[lug] Career advice

[David Morris]

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 00:55, Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 3, 2010, at 2:58 PM, David Morris wrote:
>
>> This is where a "Systems Engineer" comes into the project.  Note that
>> I use the word in the traditional engineering sense, NOT the
>> bastardized definition being applied to administrators to satisfy
>> egos.
>
>
> Sounds like a nice role to have around.  Never worked for anyplace that would pay for anyone to do that role.

It is nice.  It makes life a LOT easier on the engineers.

> You mentioned aerospace... sounds like a pretty big budget.

Sort of.  The vast majority of the budget goes to hardware.  The
software is, in my experience, just as budget limited as other
industries...if not more so at times.

> In most aerospace projects, lives are on the line (one way or another...), so I can see companies expending a lot of money on people to make sure things "go right".

I've actually never worked an aerospace (developing satellite
software) where lives were on the line, even indirectly.....lots of
science missions mostly.  The reason the System Engineer is so common
in aerospace projects is you get one chance only to get it right. Back
in the Apollo days (if I recall correctly) NASA found they needed
someone to coordinate between the various engineering disciplines in
order to get a working spacecraft, and that tradition has become the
industry standard.

> I'm guessing that kind of expenditure only happens if there's a serious rate of return... airplanes, spacecraft, offensive and defensive ballistic missile systems, and commercial launch vehicles... aren't cheap.  In the Defense industry, I bet there's more than one Systems Engineer on "cost plus" contracts.
>
> I wouldn't put them in a discussion of "normal software", though.  Do you?  How many companies really utilize such a role on consumer and business software, or can even afford to?

In my opinion, companies can't afford not to on a large software
project, they just don't realize it.  In the aerospace world its a
necessity not so much because lives are at stake, but because you have
one chance to do it right or you just wasted hundreds of millions of
dollars.

I should mention that Systems Engineering requires a large amount of
experience in a related engineering field combined with the ability to
interface with customers, view the "big picture", and consider
long-term impacts of decisions.  This same set of skills also happens
to be a common skill set for a project manager, which means some
projects end up getting a systems engineer even though they don't know
it.  For that matter, small projects frequently deliberately combine
the Project Manager and Systems Engineer roles.  There is a lot of
overlap in both skills and duties.  They are typically only different
positions when there is too much work involved for one person to
handle alone because of the scope of a project.

In pure software environments it is a lot more rare a role, but it
does still exist at times.  The most common version in a pure software
company gets the duties rolled in with QA (Quality Assurance).  Not so
much because the two have anything in common (there is some overlap,
but not much), but because QA has the extra time.  The role is also
frequently slimmed down to just requirements definition (interpreting
customer needs).

--David