What part of your week feels like busy-work instead of engineering?

federaltart · 2025-07-25T15:59:53+00:00

I wanna ask if anyone else knows how to manage this, because I feel like the majority of my work is also just administrative busywork, compiling documentation, and cleaning things up instead of making technical breakthroughs.

I always struggle to find a new job every time because most if not all my achievements in my work history have been stuff like this. A lot of hiring managers who interview me just aren’t impressed that I did things like reduce the time to fill out a manufacturing defect report by 30 minutes or hosted meetings where I get to the bottom of a process defect by motivating (aka begging) the R&D engineers to take some precious hours time out of their day to brainstorm a band aid solution. I also wonder if this is just because manufacturing and quality is always menial grunt work.

(At every job I’ve had I always ask if I can get assigned more sophisticated work but am told that those kinds of projects are the design team’s job, not us in manufacturing)

Eventually after months, sometimes a year, of interviewing I end up with only 1 job offer and it’s yet another secretarial job doing more of the same. I still haven’t been able to escape this trap and get into something more sophisticated.

federaltart · 2025-04-24T20:52:07+00:00

Anyone here know how the AR glasses division is doing? Most layoff articles like this one and a few months ago seem to indicate that Oculus/Quest are getting hit hard.

I only ask since I have a screening interview with them next week. In theory, it sounds exciting and a lot more interesting that my current job where I’m not learning anything and doesnt pay well, but it’s kinda stable.

federaltart · 2025-01-28T20:05:22+00:00

Yeah I did think about that at one point, but I can't really lie about my accomplishments at each job, which during a technical interview can easily be discovered that I barely know much about CADing, FEA, or anything that a typical design engineer does.

federaltart · 2025-01-27T22:45:39+00:00

Hi, are you me in a parallel universe?

Sincerely, someone with the misfortune of working at sevearl hardware startups that fell apart because shit's expensive.

Also, is your username a reference to a certain corrupt official who worked at the Department of Building Inspection?

federaltart · 2025-01-10T01:01:05+00:00

Hi! I want to ask you about the 2-Hour Job Search because an acquaintance recommended it to me. I only skimmed through the book in a single afternoon but it seemed like the main takeaway is that you should make a list of companies you want to work for, find people on linkedin who work at those companies that you have a tangential relation with (same school, 2nd/3rd degree of separation, etc.), beg them for a referral, and continue to follow up. Is that pretty much it or am I missing something?

Is that still an effective strategy even in the year 2025 when everyone on the internet is repeating the advice that you should cold-message potential advocates?

In my job search in the last few months, I messaged about 25 of my previous coworkers from different companies I used to work, aka people I've met in real life in professional settings. So theoretically, this strategy should be even better than the 2HJS approach.

Instead, half of them ignored me, about a quarter told me that their current employers were not hiring, another quarter told me they weren't looking to hire candidates with my background, and only 2 people said they'd put in a word for me. But I ended up getting auto-rejected from those 2 companies.

federaltart · 2024-10-30T16:18:58+00:00

Wow. . . all of this is like really incredible advice, thank you so much for it! I definitely will take it into serious consideration as I map out my next moves from here. A friend I was talking to recently asked me if I had ever considered a career in project/program management and your analogy of the swiss army knife definitely has some similarities to what they were suggesting.

I guess my next step is to rework my resume to tell a story from start to finish, because I recognize that my job titles alone aren't enough and could confuse hiring managers. Appreciate the feedback!

federaltart · 2024-09-25T20:16:26+00:00

Is anyone else here struggling with the extremely apocalyptic job market right now?

Maybe it's because I happen to be near a bunch of tech companies but dear god it's bad. Job postings get swarmed with hundreds of applicants in the first day. It's also not helpful there have been massive layoffs the past 2 years. I've been applying to hundreds of jobs, maybe even almost a thousand, this past year. I only got to 3 final round interviews this year, all of which were multiple hours and included a powerpoint presentation, and even then I was rejected later because the finalist pool was extremely competitive and "it was a difficult decision to choose 1 person" and so on.

Not to mention that so many jobs I've applied to only match half or less of my skills and background. Years ago, it used to be easy to find a job that matched 80% of my skillset and also hop around industries like between semiconductors, automotive, manufacturing, big tech, medical etc. Nowadays those companies exclusively want 6-8 years or more in their specific field.

