I’m an engineer, electronics, started out as a radio engineer and have moved on to systems engineering and engineering management.
When something goes wrong with a machine (be it electrical, mechanical or a combination of both) you get to find out who your engineers are, by the manner in which they fix things and get the machine working again.
A poor engineer, fucks and farts around, changing all manner of things and more often than not will render the machine useless, and in the case of the worst of them, will declare the machine as beyond repair and have it replaced completely. In most cases it’s more economically viable to change the engineer.
A poor to average engineer has a rough idea of where to start and will change large sub units until the machine starts to work again, after a lot of time wasting and a lack of productivity, the machine can be kept going, probably at less than optimum performance levels. Still an expensive engineer to keep, but you can give the engineer a chance to improve with mentoring and experience.
A dangerous engineer is one who thinks that they know everything, fucks and farts around trying to fix the fault, causes faults in similar working models and brings the entire network down. This engineer should be shot for the good and benefit of the whole system.
A good engineer works unsupervised and can fault find down to individual component level, sometimes fix the component and restore the machine to working again, or replaces the component, or performs an upgrade that improves the overall efficiency of the machine.
A great engineer can see trends in performance and recognize the fault before it becomes apparent and can often remove apparently working components before they cause a problem, improving the efficiency of the machine by making other components perform better and the output and efficiency of the whole unit run at optimum performance.
Tottenham has a working machine that can run better because some of the components are underperforming and need repair or upgrade. We have an engineer that knows this and is working to fix the problem. What we have yet to find out is whether he’s a good engineer or whether he’s going to be a great one.
The skill as a manager is in working out whether your engineer is going to cost or save you money and make the whole network sing and dance.
