woods, or the library and THINK about the challenges, opportunities, and paths forward. Think generically and honestly about what you want in a career, trying to separate yourself from the stress at hand. Then you need to see if the new job long term prospects align to those wants. Lastly you consider if the task at hand is worth completing to hit those wants. If you decide to stick it out, then you start immediately planning a path to tackle it and succeed. If you choose to jump ship, that's OK too, but have a SOLID plan to attack the next opportunity. Remember, you picked this new job for a reason and going back to the old can seem like a rotten deal after a couple of weeks when you are reminded why you left... Crazyweasel fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Feb 24, 2016 |
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Feb 24, 2016 20:01
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My sales friend said he has never stayed at a job more than 2 years. I think in sales you need to go where the growth is, both professionally, pay wise, and when the company itself is financially growing. I think we have a big sales thread, they could let you know if you are getting screwed over. Sounds like you got some legit experience tho
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Mar 21, 2016 21:06
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Also it might be not have the same environment you'd like, but there are a lot of aerospace contractors that do varying levels of space hardware (up to full integration like at Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon)
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Mar 28, 2016 14:09
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just remember that 80% of your big company's supply chain will be little shops that you can not believe are still in business and that only want to do business by phone and only if they can bend you over on price/terms and conditions (or they just accept all your terms without really following them) Welcome to corporate supply chain
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Jun 15, 2017 01:43
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There is an AMAZING book called Becoming a Resonant Leader which is co-authored by Annie McKee , Richard Boyatzis, and some other person, but all very famous workplace/career researchers. It is really more of a work book so it goes by fast, as there are many exercises and distinct points where you reflect on what you've written down. The concept is that to be a great leader(work/home/self) we need to build our personal leadership, which is done by making some personal discoveries. The first is the person we want to be (the Ideal Self). The text in the book provides the theory and the exercises make you think and collect the data so you can put together a vision for your future that you are confident in. You then read about how to get data and find out who you are today (the Real Self), and start to trace a path between the ideal and real selves. It forces you to really reflect on your life, priorities, and goals, and I can't recommend it enough.
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Jun 17, 2018 04:42
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Nothing is a bad idea as long as you do your research and vet out what the next couple of years will be. I’d consider finding 10+ real job openings you’d like to have in those fields and see what qualifications are. Then maybe find a some people who work there on LinkedIn and ask them if they can chat about it. Then for the ones you like, find a program that has a strong reputation and proven placement, or at least networking opportunities. Going back to school can be a real grind so just really make sure you are up for it. Also imo a good story, passion, and dedication (shown by hard work in trying to break into something through grades/experience/extracurriculars) will usually work in getting into a new field In terms of ROI, this may not be a job that excites you, but I know someone who was very successful in getting a 2-year degree in Forestry and finding jobs with both utility companies (I guess reasonable clearing of land for lines) and the State for conservation for land maintenance. I don’t know what the pay or outlooks are, but probably pretty decent given the time investment. So depending on the role there may be more than 1 way to do it, and probably ways that you don’t need to be an engineer for. Crazyweasel fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Sep 29, 2019 |
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Sep 29, 2019 14:12
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MBAs are all over the place so my real take is that, as with any major new commitment, what is your goal or what do you want to do with it or get from it? Then questions like Why is an MBA(as a degree) the right choice and Why is that particular school the right choice will follow
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Oct 17, 2019 08:51
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We can only know each other so much through a forum post, but my man I hate to tell you but you loving love beer and working in the beer/alcohol industry and you’ll probably be miserable out side of it. so I’d find a way to hustle and either get a quick holdover until you can get back into it, or you make that brain of yours work to figuring out how to grind and make it happen. You’ve been in the industry for years, you said you’ve loved it a handful of times, and the only reason you aren’t in it is because of a 100 year pandemic. Yes beer is saturated, but a lot of industries are. It is the smarties who know how to differentiate what sells from what is just existing, and I able to knock out the crap outfits to make a home. You can be that person, you certainly have enough experience and passion. Many have done more with less. Go out there and make it happen and honestly I wouldn’t even consider trying to leverage your skills into an adjacent field unless you need to keep cash coming in until something opens up. If you look through my post history I think I have made a post on fairly generic advice you could apply that could at least get you to hone in on what you really liked and didn’t like about your career path and what you can build off of.
