Too many people fall into the pitfall of getting burnt out by an endless checklist of tasks. Unnecessary meetings, instant Teams responses, firefighting other people's emergencies.
Working hard =/= making a difference. What could you achieve if you traded tasks for impact?

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Prior to Honeywell acquiring us, I would complete jobs in 8-12 hours. Now it takes 30 hours or more to complete the same engineering task. More effort is invested in corporate oversight than actually doing the work, with a bunch of useless people monitoring “progress.”

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Thanks for sharing!

I’d have an entirely different role if I’m being honest. I wouldn’t work on my daily activities at all and that would suffer, but all future projects would benefit greatly from process changes I’d make

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Thanks for sharing!

One big stressor and inefficiency I've noticed is teams/IM taking over from Email for non-critical communications. As a general rule, I don't expect a response to an Email for 24 hours, so the person I'm reaching out to has some flexibility not to drop what they're working on and has some time to create a considered response. IM is the electronic equivalent to going up to someone and asking them Face-to-face, basically forcing them to drop what they're doing and either answer or ask me to wait. Sure the faster response will be needed on occasion, but often the mechanical engineering field I find that 24 hours is fast enough, gets me a better quality answer, and allows me to work to a plan instead of firefighting. Also, Teams Chat and IM are poor for finding old info, especially for group chats, Outlook is much better for that. So from my experience I would encourage organizations to reserve teams chat for true emergencies, and encourage engineers to think about how quickly you really need to have something answered and align communication accordingly.

That said, one thing I look for in companies is having incredibly robust processes. Having a process is more than having a change approval & PLM system, it’s having a documented way to do every thing you need to do to design your product. While this does add process tasks, having a good process for things that need to be done regularly protects the engineer and company from unnecessary risks, captures lessons learned, and actually makes it easier to get things done. If the company has a good process for doing something I never begrudge having to fill out the forms, and in fact I always put time, thought, and effort into them, my standard being that the target audience shouldn't need to ask me anything to carry out the work. Bottom line a company that has processes and follows them will be better to work for and can get more done.

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