Engineers, management must break the work-harder cycle: panel

That was the message Tuesday (June 5) from a panel at the Design Automation Conference here. The discussion, titled "Changing the Dialogue Between Engineers and Management," was sponsored by the EDA Consortium and the Fabless Semiconductor Association.

"Engineers, who had always been the pioneers of productivity and process change, have succumbed to the sheer workload and organization pressure to work harder," said Kathryn Kranen, president of Jasper Design Automation and an EDAC board member. "They're not spending time on productivity and process improvement."

However, she added, "We do believe that engineers and managers can work together by clearing up some communications pitfalls and break the word-harder cycle." to illustrate communications issues, she showed a video parody, embedded below, of an engineering workplace.

Slides from an EE Times survey of engineers suggested that compared with North American workers in other industries, EEs are much more under the gun and stressed at work. One in four work more than 50 hours a week, and engineers are half as likely as other workers to believe they are free to decide how they do their at work, according to the survey.

"We have to break the cycle," Kranen said.

She suggested several paths, based on an MIT study on process improvement, "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened."

Chief among them is to reward engineers for continuous process improvement and to build in time between projects to figure out how to improve a process. As for the engineers, Kranen said, "You must voice schedule and risk realities assertively and persistently."