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Dec 10, 2020 13:22
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HCFJ posted:Like the least time spent working, on or off clock, including training, to make 20-30k a year (45 if you want to be wildly forward-thinking). I'd rather work minimally day-wise than hour-wise (ie I'd prefer 1 ten-hour day over 5 two-hour days or w/e) but that wouldn't matter as much if it was remote. Assume I have no skills but the money to afford training/school. My brother is a software developer for a large cloud company for a software product they have. He works completely remote (even before COVID) because he doesn’t need to interface with hardware, and has 1 tag up every day. It is agile so he is assigned specific tasks to get done in a 2 week window. He works on average 2 - 3 hours a day, but there isn’t a reason he couldn’t work 2 days to get everything done and then “take off” the rest of the week. He only sees “surges” in work like two or three weeks out of the year. He makes close to 6 figures in New England. He had about 3 years experience as a SW developer before this role. I honestly do not know how it gets better than that with respect to your objectives. From what I’ve seen this may not be exactly the norm, but it has a lot of things going for it. In demand workforce, high pay, never needs to be in office, defined-task based so you kinda control your workload, etc. In general I see a lot of SW developers that work from home and don’t get much done, maybe not 10 hrs/wk but definitely not 40. It is so in demand they can usually bounce around and be ineffective elsewhere if they end up getting forced out after 18 months or whatever. Crazyweasel fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Aug 11, 2021 |
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Aug 11, 2021 13:43
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Proust Malone posted:I need some advice. From a purely financial aspect, you would qualify for alimony I would assume? That would help. Also, not really the point of the thread, but I would try to work on the relationship and see if you can avoid divorce if both you and your partner actually want that. If you don’t know…maybe you need to find out. Lastly, did you see yourself as a a Stay at Home Dad forever? Knowing the right next step is usually only easy if it’s something like “I need to put food on the table so I need this a job ASAP” or “this job is what I love to do, and its more money at a better company”. Anything in between and is going to be a question of what do you *need* to do and what do you *want* to do. A helpful question, why did you take that gig job after 10 years of SAHD?
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Sep 23, 2021 18:04
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Easychair Bootson posted:I'm a DBA in the higher ed space. I'm going to have the opportunity to move into a middle management role, where I'm much less technical and instead overseeing about a dozen programmer-types. I have managed people before (~6 programmers), basing my technique a lot off of stuff like Manager Tools stuff like weekly one-on-ones, a "feedback model," etc. What should I read to update my knowledge of managing people? I should note that we're not at all an Agile shop; I'm just looking for intermediate-level management advice that's up to date with current trends/best practices. TIA let's circle back touch base and level-set ciao. As far as the EQ part of it, I really enjoyed Becoming a Resonant Leader. The concepts are all based on newer science of positive coaching and such. https://g.co/kgs/GjnZJg The one goal of this book is to make you see your staff as real people and make their day job better in some way by considering what their actual goals are and how you can help. It does this by being basically a self-improvement workbook that teaches a concept and framework for asking, understanding and defining what your staff wants by applying it to yourself first. If you are someone who naturally connects with people and motivates them properly, and you have a clear vision of what you want, it could be a skip, but if not I’d check it out.
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Feb 23, 2022 05:05
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CornHolio posted:So I'm an engineering supervisor with six direct reports at a medium-sized vehicle manufacturer. Think RV, but not RV. I'm 40, been here ten years, make low six-figures. What’s the additional responsibilities of engineering manager? You’d have supervisors under you? I guess my assumption is that with six direct reports you have a pretty good idea of what management is like and being a senior manager is just more of that. From what I’ve seen in Engineering, the Tech Leads that climb the parallel ladder to Engineering Management are people who very clearly do not want to be encumbered with dealing with the HR overhead and responsibilities that come with being a Manager. If you don’t feel strongly either way at this point in time, then it might be worth doing a work back from like 62 y/o and searching around how comfortable you’d be trying new things vs. getting to a particular goal. From a monetary perspective, I’d assume there are more promo opportunities in the Managers path than the tech lead path, so it may be more a game of future opportunities as opposed to compensation.
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Nov 16, 2022 21:59
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Guinness posted:For real ladder climbers I think there is a reasonably strong argument that management has a higher ceiling of career prestige, but staff+ ICs get paid plenty well for a different lifestyle. Reminds me of a time back in Defense during a Phase Gate review - The Sr. Fellow making $280k cash a year sitting at the head of the table, happy as a a clam, doing some long division and other math on a scratch pad while management talked for 25 minutes about headcount. Painted a pretty clear picture to me.
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Nov 17, 2022 01:00
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drhankmccoyphd posted:1. Ok, glad I'm not going insane. Idgi , that was totally not the conclusion I was tracking - have you expressed any of these concerns directly to your director, even just generically in terms of your desired career growth? If so, are they still trying to push the Lead role?
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Feb 28, 2024 02:08
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My Uncle decided to do contract engineering work in the 90’s and 00’s and his method was akin to “I’m going to work for a year, then take 3-6 months off to work on my model train hobby and travel to <exotic locale>, then spend 3-6 months looking for my next contract opportunity” So I think OP above who said something like 200%+ multiple of you current yearly salary feels like a decent gauge. E: \/\/ Benefits is a good point…My Uncle had a wife who carried the insurance during his times off! I’m sure the calculus is a bit harder if you need to pay COBRA or pick up a marketplace plan every time. Crazyweasel fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Apr 25, 2024 11:55
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