I recently interviewed an engineer asking him questions about how he communicates in his profession. Although he is not the same type of engineer as the type that I am studying to become I was still able to ask him many questions about communicating as an engineer in general. The engineer that I interviewed is named Tim Foster and he is an electrical engineer who works at Bosch. Bosch is German multinational engineering and electronics company. This will be his 3rd year working at Bosch although before his current job he worked at a smaller company that was still owned by Bosch called ETAS. Earlier in his life he graduated from the engineering school at the University of Michigan getting a job straight out of school working for Ford. His current position is a product manager.
The first question I asked was what types of things does he write and how does he write them. The biggest examples that I believe will have an effect on me in the future are project reports, test plans, and DFMEAs or Design Failure Mode and Effect Analysis. Project reports are essentially what the name tells you. The document is a report on a project and the different things that were important to the project such as the design, testing, and implementation of the product. Test plans are another essential document that I'm sure I will see in the future because we are already using these in my intro to engineering class this semester. These test plans are essentially a plan explaining the steps on how the engineer is going to go about testing their product. Finally, DFMEA are basically a way to detail how the product fails in certain areas and how to minimize these failures of the product. He said that DFMEAs are definitely a type of writing that most if not all engineers will come across in their careers. Then I proceeded to ask how he writes these documents and he gave me a very simple answer. He said that all that matters is the audience. You are given an audience and then you make a decision about how to write the document based on that audience. The writings however, are almost always very technical and concise .
When I inquired about misconceptions that he has run into over the years he really didn't have any he could think of and the reason being was because he only works with engineers rather than with normal people. So I moved on to another question. I asked him if he has to write memos. In my intro to engineering class we are always writing these papers called memos. memos consist of an intro explaining what is going to happen in the paper and what the problem is, a section on how we were going to go about addressing this problem, results about how the our approach to the problem went and then an overall conclusion about the project. I explained this to Tim, but he had no idea about what I was talking about. His response was that he write reports similar except he doesn't need to give any background because the person he is writing the paper for already has sufficient prior knowledge on the subject. I thought this was interesting because the things that I am learning in class are not directly translating to the real world.
Finally I asked Tim about the comparison of where he began as an electrical engineer to where he is now. He gave me a general answer of how usually beginning level engineers start out analyzing products. They take past models and make modifications to these past models and then make sure that they work in a specific way. From there most engineers will begin working in project groups where they are assigned one part of a project and then the multiple engineers come together to create the final product. From their most engineers can either stay on the technical side or move to the more business side of things where the engineer gathers requirements from a customer and then feeds them to a project team.
Overall the communication that goes on between engineers is very simple and technical which makes sense because the field of engineering is very straightforward and technical. What I learned basically solidified my own guesses on how professional engineers connect and communicate.
By: Quinn Foster
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