General > General Technical Chat
Millstoning in Electronics?
VK3DRB:
One of my clients hired a fellow with a Masters Degree in electrical engineering. When he started he was clueless - a testament to degrees that didn't teach him much. The guy didn't even know how to do a Google search, let alone how a bloody diode worked. But he was a nice chap and I made time for him. I charge by the hour and the CEO was happy for me to take him under my wing, solving problems and doing their design work (hardware and firmware) whilst teaching him and providing plenty of advice along the way.
Lo and behold! He has become a fairly competent engineer for his age and limited experience. He can now write code and understand how circuits work. He can also do research. He is now learning to use Altium.
What's in it for me? Not the money as much as I mentored him and helped him. The CEO told me recently that he greatly appreciated the effort I put in to "get them out of trouble" and the help for that young bloke. A great compliment. Electronic stuff we created create over the years is here today, gone tomorrow - it is the nature of the beast. What's the point of retiring or dropping dead when you have left no legacy from your work, other than maybe a few building blocks? The most important legacy from a career might be those you have influenced over the years.... and that includes helping out young inexperienced engineers.
AVGresponding:
--- Quote from: tooki on February 18, 2023, 07:44:58 pm ---To call a burdensome thing a millstone is a known usage. But the verb “millstoning” I can’t find any reference to.
--- End quote ---
Perhaps he's filed a copyright on the term, and intends to start demanding royalties once everyone gets used to using it :popcorn:
Nominal Animal:
I've been both the junior and the senior in that kind of mentoring/millstoning situation myself.
As far as I can tell, there are only two cases when mentoring turns into millstoning:
* The junior is uninterested or incapable of learning from the senior
* The senior is uninterested or incapable of mentoring the juniorI've met both types, and they cannot be helped. Such a junior is not employable in that job (so only employable if they have sufficient skill and experience to do some other job), and the senior can only be employed for tasks where they are easily replaceable.
Either one of them can be the proverbial millstone. It is noteworthy that seniors who refuse to mentor juniors (typically because juniors will eventually take their jobs, and they want to maximize job security) are easier to replace than the ones who are able to mentor juniors.
(A third case is also possible: both are interested and capable, but their personalities clash too much for it to work. While social details can be overcome, things like work ethic and tool use and organization can be showstoppers. This case is for a capable manager to resolve.)
Using a dead weight as a social tactic to keep a senior stuck at a certain task is detrimental to the company. Of course, that does not mean that sociopathic middle managers won't do it; but it does mean that when a Cxx-level executive does it, the owners of the company should be aware of the damage that does to the operations of the company. In many legislations, contracts between companies that keep an employee hobbled like that are quite illegal, too.
The reason is that a company does not pay its employees to be there; it pays for the results of employees work. Hobbling that up, a company is only making sure they extract less useful work from that employee than they otherwise could.
At the very thin spike at the top of the expertise hierarchy, we have people who may be employed simply because their knowhow is such that having them working for a competitor may be catastrophic to the company. The solution there is not social games either, but simply benefits, cold hard cash and well-written agreements both the company and the expert can agree to. A typical benefit in the software engineering world is paying them for 100% of their time, but letting them work on their own (often required to be free/libre projects, to avoid competing with the company, and specific subfields/software targets ruled out) for 10%-50% of the time.
(Because the companies so often turn out to greatly benefit from such work nevertheless, it is becoming more and more common for companies to offer that extra time for use in ones own projects, for even "lesser" experts in their software fields.)
As I am not an EE, I do not know whether similar practices exist in the electronics design field – YET. For certain, the amount of dedicated chips and even SMPS controllers is such that if I was the owner of such a company, I for sure would like my top designers to spend at least 10% of their work time on average experimenting with new chips and designs, just to make it more likely that they'll discover new, cheaper, more effective ways of using available stuff in the products the company designs. (There is also historical precedent across industries showing this is worth the expense for the company on the average.)
