Frustrated Engineers

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

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4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As an engineer, do you feel you carry a bigger burden at work? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Richard Sheridan, an engineer, CEO, and author. They talk through what to do when you want to influence decisions as a technical expert, you’re a female engineer seeing your male counterparts promoted more quickly, or you have a hard time committing fully to flawed projects.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.9	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.9	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.3	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.3	We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.
0:17.8	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:19.9	We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts, and help you move forward.
0:28.6	Today we're answering questions from frustrated engineers with Richard Sheridan.
0:36.6	He's a software engineer, the CEO of Menlo
0:38.9	Innovations, and the author of Joy, Inc. Rich, thanks so much for coming on the show. Great to be with you.
0:44.9	So do engineers face different workplace dilemmas than the rest of us? I would say that engineers
0:51.1	have to fight through a lot of difficult technical work.
0:56.0	And often because of that hard work, they're typically shielded from many of the wider business
1:04.0	activities, so they have an important perspective, but it can be a narrow one based on their engineering work.
1:10.0	I tend to think of engineers as very logical.
1:12.7	Is that a source of tension?
1:14.6	Yeah, I think as engineers, we are wired to see things a little more black and white
1:19.4	because we're trying to figure out not only how to get things to work,
1:23.3	but we're also trying to figure out how to make sure they don't break in dramatic ways.
1:28.0	There's a stereotype that engineers are so technical that they don't have the soft skills.
1:35.9	Is that true?
1:37.0	If you think about the typical Dilbert picture of the introverted engineer, stuck in the cubicle with headphones on,
	...

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