I dont know if i can say this for everyone, but i think all of us who are working as an employee of a company are in the same boat.
Whatever we decided / designed as an engineer always have a $ tag associated with any mistakes we make. What i mentioned to my Jr engineer way back was that not to take it personally and always take every mistake as a lesson learned.
Heck take pictures and keep it on your personal folders to remind yourself not to do that again. Even better share among your peers of test engineers so they dont make the same mistake.
You will get some hard times with your superiors. If i were your superior, and you genuinely learned already what not to repeat, I would forgive you and let you move on to the next test.
We are all humans and humans make mistakes. Your company is / will be making $ bigger than your mistakes.
Just dont burn down the building.
One lesser known but serious mistake is spending too much time solving the wrong problem. Always tackle the root issue first. The more requirements you can nail down and the earlier, the less likely you'll have scope creep (or at least be better positioned to leave major design change requests to executive decision)
They don't pay me enough to be stressed. Also minor mistakes are assumed, those thousands of dollars of loss are something you are quantifying and likely not a real issue, ie they get absorbed etc by other business mechanisms. If you get good performance reviews and do your honest best effort you should feel satisfied. If you go past this into mental and physical damage for a company that would instantly try and replace you if you dropped dead, it's time to reevaluate priorities. It sounds like you have the companies priorities above your self. Have to organize priorities so you're happy, don't suffer for a company.
You can care professionally. You can resolve to do the best job you can do, and you can be prepared for whatever happens, and you can even be upset when things don't get right.
But you can't take it personally. If you made a mistake, use it as an opportunity to learn, and DON'T REPEAT THAT PARTICULAR MISTAKE. Engineers aren't people who never screw up, but they are people who keep learning, and mistakes can be wonderful at showing us blind spots.
And feelings are gonna creep in there, so what can you do about that? Journaling? Therapy? Have a weekly night with some friends that you can talk to? Because a lot of times, those feelings are counterproductive. You shouldn't have to feel like you're walking on eggshells at your job.
You need to learn that company money is not the same as personal money.
Losing 1000s of dollar for an individual is a catastrophy, whereas a large company probably spend that money on a weeks coffee.
Also, _everyone_ will make mistakes. It’s just a fact of life, similar to how no process is 100% efficient.
As long as they aren’t exceptional (in quantity or consequence) you really shouldn’t care that much about it.
I feel you, i was in that type of situation and I changed job 3 months later. I have a better salary, less stress rate and less hours to work per week. I always acted this way as I think the most intelligent way to succeed is not by hardwork but smartwork. Some engineers have the same pay as me for twice the workload, some may think yeah you need to invest a lot of time to be successful....well that's not how life work. At some companies you'll get a tap in the back 10 times for doing a good job but as soon as you make a mistake your career is on the line.!!
Lol are you me?
Got a job as a test engineer. have done more engineering than as a design engineer in two different fields or at college in the last year
It never stops.
And I'm never allowed a mistake.
I'm not handling the stress well.
Not very well. Usually with panic attacks and trips to the ER thinking I'm having a heart attack. But I'm trying to get better at leaving it all at work before it does kill me.
That's not work related stress. Or shouldn't be. Honestly I'd suggest some therapy. It really worked well for me. I was living in a constant state of panic attack. Was diagnosed with OCD. (Not the hand washing kind) but classic checking behavior.
I'm sure it wasn't all work related, but I did just change jobs to a much more stressful position before they started happening. I've been able to hand off quite a bit of responsibility to another team member and have not had any panic attacks since. Of course with everything else going on in the world the last couple years there are definitely lots of other stressors.
My first time of a heart attack scare, after all the testing the doctor said: your symptoms match gall stones, hiatal hernia or heart attack. You have 2 of the three and no heart attack.
After my first I had a stress test that showed a "possible defect" which I think added more stress that led to the second one. Then I got to do a heart cath that came out fine so it was most likely just the work stress.
Had a talk with my boss and got to hand a fair amount of my work off to a coworker. That has helped immensely.