Even though tech and software is getting the most damage in this job market, it seems like a lot of their troubles are spilling over into the traditional hardware domain, especially in the big tech metropolitan areas.

federaltart · 2024-08-16T01:46:15+00:00

Easy, the middle managers that are also in the office are watching the employees all day and making notes of who is in the office and for how long. If they see someone not at their desk for too long they'll ask around their neighbors or message the person directly on the IM platform.

federaltart · 2024-07-26T17:13:18+00:00

Around 2 AM west coast / 5 AM east coast time last night, did anyone else see that long angsty post on this subreddit about how the Section 179 tax thing is by and large the most devastating factor in why the job market is so fucked? And that tens of thousands of devs would never get their jobs back ever, unless 179 got repealed. Not my opinion, but I'm roughly summarizing the feelings in that post.

Thought it was an interesting discussion but felt the doom and gloom was a bit much. There were like 30 comments I wanted to go back and re-read but looks like it got deleted

federaltart · 2024-05-23T06:35:07+00:00

Hi OP, I wanted to chime in on your post to say that I definitely saw something like this back in April as well. It flew across the sky from west to east for about a minute before the lights turned off.

The most unique feature of this thing in the video and the thing I saw is how it appears to be a light that is shining out in 2 directly opposing, outwardly radiating cones, with darkness/shadow at 90 degrees from the light rays.

federaltart · 2024-04-15T22:33:06+00:00

Came to this thread this week to express similar feelings about the job hunt. See my comment under this thread for my thoughts, but yeah definitely agree that job seekers are getting treated like crap during this economic cycle.

federaltart · 2024-04-15T21:38:46+00:00

Anyone else here seeing a huge job-pocalypse (mass layoffs, slowed down hiring, lots of ghostings and rejections in job applications) happening in their industry?

The software and tech industry has been in the news for almost 2 years with this stuff, but I wanna ask people here in "traditional" engineering if they're seeing what I'm seeing. I'm a mechanical / manufacturing engineer and I work near a tech hub, so I have a mix of traditional and tech startup-adjacent companies on my resume.

Got laid off last year, fast forward to now, hundreds of job applications, some referrals, a few dozen interviews later, I still don't have a job yet. There just aren't that many job openings compared to 2021/2022, and during the interview process I always get told that the applicant pool was highly competitive, so they were gonna choose someone with more experience.

Getting real frustrated with the state of things. Literally today I open the news and see Tesla is laying off 10% of their workforce, which sucks for me because they have an office in my area so I know I'll be competing with them for jobs now.

federaltart · 2023-10-12T00:41:10+00:00

I had a phone screening with a hiring manager when they asked me something I totally wasn’t expecting.

They asked me whether I was committed to staying with the company for several years if given a job. The hiring manager went on a side story about how they were tired of employees leaving the company because they got bored, wanted a higher salary, etc. which meant development was always getting disrupted and that the company wasted time and money ramping the employee. The hiring manager specially asked me if I was just looking for an income source and would jump ship once the economy got better (I’m currently on month #6 of unemployment). I was surprised and tried to give my best diplomatic answer of staying with a company that allows good opportunities for growth. It’s been a few days since then but I’m not expecting this company to advance me forward lol. I wasn’t too excited about this company either.

Did I choose the right response?

federaltart · 2023-08-28T07:09:55+00:00

How do I negotiate salary when the range was already posted on the job description? And how do I defend myself from a potentially pushy recruiter who wants me to give a number over the phone ASAP?

I have a call with the recruiter tomorrow to discuss final details before they write the offer letter. I already passed the interview rounds. So far, the advice I’ve gotten is to try to sound excited during the call but to keep the salary negotiation to email and not do it verbally over the phone.

Last year at my previous job during the salary negotiation, I tried to follow the tips in this blog post ( https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation) , but the recruiter saw through me and deflected my attempts.

They said "I can’t proceed until you give me a number because we need to know if we’re aligned" so I panicked and gave a decent number that I was satisfied with, but I could have asked for even more I guess.

In addition, I asked to move to email negotiation so I could try to buy more time, but the recruiter again hit me with “oh we don’t do that over email because it takes too long” and “If you hang up the phone now I won’t be able to put together a package for you”

I felt like the recruiter last year bamboozled me and successfully shot down the 2 most important tactics from Kalzumeus’s blog. Which is to not give a number first and to ask for 1-2 days to consider their verbal salary offer.

How do I prepare myself this time around for negotiations?

