On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:24:39 -0500, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


Winston wrote:

Don Foreman wrote:

I think good electronic techs and modelmakers are greatly under-rated
and unappreciated contributors. They sure were at the corporation
where I worked as an engineer, manager and research puke for many
years.

Management puts us into one of two boxes:

1) Invisible
2) Dangerous


Three boxes:

3) Banned from engineering for life.

Being an incorrigable maverick, when I was a manager I took a
different tack. I tried to promote my high-talent techs to
engineering grades because their contributions deserved that level of
compensation and respect. A diploma does not make one an engineer any
more than a uniform makes one a soldier. Results are what count.
HR about **** a brick. You can't do that, they don't have the
credentials, yammer yammer. I said designing and prototyping
competition-beating products and winning patents looked like
qualifications to me, did they disagree and would they so advise the
results-oriented VP?

Wull wull wull ...

So they came up with a parallel career path called "technologist"
where the pay grades were the same as graded engineers up to a point,
like warrant officers and commissioned officers, W-1 thru W-4 vs O-1
thru O-4. A W-4 Chief Warrant Officer gets the same pay as a gold oak
leaf O-4 major or Navy lt cmdr. He has no command responsibility,
he's a technical contributor or operator.

Transition from technician to technologist was by no means an
entitlement with seniority, it had to be earned by merit and only a
few did.

My little band of mavericks confounded HR and some of management
because, as a group, we far exceeded all other org entities in:

percentage of non-degreed significant technical contributors
corporate technical achievement awards
diversity
percentage of veterans
percentage of members who'd won patents (all tech contributors)
retention (zero voluntary turnover)
projects completed on time within budget
having fun at work

Then there was a re-org that involved more politics than reason and my
skunkworks and I got nuked. But it lasted for 15 years and we had one
hell of a good time while it lasted.