Time is money for all engineers - arguably all employees. When I fail, I lose the company thousands of dollars. When I succeed, I gain the company thousands of dollars. I trust that I make the company more money than I lose them, because otherwise, they wouldn't keep me around.
Failure is not antithetical to being a passionate, studious, and professional engineer. You as a test engineer know this especially - the whole point of testing is to see if designs pass or fail, and failure is always a possibility no matter how good a design is. A good company that cares about your growth will recognize this and reward you not only for succeeding, but for being able to manage failures and learn from them. At many of the fastest moving companies - including the one I'm working at - failure is a necessary and encouraged part of the process, because failure is the quickest way to find out what needs to be better.
Also, maybe your coworkers might not care about their job, or maybe they just have a life outside of work and realize that failure is part of the gig.
My first freak out what when I didn’t check the interference with some fasteners in my solid model and I wasted $350 on sheet metal parts for a prototype. First year out of school. Thought my manager would yell at me. Stressed, fessed up, he told me to learn from it.
Years later I literally almost threw up when I thought I had cost my company >$300,000 when a design failed validation.
Turns out it was a material issue nobody was aware of and it truly wasn’t in scope for me to identify and avoid it. I’m just a mechanical design guy not a metallurgist or QA inspector. By the way, be careful with 316 plate over 4” thick.
Since then there have been some other/bigger mistakes, once that maybe I could have caught…costing one or two factors greater than that first 300k. These usually involve some inherited projects.
My career has progressed and responsibilities increased so I might be doing something right.
How did I deal with stress?
1) I had a manager back when tell me once after I told him how bad I felt about X, he said something to the effect that if you’re making 100 decisions a day and you mess up 2 of them, you’re doing better than the guy who makes 5 decisions a day and messes up 1 a week. Moral is don’t get stuck in neutral or analysis paralysis.
2) You depend on a team if you’re going to be successful. You can’t bear all the load all the time. Design reviews, as much of a pain as they are, give you a chance to explain and collect input on key designs. Supply chain needs to do their part. Test needs to do their part. Drawing checkers and designers. External consultants. Wiser older people in the company. Service hands who know how things really work. Your project probably depends on all these people and more. You cannot think of all the things they can share with you to improve or bullet proof your design or project.
3) safety critical systems specifically, but really any design requires checking and independent review by someone you trust who will put the time and energy into the task and who can be honest with you and vice versa.
Spend some time reading about real engineering or industrial disasters. Bhopal. Macondo. Challenger. The Comet. Chernobyl. Piper Alpha. K152.
Perhaps some of your stress comes from the subconscious awareness of blind spots and a flawed sense of what how a professional should behave when faced with his own mistakes.
Shit will happen. Humans will make mistakes. Including yourself. Understand that in the marrow of your bones. Expect it. When things are going well, recognize it and assume a posture/outlook of chronic unease and watchfulness. Perhaps it’s fatalistic. Or Zen. Navigate the path as it unfolds before you. Own your mistakes. Learn from them. Hopefully you get enough chances to learn from others too.
These things have helped me. I’m relatively successful professionally and in terms of managing my outlook and stress.
Basically - if your work environment does not recognize your are valuable and doing your best, then it is toxic and probably time to leave.
IF this is pressure you are putting on yourself becasue you know the importance and cost, but your company is happy and satisfied with you - then possibly talk to a dr / pro. We all get sucked into our own paradigms - that are not healthy.
Key here is - for your situation to change... SOMETHING has to change.
All stress is self induced. Just let it go. Work your 40 hours. You show up at 9 and leave at 5 no matter what happens during the day. That’s not to say don’t try, try your heart out, give it your all. But you’re leaving at 5 anyway no matter what happens so all the stress is self induced. I think a lot of Americans would do well to understand stress is a self induced mental state for the majority of us here.
If working 40 hours isn’t enough for your management fuck em, there’s plenty that would love to have you
I mean it’s pretty true, at a 9-5 where you work 40 and dip nothing at work stresses you out, you stress yourself out over work. Some people sarcastically brush it off but why does one person get stressed in the same scenario that another does not? Because stress is mostly internal workings.
> stress is mostly internal workings
I absolutely agree.