Of course, nowadays the problem is that if an approach makes 5× the profit in a year, but there is an alternate approach that provides 1× the profit in this quarter, the this-quarter solution is always selected. Very few care about long term, and instead live and die quarter-by-quarter.)
In Faringdon's case, I'd take a hard, objective look at the situation, and follow the money. It is extremely unlikely any corporate mill-stoning is taking place. If it indeed is happening, then it is much more likely that someone is defrauding the company, or making illegal agreements; similar to anticompetitive agreements among companies wrt. employee hiring practices. In all western countries, including the UK, there are government agencies who would be very, very interesting to hear the details if such agreements actually have been made. (This obviously includes the case where Faringdon is just reading the situation wrong; for example, misunderstanding a minor personality clash that can be overcome, as something more significant.)
In the real world, especially here in the Finland, there is basically never such an agreement, and the junior just turns out to be a (close) relative of (a close friend of) someone higher up in the company hierarchy. Then, anonymously divulging the situation to owners/shareholders (if Cxx-level officers are involved), or to Cxx-level (if it is just middle-management that is using the company as their personal cash-cow), carefully but neutrally documenting the situation and especially the loss of productivity and the hit it will do on the company bottom line, is the best course of action in my opinion.
(Others do recommend just taking your leave as fast as you can, but personally, I do get a kick out of making such exploiters essentially unemployable. It brings me joy, knowing that parasites failed to prosper. Others do volunteer work, I like to make life difficult for those who exploit others.)
tooki:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on February 19, 2023, 09:49:19 am ---As far as I can tell, there are only two cases when mentoring turns into millstoning:
* The junior is uninterested or incapable of learning from the senior
* The senior is uninterested or incapable of mentoring the juniorI've met both types, and they cannot be helped. Such a junior is not employable in that job (so only employable if they have sufficient skill and experience to do some other job), and the senior can only be employed for tasks where they are easily replaceable.
Either one of them can be the proverbial millstone. It is noteworthy that seniors who refuse to mentor juniors (typically because juniors will eventually take their jobs, and they want to maximize job security) are easier to replace than the ones who are able to mentor juniors.
(A third case is also possible: both are interested and capable, but their personalities clash too much for it to work. While social details can be overcome, things like work ethic and tool use and organization can be showstoppers. This case is for a capable manager to resolve.)
--- End quote ---
A few more cases are possible, like having both a junior who is uninterested or incapable of learning from the senior and a senior who is uninterested or incapable of mentoring the junior. Of course, that’s a sign of wildly incompetent (or corrupt) management — I can’t imagine any scenario in which that combination of employees somehow improves!
Nominal Animal:
The word used in Finnish for this idiom more commonly than millstone, is riippakivi, by the way; the best translation to English in my opinion is "dead weight", but it literally translates to "weighing-down stone". Millstone is sort of old, so you can expect anyone over 30 to understand the reference, but even the young'uns will get "riippakivi".
--- Quote from: tooki on February 19, 2023, 12:26:10 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on February 19, 2023, 09:49:19 am ---As far as I can tell, there are only two cases when mentoring turns into millstoning ...
(A third case is also possible: both are interested and capable, but their personalities clash too much for it to work.)
--- End quote ---
A few more cases are possible, like having both a junior who is uninterested or incapable of learning from the senior and a senior who is uninterested or incapable of mentoring the junior.
--- End quote ---
True, a stone mentoring a pebble how to get lodged in a shoe :D
When a workplace gets that dysfunctional, better get the heck outta there. I've been in organizations where people just weren't fired, ever; when they were too much to handle, they were promoted sideways or upwards just so they'd annoy someone else instead, or otherwise socially pressured and gossiped about so that "they'd get the drift" and quit themselves. The real-world tales of ostensibly "corruption-free Finland" I could tell are pretty much unbelievable.
Here in Finland, it is typical that when statistics show results embarrassing to decision-makers, the action taken is to stop making the statistics.
D1: I've read so much about the dangers of alcohol, I've decided to stop.
D2: Drinking, you mean?
D1: No, reading.
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