You will BURNOUT. It’s just about how much you can last before you do!!!
1- Chaotic product development process.
- Design review meetings are something worse than shark tank. You get attacked by a swarm of questions not leaving room to even finish your presentation.
- Even if you follow your design checklist items, you are still met with unrealistic “what-if” scenarios from peers, and management not defending against such scenarios.
- You are asked to pass a design review for a design that is not complete. Not getting approval results in disciplinary action, even when you have communicated in writing your progress over time.
- Assigns less engineers per project compared to what is quoted. For example, a project requires 3 engineers, they quote 3 but employ 2 which leaves engineers super loaded all the time (NO downtime).
- Your working capacity is spread over many projects, for example, a New Product Introduction of 25+ components on one major program, and 3 to 4 running design changes on 2-3 other in-production programs.
- If you are assigned an EV program, your lead-time is cut in half on top of everything stated above.
2- Chaotic change management process.
- Poor change management board decisions.
- Lacks oversight and accepts customer requests even when the team has been already over loaded.
- Lack of cross-functional collaboration yielding poor decisions and monetary losses.
- Team DOES NOT MEET for new RFQs to properly assess whether the company can actually deliver on time. The customer asks for a design change in the weekly meeting and assumes we can do it without the PM actually making a timeline and responding back.
3- Chaotic project management conduct.
- PM does not maintain the project’s timeline.
- You are left guessing how to prioritize your tasks.
- You are judged by leadership for guessing wrong.
- PM not supporting even when the project is falling behind.
- PM assigned many programs, they hate their jobs as they vocalized it to me.
4- Everyone is overloaded. You can’t get anything done without needing to request priority. By overloaded, people are constantly frustrated which yields constant escalations across the organization and often being in uncomfortable positions.
5- You never leave home feeling accomplished. Looming fear over the mountain of tasks waiting for you tomorrow.
6- Engineering management will ask you (the junior engineer) to do their job, for example, contact stakeholders across the organization, including the Engineering VP, and ask them what are their top 3 priority items, then put them all on one sheet and come to him (your manager) with the top 3. That is supposed to be their job.
7- Engineering management decisions and directions constantly changing leaving the engineers not sure about how to conduct business. Lack of standardization.
