adammil1
Titanium
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2001
- Location
- New Haven, CT
I work for a custom machine design/builder who made the unfortunate mistake of simply trying to grow to fast. The work that we do is some of the most fun work I have been involved with in my entire career and as far as I am concerned I would love to work at this company for years to come. The owner of the company put in place a plan to double the business in a short amount of time but as far as I can tell this is the root cause of every other major issue in the company.
The key problem is in our engineering group where we just keep on loosing people. From my perspective it takes a good 1 year for an engineer to come up to speed at our company and maybe another 3-5years till said engineer is really able to lead and run projects on his own. Where I work the engineer is the guy who more or less owns the job from start to finish. He is there when the customer first states the needs of the machine, he see's it though design, then production, then testing and setup at the factory and later goes out, commissions it and teaches the customer how it all works. It is a lot to learn, lot of responsibility, lot of fun but also a lot of stress, which can and does burn out a lot of people especially ones who find themselves in over their heads with no support. A young engineer can come into our company and soon find himself almost solely responsible with minimal oversight for bringing a $2 million piece of machinery to life.
The good news is we are making money and have more work than we can handle but that is also the problem. We took on a few projects one of which that had the effect of burning out a 19 year veteran of the company (my mentor) which appears as though it is propagating down to more and more people who may be on their way out the door. As with each person who has quit the load gets transferred to fewer and fewer people. It is almost like watching a structure fail and pretty soon even the happiest employees such as myself start wondering if it is time to get out.
Anyone ever seen such a phenomenon at a company they worked for? Anyone ever seen something like this get turned around and how does that happen? Any ideas for surviving such turmoil and even being able to help be part of the solution?
The key problem is in our engineering group where we just keep on loosing people. From my perspective it takes a good 1 year for an engineer to come up to speed at our company and maybe another 3-5years till said engineer is really able to lead and run projects on his own. Where I work the engineer is the guy who more or less owns the job from start to finish. He is there when the customer first states the needs of the machine, he see's it though design, then production, then testing and setup at the factory and later goes out, commissions it and teaches the customer how it all works. It is a lot to learn, lot of responsibility, lot of fun but also a lot of stress, which can and does burn out a lot of people especially ones who find themselves in over their heads with no support. A young engineer can come into our company and soon find himself almost solely responsible with minimal oversight for bringing a $2 million piece of machinery to life.
The good news is we are making money and have more work than we can handle but that is also the problem. We took on a few projects one of which that had the effect of burning out a 19 year veteran of the company (my mentor) which appears as though it is propagating down to more and more people who may be on their way out the door. As with each person who has quit the load gets transferred to fewer and fewer people. It is almost like watching a structure fail and pretty soon even the happiest employees such as myself start wondering if it is time to get out.
Anyone ever seen such a phenomenon at a company they worked for? Anyone ever seen something like this get turned around and how does that happen? Any ideas for surviving such turmoil and even being able to help be part of the solution?