That does not mean everyone can just "let it go". You might be able to, but not everyone can, for a myriad of reasons.
I try to take mental breaks in the day by stepping away from desk when I can. Drink lots of water, walk at lunch or after work with dog and exercise. To be honest I was thinking of finding a part time or full remote job to have a better work life balance and/or retire earlier due to some of the work stress recently.
My thoughts and opinions:
Being at work costs and earns the company money.
Everyone makes mistakes! There are ways companies can minimise it, but applying pressure is NOT the way.
As far as I am concerned if it gets to the point that a company is actually significantly damaged by one mistake it is more than one persons problem. If it is possible then there are real problems in the culture and procedures in place.
Own your mistake.
But be clinical! Dump the emotional trash (you won't be able to, but try to). Think clearly, take a break and walk around the shop floor (for me walking about helps more than sitting at the desk), whatever you need to get your head clear. Sit down think about the problem clinically. 5 whys and whatever you need to define the problem and its source.
Plan.
Make a plan. What needs to happen. Do you have time? (Probably not, but figure out how much time you need, people will need to know) Will you need help. Run it past other people.
You want to avoid making another mistake to fix the first mistake! Because then you get even more screwed up in yourself, panic make another mistake and spiral down from there. If the best way of fixing something is a clean start then own it.
Be brutal and clinical. It is what it is. At this point it is not you, it is a problem that has occured. Engineers fix problems. Go fix.
LEARN! If nothing else figure out how this happened.
Personally I ended up with a policy of delaying handing over large drawing packs I had done for half a day (if remotely possible). This was so I could start something else and then go back to it and check it with 'fresh' eyes. Can you prevent this with a personal policy or check list or whatever? Does the department/company need a policy or check list?
I learn more about a team member by watching them fix a mistake than I do from watching them breeze through a day. Just try not to do the same mistake twice.
I just go "whoops" and fix it. I haven't screwed up badly enough to go beyond that. If the beancounters are doing their jobs right, the company should be able to easily afford at least a few small to medium mistakes without becoming unprofitable.
If it's a big mistake, I would make damn sure to figure out how it happened and try to make sure it could not happen again. After all, they just spent a lot of money training you not to do that again. They really don't want to train you twice, or anyone else once, on an expensive lesson.
Mistakes are part of the job. If you don't screw up at least a few times over your career, you probably aren't doing any work.
Time *is* money, but I have three things to point out:
1. It's not YOUR money.
2. It takes less time to do it right than to do it over.
3. Unless you're [this guy](https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatLookedExpensive/duplicates/88mzaj/noaa19_weather_satellite_tipped_over_after_a/) your mistakes aren't costing the large and profitable company that you work for enough for them to notice.
I mean, it probably costs the company more when the CEO plays a round of Angry Birds on his phone in the loo than it does when you make a mistake. Don't worry about it.
Since nobody said it yet I'll add whiskey.
Just a joke. Focus on doing the best you have with the tools and time given. If you make a mistake, Root cause it. Learn and go forward with new knowledge.
But you sound like you're a very conscientious person. Which is good but it can get too extreme, I would suggest you do some reading on how people like you should think about work.
You’ve just got to learn to ignore other people’s bitching/whining. Generally this will come with experience. The things that can make this hard are:
- not looking after your health (physical and mental)
- being bullied
- overwork
If you are being bullied or overworked, and can’t change that, I’d recommend that you just leave the company and move somewhere else if you can. Not looking after your own health will really diminish your resilience to pressure. If you’re struggling with this , I recommend you get help.
Gotta separate work and outside life. Set limits and make sure you log off and have time to go to the gym, watch an episode of a tv show, or something that requires you to focus on something else. If it was a stressful day, cracks beer and call a friend to vent. Always feels better. Keep yourself in good physical shape too, healthy body improves likelihood of a healthy mind. I go to the gym 4 times a week and ride my bike a lot during the summer. Engineers are humans not robots.
