• Question: Is your job what you expected it would be?  If different, then how is it different?

    Asked by Annika to Fran, Peppe, Greg, Petros, Pooja on 15 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Greg Chance

      Greg Chance answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      I couldn’t get over how much easier my first job was compared to my PhD. THen as you progress it get difficult in a differnet way, mostly too many jobs and too little time and it becomes an exercise in time management and good decision making – which is frankly not what i did a physics PhD for! Still, this is the same in most jobs I expect.

    • Photo: Petros Papapanagiotou

      Petros Papapanagiotou answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      I didn’t know what to expect to be honest. I just followed what I enjoyed doing, engineering and research. For my latest job, I expected it to be more strict in terms of the things I would have to work on. Instead it is more open and I get to choose the projects that I want to work on and even come up with my own. This is awesome (and quite rare), but you also have more responsibilities and it is worse for you if the project ends up not going well.

    • Photo: Fran Zuch

      Fran Zuch answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      Usually, when you work as a Product Analyst or Product Manager (as I do) you are not expected to code or know code. I quite like it and I think it helps me to do my job better. When clients tell me what they would like and I know it is not possible, I can be honest about it and I won’t promise anything that is not possible. Clients can get very frustrated when you do that kind of thing. But also, I can write better documents for our developers as I understand how they work and what goes on in their brain 🙂 At the end of the day, the job is what you make of it. There are lots of possibilities to do more or not which can be great

    • Photo: Giuseppe Cotugno

      Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 17 Nov 2017:

      Rolling back my memories to when I was a university student, I can confirm you that there are differences between what I thought it was being an engineer and how actually is. When you are at university things tend to be quite theoretical: a software architecture (the internal structure) is always thought to be easy to expand, most advanced technology is always used, projects are mostly on time and people use the correct counter measures to avoid delays, documentation is always correct and complete and so on.

      Reality will tell you (and this is true for all professions) that software architectures are often short sighted (very difficult to add, let’s say, a new sensor to a system), principles of software development are not followed, documentation is unclear or does not exists at all, 10 years old software is still in use and projects are almost always delayed. This does not happen because people forget what they studied once they started working (sometimes, unfortunately it is the case), it happens because of the current situation forced you to do like that and the skill of an engineer (and other professions) is to decide what is worth to sacrifice. Maybe it is difficult to add a new sensor to the system, but rarely this problem will arise, very old technologies are used because they are more stable than new one (less bugs – errors – more help on the internet etc.), documentation has not been written because when people were clear on what they’ve done the project was so delayed that they had to finish it quickly, and project might be delayed simply because suppliers were not punctual. The more experience you gain as an engineer the more you are able to decide what is important to be done the best and what can be left to a later stage or abandoned. When I was a student, I also did not appreciated the relevance of being an engineer and how often you need to talk with other engineers and people that know absolutely nothing about engineering and you need to make sure to be understood by everyone if you want the company not to do an involuntary mistake.

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