To prevent as many green wires - mistakes that require precision soldering skills to fix - as possible, our design undergoes extensive review. This is very taxing, because a lot of people ask a lot of questions. As a developer, you must defend your creation's chances of success by meticulously pouring over every last detail. And people still find problems, and it's a wonderful, iterative process that ultimately ensures a LOT of revA modules ship... but it takes a ton of time. After two exhausting weeks,
Next up, week three: Last year I brainstormed a trade show presentation with one of our marketing guys about how to not destroy relays when switching nonideal signals. FF to 2 months ago: I've since moved from group A to group B, but considering the immense knowledge I gained during my time with group A, I agree that I will give a presentation titled "A Day in the Life of a Relay" (Beatles-themed). Two weeks later, I'm offered a position in group C. Another week later, marketing guy asks if I'm still up for vaguely defined A-topic trade show presentation. The logical "you can't possibly do this during normal work hours" side of me wants to say no, but the "I have so much to share and have already verbally committed" side trumps and I hear myself utter "sure". 5 minutes later, my inbox pings me with a "thanks for signing up for vague topic presentation!"
What did I just commit to, you ask? When it was all said and done, 31 hours of additional work - including a functional hardware demo with digitizers, a power supply and programmable load, a custom-wired DUT box and a visible lack of sleep - to flesh out the marketing prompt "maximizing relay life". For the entirety of the slide-making process, I kept telling myself "nobody is going to come to this. You're wasting your time, but you've committed, so you must do well." Hours and hours of work, potentially presented to nobody. Three days before the presentation, the end was nowhere in sight. I was stressed. I started the HW demo two nights before, finishing at 4AM, then off to sleep in the woods - too tired to bike home - only to awaken a few hours later, 5 minutes before breakfast was over. I must have looked like a zombie drudging into the cafeteria with a hurriedly-packed tent under my left arm.
The day before I was to present, I spent 14 straight hours on slides. The goal of any great presentation is to impart as much knowledge as possible without the use of bullet list, animations, overwhelming statistics or pages and pages of derivations. I hate how everyone thinks they can slap a few talking points into powerpoint and suddenly have a presentation... My slides are pictures, graphics, important words and scarce equations. Of course, this takes more time and is not how PP is designed, so I end up doing a ton of the work in Paint and Photoshop (a shank and a surgeons knife by comparison, but for the most part Paint does what I want it to... I've used LabVIEW to kludge in a rudimentary N degree rotate and a threshold algorithm to remove white borders so that images blend in with the background. The most difficult part is sourcing non-copyrighted images. Even public domain images can be marked as "not for commercial use"... so I ended up creating, microscoping, snapping numerous illustrations to show the inner workings and faults of the various relay types.
I can tell you this: the night before the presentation (specifically, at 11PM) was the first time I felt the burden of creation-or-doom lift off my shoulders; I was done, and I knew it. Now all I had to do was present.
FF to 11:30AM: Our keynote just ended and I'm up in a neighboring room, ready to present. To my surprise, over 50 people show up, which is a ton when you think that each individual potentially represents a single, multi-national company to the likes of Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc... I'm thrilled! I give the presentation and everything works exactly as I want it to. The demo goes off without a hitch and I think my delivery was 100%.
What a relief to be done with it! Over the next few days, I solicit feedback from the coworkers that attended. I'm surprised how much my fellow engineers say they've learned from my slides: proof that spending over a year on a single topic (and another year with mixed studying) leads to intense knowledge... imagine the intricate nuances others possess with their own time-entrenched widgets!
...
So as of this Monday, I'm now 90% dedicated to position C. The only problem is group C is in prerelease mode and it's super-hectic. The past three years have done little to prepare me for the specification derivation I'm tasked to do; there's so much work to be done in so little time with little more direction than "ASAP!", so people are outputting sloppy mistakes that I'm too inexperienced to recognize are invalid. I had to toss two entire days of work because I didn't know to look at one little piece of data before crunching a ton of numbers. Yikes!
Position C brings back the fear of my first day of work. I had just finished college and had a piece of paper that represented vast theoretical knowledge... but now I needed to apply it, and I didn't understand the tools. My main fear right now is that the combination of poor documentation, scant instruction, and HUGE expectations (I didn't even have to interview) is going to cause an internal meltdown as I flounder in the idea-boxes of others' past creations, trying to understand why we chose X over Y or N. For each new task, I must first evaluate whether or not I even understand what X, Y and N are, lest I discount a subproperty of even a single parameter and thus totally hose something down the line.
One thing's for certain: I have a new-found respect for each and every specification that comes with all scientific instruments. Right now I'm running temperature chamber tests on our new product with the hope that all goes well. If I don't go crazy or totally drop the ball, hopefully one day soon engineers the world over will casually inspect my masterpiece.