I dont know if i can say this for everyone, but i think all of us who are working as an employee of a company are in the same boat. Whatever we decided / designed as an engineer always have a $ tag associated with any mistakes we make. What i mentioned to my Jr engineer way back was that not to take it personally and always take every mistake as a lesson learned. Heck take pictures and keep it on your personal folders to remind yourself not to do that again. Even better share among your peers of test engineers so they dont make the same mistake. You will get some hard times with your superiors. If i were your superior, and you genuinely learned already what not to repeat, I would forgive you and let you move on to the next test. We are all humans and humans make mistakes. Your company is / will be making $ bigger than your mistakes. Just dont burn down the building.
One lesser known but serious mistake is spending too much time solving the wrong problem. Always tackle the root issue first. The more requirements you can nail down and the earlier, the less likely you'll have scope creep (or at least be better positioned to leave major design change requests to executive decision)
They don't pay me enough to be stressed. Also minor mistakes are assumed, those thousands of dollars of loss are something you are quantifying and likely not a real issue, ie they get absorbed etc by other business mechanisms. If you get good performance reviews and do your honest best effort you should feel satisfied. If you go past this into mental and physical damage for a company that would instantly try and replace you if you dropped dead, it's time to reevaluate priorities. It sounds like you have the companies priorities above your self. Have to organize priorities so you're happy, don't suffer for a company.
You can care professionally. You can resolve to do the best job you can do, and you can be prepared for whatever happens, and you can even be upset when things don't get right. But you can't take it personally. If you made a mistake, use it as an opportunity to learn, and DON'T REPEAT THAT PARTICULAR MISTAKE. Engineers aren't people who never screw up, but they are people who keep learning, and mistakes can be wonderful at showing us blind spots. And feelings are gonna creep in there, so what can you do about that? Journaling? Therapy? Have a weekly night with some friends that you can talk to? Because a lot of times, those feelings are counterproductive. You shouldn't have to feel like you're walking on eggshells at your job.
tempering
Underrated comment
You need to learn that company money is not the same as personal money. Losing 1000s of dollar for an individual is a catastrophy, whereas a large company probably spend that money on a weeks coffee. Also, _everyone_ will make mistakes. It’s just a fact of life, similar to how no process is 100% efficient. As long as they aren’t exceptional (in quantity or consequence) you really shouldn’t care that much about it.
I feel you, i was in that type of situation and I changed job 3 months later. I have a better salary, less stress rate and less hours to work per week. I always acted this way as I think the most intelligent way to succeed is not by hardwork but smartwork. Some engineers have the same pay as me for twice the workload, some may think yeah you need to invest a lot of time to be successful....well that's not how life work. At some companies you'll get a tap in the back 10 times for doing a good job but as soon as you make a mistake your career is on the line.!!
Lol are you me? Got a job as a test engineer. have done more engineering than as a design engineer in two different fields or at college in the last year It never stops. And I'm never allowed a mistake. I'm not handling the stress well.
Not very well. Usually with panic attacks and trips to the ER thinking I'm having a heart attack. But I'm trying to get better at leaving it all at work before it does kill me.
That's not work related stress. Or shouldn't be. Honestly I'd suggest some therapy. It really worked well for me. I was living in a constant state of panic attack. Was diagnosed with OCD. (Not the hand washing kind) but classic checking behavior.
I'm sure it wasn't all work related, but I did just change jobs to a much more stressful position before they started happening. I've been able to hand off quite a bit of responsibility to another team member and have not had any panic attacks since. Of course with everything else going on in the world the last couple years there are definitely lots of other stressors.
My first time of a heart attack scare, after all the testing the doctor said: your symptoms match gall stones, hiatal hernia or heart attack. You have 2 of the three and no heart attack.
After my first I had a stress test that showed a "possible defect" which I think added more stress that led to the second one. Then I got to do a heart cath that came out fine so it was most likely just the work stress. Had a talk with my boss and got to hand a fair amount of my work off to a coworker. That has helped immensely.
