Well put, Mr Wright.
-----Original Message-----
From: PipingDesign@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:PipingDesign@yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of Christopher Wright
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 5:12 PM
To: PipingDesign@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [PipingDesign] BraNch CalCulaTion last word (really)
I figured I'd wait to see if anyone actually provided "every thing u know about branch calculation." Since no one has, I presume the post really was pointless.
Just so everyone knows, I'm going to start rejecting questions like that when they get to me for moderating, but I am going to enclose a note explaining why **if** I think the explanation will do some good, perhaps such things as using 'u' for the second person pronoun and mixing lower and upper case like script weenies and spammers. I may even get a little blunt about it, but that's life.
Which brings up my third point. Engineering is not all sweetness and light. Engineers deal with life as it is, not the way it appears on a computer monitor, and some days you'll be the windshield and some days you'll be the bug. It took me a while to realize that when I was a newbie and maybe a little lecture for the benefit of current newbies might help.
If you stay in this business long enough you'll run into plenty of customers, colleagues, managers, competitors and possibly lawyers who will subject you to some pretty abusive situations. You'll be fired, outsourced, blamed, ignored, disagreed with, misunderstood and taken advantage of, and you better learn to deal with it. If you don't learn from it and use the experience for the next job, you'll be no use to yourself or anyone else. If you respond to criticism by running off to your room and weeping bitterly, you learn nothing except how to blame others instead of stand on your own two feet.
Mostly criticism won't be personal, just business, and in some cases you'll have it coming. Some of the real sweethearts you run into will turn out to be complete åss-holes and some of the åss-holes you run into will be pretty nice people. To make it worse, you're going to have to admit to some really stupid blunders, and let unjustified criticism roll off your back, because you won't always be right and you won't always be able to do anything about it if you are. And sometimes criticism **will** be personal and mean. Just like the rest of life.
I've been fired, more or less, from 3 direct jobs, laid off from a couple of others, and roundly beaten about the head and shoulders on many occasions. I'm inclined to dwell on things for a while afterwards, which used to seem like a personal problem, but there's value in studying disasters. You'll find you can learn from sorting out hurt feelings, poor communications, unmet expectations, personal chemistry, ignorance and sh¡t-headedness and usually find something instructive. You'll always learn something about the people around you and you should learn something about yourself. Just possibly you'll gain some experience to fall back on next time it happens. If you're in luck you'll learn something about self-reliance, which is the single indispensable quality of a professional, and the reason I nag constantly about doing your own homework.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen.
.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania1864)
Yahoo! Groups Links Received on Wed Aug 31 08:19:00 2005
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