Job challenge, work effort, and job performance of young engineers:a causal analysis

The author explored the causal relations among job challenge, work load, and job performance of a group of young engineers during their first industrial work assignments as coop engineers in college, then three years later as professional engineers. Causal relations among the three key variables were analyzed using both path analysis and the method of cross-lagged correlation differentials. The results showed that the job challenge and work load not only have direct causal effects on current job performance they also have indirect causal effect on current job performance. Moreover, work load was found to have a more dominant effect on job performance than job challenge. This study points out how different causal assumptions can lead to different interpretations of observed results by prior researchers as well as different theories of professional development for young engineers. Overall, the findings support the proposition that it is work experience that determines job performance. The implications of the present findings for management policy are also discussed     

The humanities and their effect on engineering education

The author seeks to shed light on the current debate on what constitutes an appropriate education in the humanities and social sciences, to give some of its history and rationale, and to explain why there will and always should be such a debate. He then describes the humanities and social sciences and shows how they evolved fairly recently from philosophy. He discusses the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the education of engineers, to the engineering profession, and to the quality of life of individuals and society. Finally, he describes how the humanities and social science requirements are structured in most engineering curricula and makes recommendations for improvement     

Reflections: The disappearing space crunch

Several years ago, the author wrote how there was a perpetual space crunch in the management of space in engineering laboratories and offices because engineers tended to accumulate and hide excess square footage. Now, however, such labs and offices contain empty rooms and disused equipment everywhere. The author examines why this is so and presents one theory which suggests that the present surplus of space is really the visible manifestation of another trend: engineers are disappearing     

The need to provide writing support for academic engineers

Academic engineers must write frequently on the job. But unlike others in academe, academic engineers have some writing problems that justify their receiving various kinds of writing support. The writing problems unique to academic engineers are that they often have little knowledge and experience in writing; they must produce a variety of documents, some of which affect not only their professional standing but also the academic standings of their engineering colleges; and some lack fluency and confidence in their writing because English is not their native language. The best solution for addressing the writing problems of academic engineers is to provide adequate writing training for engineering students. But given the already compacted curricula of engineering colleges, this solution is not realistic. The author presents some second-best solutions that can ease the writing problems of academic engineers     

Stuff you don't learn in engineering school

New engineers often leave school with technical know-how but without workplace savvy. Many if not most young engineers emerge from school with fabulous technical talent but little ability in the "soft" skills or even the realization of how important such skills are. They include making decisions, setting priorities, working in teams, running meetings, and negotiating. When students eventually hit the workplace, they may find their soft skills woefully undeveloped. Who will teach them then? That's the goal of this series of articles: to acquaint readers with the most important nontechnical skills that every engineer needs to be more effective in the workplace and happier in life. In this article the author gives advice on effective communication: writing, speaking and listening.     

Joint effort [mobile robot developments]

The author describes how distributed control has allowed British engineers to take a leap forward in the development of mobile robots for industrial applications     

Smith charts are easy. III

Smith charts are an extremely powerful visualization tool used by microwave engineers to design impedance-matching circuits, filters, amplifiers, and transmission lines. They are based on the simple principle of conformal mapping. The author shows some measurements made on real components and how to interpret them     

International science and technology museums. I

Volunteer electrical engineers outside the United States and their children find museums in their countries fun, serious, and varied in the ways they try to educate budding engineers. This paper presents reviews of 20 museums in eight nations. General observations are given on the exhibits, admission fees, hands-on demonstrations, and how conducive the museums were to learning     

Engineering contributions to the evolution of management practice

The author argues that the future opportunities for engineers lie in enhanced appreciation of the contributions of the other functions-marketing and finance-in a multidisciplinary approach to the needs of present and future businesses. He indicates that engineers should be aware of their record of contributing to organizational and sociological advances, through their ability to think conceptually and in terms of systems. He concludes that they should seek a career pattern that will develop an appreciation of all the aspects of an enterprise, so that they understand the idiom of their colleagues in the order disciplines and are preparing themselves for wider responsibilities in top management     

Learning from hackers [open-source programming]

The author describes how the open-source movement can teach project managers a lot. Unlike the troublesome computer vandals about whom we read in the mainstream press, open-source hackers are people who “solve problems and build things”. Most engineers would be proud to be described that way. So would most project managers     

Tools for measuring software reliability

The author discusses a measure of software reliability and various models for characterizing it, the result of 15 years of theoretical research and experimental application, which are moving into practice and starting to pay off. These tools let developers quantify reliability, give them ways to predict how reliability will vary as testing progresses, and help them use that information to decide when to release software. He examines the distinction between failures and faults and how these affect reliability. He compares execution-time models with calendar-time models, which are less effective, and discusses the choice of execution-time models. The author then describes a generic, step-by-step procedure to guide software reliability engineers in using the reliability models     

Auto manufacture digitizes in depth

Automobile manufacture typifies one aspect of today's highly competitive, global economy. It is generally a large, distributed effort, spread out over several continents and involving thousands of engineers and technicians, whom digital technology is helping to work together. Only with this technology's aid can they hope to respond to competitive pressures by cutting costs and, more importantly, by shortening the design-to-manufacturing cycle for the new car models. The author considers how the integration of design and manufacturing software, coupled with the aggressive use of digital prototypes and virtual reality, is already helping auto makers cut costs as well as time-to-market     