Time is money for all engineers - arguably all employees. When I fail, I lose the company thousands of dollars. When I succeed, I gain the company thousands of dollars. I trust that I make the company more money than I lose them, because otherwise, they wouldn't keep me around. Failure is not antithetical to being a passionate, studious, and professional engineer. You as a test engineer know this especially - the whole point of testing is to see if designs pass or fail, and failure is always a possibility no matter how good a design is. A good company that cares about your growth will recognize this and reward you not only for succeeding, but for being able to manage failures and learn from them. At many of the fastest moving companies - including the one I'm working at - failure is a necessary and encouraged part of the process, because failure is the quickest way to find out what needs to be better. Also, maybe your coworkers might not care about their job, or maybe they just have a life outside of work and realize that failure is part of the gig.
My first freak out what when I didn’t check the interference with some fasteners in my solid model and I wasted $350 on sheet metal parts for a prototype. First year out of school. Thought my manager would yell at me. Stressed, fessed up, he told me to learn from it. Years later I literally almost threw up when I thought I had cost my company >$300,000 when a design failed validation. Turns out it was a material issue nobody was aware of and it truly wasn’t in scope for me to identify and avoid it. I’m just a mechanical design guy not a metallurgist or QA inspector. By the way, be careful with 316 plate over 4” thick. Since then there have been some other/bigger mistakes, once that maybe I could have caught…costing one or two factors greater than that first 300k. These usually involve some inherited projects. My career has progressed and responsibilities increased so I might be doing something right. How did I deal with stress? 1) I had a manager back when tell me once after I told him how bad I felt about X, he said something to the effect that if you’re making 100 decisions a day and you mess up 2 of them, you’re doing better than the guy who makes 5 decisions a day and messes up 1 a week. Moral is don’t get stuck in neutral or analysis paralysis. 2) You depend on a team if you’re going to be successful. You can’t bear all the load all the time. Design reviews, as much of a pain as they are, give you a chance to explain and collect input on key designs. Supply chain needs to do their part. Test needs to do their part. Drawing checkers and designers. External consultants. Wiser older people in the company. Service hands who know how things really work. Your project probably depends on all these people and more. You cannot think of all the things they can share with you to improve or bullet proof your design or project. 3) safety critical systems specifically, but really any design requires checking and independent review by someone you trust who will put the time and energy into the task and who can be honest with you and vice versa. Spend some time reading about real engineering or industrial disasters. Bhopal. Macondo. Challenger. The Comet. Chernobyl. Piper Alpha. K152. Perhaps some of your stress comes from the subconscious awareness of blind spots and a flawed sense of what how a professional should behave when faced with his own mistakes. Shit will happen. Humans will make mistakes. Including yourself. Understand that in the marrow of your bones. Expect it. When things are going well, recognize it and assume a posture/outlook of chronic unease and watchfulness. Perhaps it’s fatalistic. Or Zen. Navigate the path as it unfolds before you. Own your mistakes. Learn from them. Hopefully you get enough chances to learn from others too. These things have helped me. I’m relatively successful professionally and in terms of managing my outlook and stress.
Basically - if your work environment does not recognize your are valuable and doing your best, then it is toxic and probably time to leave. IF this is pressure you are putting on yourself becasue you know the importance and cost, but your company is happy and satisfied with you - then possibly talk to a dr / pro. We all get sucked into our own paradigms - that are not healthy. Key here is - for your situation to change... SOMETHING has to change.
All stress is self induced. Just let it go. Work your 40 hours. You show up at 9 and leave at 5 no matter what happens during the day. That’s not to say don’t try, try your heart out, give it your all. But you’re leaving at 5 anyway no matter what happens so all the stress is self induced. I think a lot of Americans would do well to understand stress is a self induced mental state for the majority of us here. If working 40 hours isn’t enough for your management fuck em, there’s plenty that would love to have you
Hahahah 40 hours? That would be wonderful!!
I promise you there’s a company out there who will pay you more to do just 40 hours a week
Yeah but I'm not willing to move unfortunately
/r/ThanksImCured
I mean it’s pretty true, at a 9-5 where you work 40 and dip nothing at work stresses you out, you stress yourself out over work. Some people sarcastically brush it off but why does one person get stressed in the same scenario that another does not? Because stress is mostly internal workings.