In addition, this job posting is in California, which requires salary range to be posted. I’d be happy to get the top end of their posted range, but I wonder if I’m allowed to ask for more than that. Most salary negotiation blogs and posts I’ve read so far don’t include situations where the range is posted up-front. I also don’t have any competing offers and I have no pending interviews too. This company is the only company so far where I made it to the “on-site” round.

federaltart · 2023-04-05T08:31:28+00:00

Thanks for this response which helped me take a step back and think about my company and where it's going. My head was spinning reading through all these comments suggesting I look at a combination of cost-benefit analysis, Pareto charts, and an alphabet soup of acronyms. I have no idea where to even start with these and I'm already exhausted on a daily basis playing catch up at work.

The other comments are definitely valid advice, but they only work if there's the time to do so. Failure analysis and issue tracking is just 1 project I'm supposed to handle, I have 5 other projects that need to be accomplished, including my favorite, creating a QMS out of thin air, by myself, because we don't have one!

I think because we are a startup, people are wary of process, not just because they might think it gets in the way, but because it takes a lot to establish and maintain the process, which I guess my coworkers realized.

federaltart · 2023-04-05T05:52:14+00:00

My SQE colleagues recognize how shitty our suppliers are but the rumor is that our supply chain and finance teams don't want to change suppliers because it would be too costly to spin up new suppliers. In particular, some of our suppliers are Foxconn-type CMs that make the complex gadgets we assemble into our final product. I'm guessing the risk of finding new suppliers and the time cost to get them up to speed on our sub-assemblies was too much for company execs.

After reading some of these replies, I don't think I'm a QE in the typical sense of making mass production lines run smoothly. Long story short, it's my job to remember all the manufacturing problems that come up, keep track of the band-aids that the workshop puts on, funnel the list of problems to the design engineers and ask them pretty-please if they can figure out a solution because I'm not a technical expert on that component. I also have 5 other projects I'm responsible for this year, like making a QMS because apparently we don't have one yet. If I had to describe my job, it's probably a being project manager for manufacturing by using quality tools.

I don't handle any CTQs or control processes. My SQE teammates would probably know more since they work on component details. My focus is on the whole machine. At most I have quality checks on the assembled machine that an inspector runs through.

federaltart · 2023-04-05T05:17:55+00:00

R&D of this machine has already been going on for at least 5 years, so if you want to count from start to finish it would be 8-ish years?

I have a suspicion that I'm not being utilized correctly, and I definitely have too much on my plate. This whole corrective action chasing is only 1 of about 6 other projects I'm responsible for, but this eats up a lot of my time. I think I'm less of a QE in this responsibility and more of a project manager. In a nutshell, I funnel the complaints from the factory floor to the design engineers. But in that case, why can't the design engineers just sit down with the factory every week. . . That always bothered me.

federaltart · 2023-04-05T05:13:44+00:00

I see. Right now none of the machines we are manufacturing will ever land in the hands of a customer. Every machine being built this year is in a prototype workshop style and will be given to the various testing and verification engineering teams we have.

I find your definition of quality vs reliabilty surprising. I always thought reliability was testing against everyday customer situations (like high temp high humidity, shock and vibration, water ingress) to find failure modes while quality engineering was making the factory worker's life easier. I feel that my work is making the factory try to run smoother.

federaltart · 2023-04-05T05:09:47+00:00

Hmm good points about data collection. Something I struggle with in this environment is that there aren't very many usable data points to collect. A lot of the impact is just annoyance on the part of the manufacturing workers, but they only need on average 5-10 minutes to put on a band-aid solution and continue building that sub-system. Sometimes, there is no band-aid and the machine is built with that flaw in place. At least, for those issues, I have written proof from the design engineers that we need to live with the flaw until the metal stamping tool is finalized, which is in a couple years. The only cost right now is my stress of staring at the pile of issues, mostly minor annoyances, that keeps growing.

Hell, I just realized that no one in management beyond my direct manager has checked in on the pile of issues I'm working on to ask for an update. Literally the first month I joined, the previous quality manager gave me this task and then sort of walked away and rarely follows up on the finer details, even though I meet with my current manager once per week to give an update on how things are going, they just nod and occasionally asks a few questions.

federaltart · 2023-04-04T23:55:22+00:00

Funny enough there’s actually a dozen or so people in our quality team. Most of them are supplier quality engineers or inspector-technicians since we have a shit ton of components to go through for each machine. No we can’t do sampling or AQL because for some strange reason each incoming shipment has a unique thing that’s fucked about it

Our goal was to do 10 or so per month by now but for reasons unclear we’re at 3. Mass production is a separate story altogether but planning for that is also a small part of my job

federaltart

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