Test yourself: how much do you know about internationalcommunications? [International numbering systems]

We like to think of international telephone communications as `transparent', the successful outcome of 100 years of technical progress and standards setting, but the author shows us that it is not. The user still has to be something of an expert to understand how to make international calls, and there are chaotically differing numbering systems for telephony, telex, and electronic mail. We should be reminded that usability of services, not just their usefulness, is a critical component of communications. Simplicity, consistency, and rationality of service features and the `human interface' that allows users to invoke them should be a high priority for communications engineers as they work toward the integrated services networks of the future     

Fitting into technical organizations: the socialization of newcomerengineers

The socialization of newly hired engineers was investigated. Subjects described early, formative incidents they experienced as they learned about the new organization. Across 12 organizations, this study compares newcomer engineers' perceptions of behavioral norms with those of their engineering managers. Results indicate that engineering managers view their organizations as supporting norms of achievement and collaboration whereas newcomer engineers believed their organizations support norms of competition and defensive interpersonal relations. Critical incidents of socialization reported by newcomer engineers are presented to illustrate how newcomers learn relevant workplace norms. Examples of incidents reported are: supportiveness of the engineering manager, conflict between the engineer and the engineering manager, coworker cooperation, and participating in a substantive project team meeting. Implications for increasing the effectiveness of socialization and for engineering management development programs are discussed     

Do you use your Engineering Societies Library as much as you might?

Nowadays there is a great deal of talk about the information revolution, information retrieval, and the mechanization of libraries, talk that might even lead you to assume that libraries as they now exist have become next to useless. Such is hardly the case. A library, even the smallest and most specialized, is only useless when its potential users don't know it exists, don't know what's in it, don't think of using it when the need arises, or don't use it because they don't know how to use it. You'd think the last reason listed would be the last to apply to engineers, who are, after all, educated men. But no, says ESL Director Ralph H. Phelps, engineers in general don't know how to use libraries effectively because they haven't been trained to use them. In fact, if you are like most engineers, you probably don't use your own Engineering Societies Library nearly as much as you might. It may pay off for you to spend a few minutes considering just what ESL is, and to find out how it is prepared to help you? no matter where you are, whether you are near ESL, which is in the same building as IEEE Headquarters in New York, whether you are on the West Coast, or in Europe.     

Solitons-permanent waves [optical communications]

Communications engineers are learning to create an electromagnet wave at will, to transmit information. This wave, the optical soliton, is the subject of astounding recent developments in nonlinear optics and lasers. The author describes the principles behind the use of solitons in optical communications and shows that in the context of such communications the most important property of solitons is that they are extremely stable. Not only do they not disperse, but an encounter with a perturbation (e.g. a joint in optical fibre) will usually leave the soliton unaltered     

Electronic mail-E-mail at work

The author discusses how electronic mail has removed the barriers of time and place between engineers collaborating on complex design projects. Besides the obvious boon of avoiding telephone tag and time zone dissonance, E-mail gives companies unprecedented flexibility. Electronic mail can also uncover hidden expertise in a company. It has ended the isolation of researchers at universities and cuts across hierarchies at corporations and other institutions. Disadvantages of electronic mail are also discussed     

Basic science [Technology 1998 analysis and forecast]

The smaller they make their devices, the closer electronics engineers come to entering the world of quantum mechanics, that wonderland where the rules of physics differ drastically from those of the macroscopic world people experience with their senses. In one example, physicists and engineers are creating so-called quantum dots and are investigating how to use them in new forms of electronics. They aspire to transmit data not by tiny currents, but by single electrons that hop from one quantum dot to the next. Probably the one thing generally known about quantum mechanics is that matter-despite its particulate nature-may behave like a wave. This idea was emphasized once again last year when a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, produced coherent beams of matter in what the group refers to as an atom laser. (The same group just two years ago produced an entirely new state of matter known as Bose-Einstein condensates.) Elsewhere, scientists in France have succeeded in detecting decoherence, the transition from the quantum world into the macroscopic world, by contriving systems that can be in two quantum states at the same time, albeit briefly. Also in France, physicists have shown how to exploit chaos to encrypt optically transmitted data. This finding might eventually be useful in ultrafast applications, such as the scrambling and unscrambling of television signals transmitted over optical fibers     

Engineering layoffs: facts and myths

Being `technically vital,' proficient in a hot speciality, or retrained does not guarantee a job in today's market. This report recounts problems faced by laid-off engineers. Through their eyes, it also addresses such questions as: how successful has keeping technically vital been in making these individuals immune to layoffs? What hot new job areas have they found or not found? How well does the defense-to-commercial conversion appear to be working? In this article the case studies are highly personal views. Nonetheless, the experiences of these engineers suggest that, at least in certain contexts in today's work world while some commonly believed assumptions may be facts, others are myths     

Launcher without a country [marine satellite launch platform]

The author describes how an international team of marine and rocket engineers is combining advanced oil platform technology with a Cold War rocket system into a novel means of launching satellites at sea. The objective is to heave telecommunications satellites from the equator, the best launch latitude on the planet, into geostationary orbit, the most marketable territory in space. The paper details how marrying an agile Soviet rocket design with the best oil platform technology may provide an altogether new means of getting big satellites into orbit