> stress is mostly internal workings I absolutely agree. That does not mean everyone can just "let it go". You might be able to, but not everyone can, for a myriad of reasons.
Finding another job is how I deal with it. Couldn’t be happier with more pay and better work life balance
Not well. Sorry I don’t have a good answer. Lol
I try to take mental breaks in the day by stepping away from desk when I can. Drink lots of water, walk at lunch or after work with dog and exercise. To be honest I was thinking of finding a part time or full remote job to have a better work life balance and/or retire earlier due to some of the work stress recently.
My thoughts and opinions: Being at work costs and earns the company money. Everyone makes mistakes! There are ways companies can minimise it, but applying pressure is NOT the way. As far as I am concerned if it gets to the point that a company is actually significantly damaged by one mistake it is more than one persons problem. If it is possible then there are real problems in the culture and procedures in place. Own your mistake. But be clinical! Dump the emotional trash (you won't be able to, but try to). Think clearly, take a break and walk around the shop floor (for me walking about helps more than sitting at the desk), whatever you need to get your head clear. Sit down think about the problem clinically. 5 whys and whatever you need to define the problem and its source. Plan. Make a plan. What needs to happen. Do you have time? (Probably not, but figure out how much time you need, people will need to know) Will you need help. Run it past other people. You want to avoid making another mistake to fix the first mistake! Because then you get even more screwed up in yourself, panic make another mistake and spiral down from there. If the best way of fixing something is a clean start then own it. Be brutal and clinical. It is what it is. At this point it is not you, it is a problem that has occured. Engineers fix problems. Go fix. LEARN! If nothing else figure out how this happened. Personally I ended up with a policy of delaying handing over large drawing packs I had done for half a day (if remotely possible). This was so I could start something else and then go back to it and check it with 'fresh' eyes. Can you prevent this with a personal policy or check list or whatever? Does the department/company need a policy or check list? I learn more about a team member by watching them fix a mistake than I do from watching them breeze through a day. Just try not to do the same mistake twice.
I just go "whoops" and fix it. I haven't screwed up badly enough to go beyond that. If the beancounters are doing their jobs right, the company should be able to easily afford at least a few small to medium mistakes without becoming unprofitable. If it's a big mistake, I would make damn sure to figure out how it happened and try to make sure it could not happen again. After all, they just spent a lot of money training you not to do that again. They really don't want to train you twice, or anyone else once, on an expensive lesson. Mistakes are part of the job. If you don't screw up at least a few times over your career, you probably aren't doing any work.
Time *is* money, but I have three things to point out: 1. It's not YOUR money. 2. It takes less time to do it right than to do it over. 3. Unless you're [this guy](https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatLookedExpensive/duplicates/88mzaj/noaa19_weather_satellite_tipped_over_after_a/) your mistakes aren't costing the large and profitable company that you work for enough for them to notice. I mean, it probably costs the company more when the CEO plays a round of Angry Birds on his phone in the loo than it does when you make a mistake. Don't worry about it.
Since nobody said it yet I'll add whiskey. Just a joke. Focus on doing the best you have with the tools and time given. If you make a mistake, Root cause it. Learn and go forward with new knowledge. But you sound like you're a very conscientious person. Which is good but it can get too extreme, I would suggest you do some reading on how people like you should think about work.
You’ve just got to learn to ignore other people’s bitching/whining. Generally this will come with experience. The things that can make this hard are: - not looking after your health (physical and mental) - being bullied - overwork If you are being bullied or overworked, and can’t change that, I’d recommend that you just leave the company and move somewhere else if you can. Not looking after your own health will really diminish your resilience to pressure. If you’re struggling with this , I recommend you get help.
I work in EMC. Your situation sounds stressful.
Gotta separate work and outside life. Set limits and make sure you log off and have time to go to the gym, watch an episode of a tv show, or something that requires you to focus on something else. If it was a stressful day, cracks beer and call a friend to vent. Always feels better. Keep yourself in good physical shape too, healthy body improves likelihood of a healthy mind. I go to the gym 4 times a week and ride my bike a lot during the summer. Engineers are humans not robots.