Engineering Jobs

For you engineers out there -

I can tell you your worst nightmare: you go to bed one night as a competent secure in your technical competence, and you wake up the next morning as a technological dinosaur. All your strong technologies are now quaint footnotes in the history books and you’re faced with re-learning a whole new repertoire of technologies. You open up the morning paper and you see a want ad like this:

Job Description:

As a member of a project team responsible for designing, coding, unit/integration testing web services applications using Java, XML, or SQL. Understanding of system development lifecycle processes and rapid development cycles with the ability to independently code, test and implement solutions based on user requirements and as directed by project leadership. Ability to plan, manage and lead UML design sessions. Exceptional user facing skills and client relationship skills.

Required Experience/Technologies:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or other physical science
• 7+ years of professional Java development experience with at least 3 years J2EE
• J2EE, XML, SQL, hands-on database development (JDBC)

• Jakarta Struts (Front Controller with JSP’s) or EJB2.0

• At least two of the following technologies: SOAP, SAX/DOM, JMS,
• XML Schema or DTD, Stateless Session Beans
• 5 years UML design modeling experience
• mandatory, RUP, UML
• WebSphere certification preferred

How in the world did this happen - how did you fall so far behind do quickly? Well, don’t feel too bad, the technology changes so quickly that you’re running the Red Queen’s race: you have to run as hard as you can to stay in the same place, and to make any progress you have to run twice as fast. On the average, major technologies change every eighteen months, and only a few of the new ones have any staying power. If it’s any comfort, I’ve been away from active engineering for sixteen months, and it’s difficult even to read the technical literature any more, let alone be productive.

So, what can you do about this? I offer three recommendations, all of them hard to implement:

1. Stay Informed

   Don’t let yourself fall behind! Spend at least 4 hours per week keeping yourself up to date by reading technical journals or survey books (the O’Reilly series are excellent) so that you’re at least aware of emerging technologies. Make learning part of your job!

2. Learn to spot winners and losers

   You can’t learn every new technologies, so you have to be selective and choose the ones that seem to have some staying power (three or more years) and those that are fads of the moment.

3. Learn to learn fast

   You have to become very good at picking up new technologies on the fly, with minimal training. Luckily, if you’ve been in the business for long this won’t be very hard, because most new technologies are simply repackaging of old concepts that you’re already familiar with.

As I said, none of these is easy, but if you’re to have a multi-decade career in engineering you’re going to have to learn to deal with constant and accellerating technology change. Sorry, but that’s just the way it will be.

About the Author
Bruce Taylor is the Owner and Principle of Unison Coaching, and provides corporate and executive coaching to a wide variety of businesses including engineering, human resource, consulting, and recruiting firms. Mr Taylor has extensive background in Psychology, Human Resources, and Software Engineering. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from Duke University, a Masters in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts, and a Certificate in Job Stress and Healthy Workplace Design from the University of Massachusetts. He can be reached at http://www.unisoncoaching.com or bruce_taylor@unisoncoaching.com.

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Bangna-Bangphli-Bangpakong Expressway, Thailand (BBBE) dubbed as the world’s longest elevated expressway bridge (about 55-kilometre) and also the widest (27.2 meters) carrying 6 lanes traffic 3 in each direction, was built along the median of highway 34 from Bangna to Chonburi. This expressway is part of the networks of expressway planned by the Expressway and Rapid Transit Authority of Thailand (ETA) to ease the flow of traffic in and around the metropolitan Bangkok. Specifically, this superhighway is meant to serve the Eastern Seaboard Area and the soon to be completed Bangkok Second International Airport.

Apart from this 55 kilometers main expressway, there is also an additional of 26 ramps or about 40 kilometers in length, two elevated mainline toll plazas with surveillance buildings, 11 platforms for toll surveillance, two police stations, and associated at-grade works. The total bridge deck area is 1,900,000 m2. All these were completed at a record time of only fifty-three months overall construction period by employing a state-ofthe- art design and construction technique known as the “Precast Segmental Technology of Bridge Construction”.

This turnkey project was undertaken by a joint venture company called JV-BBCD composed of Germany’s Bilfinger + Berger and Thailand’s Ch. Karnchang Public Company as the lead partners. These two companies havefor years been a part of Bangkok’s implementation of networks of elevated expressways, now to a record total length of expressways built in and around the city of 132 km or 3,598,000 square meters of deck area or 5,854 spans total including this project.

Alignment and Foundation Design was done by the Asian Engineering Consultants (AEC) and the Superstructure and Column Design was done by the inventor of the Segmental Technology of Bridge Construction, Jean Muller International (JMI). The design of selected parts was reviewed by ACECOMS, AIT.

Buddhi S. Sharma is CEO of CivilPark International (http://www.civilpark.com) and chief structural designer and top site supervisor on behalf of design consultants for more than 20 Buildings, Bridges and other structures projects. Independent advisor on planning, structural design, construction and seismic aspects. Main and co-speaker in over 50 trainings, workshops and seminars organized in several countries total over 300 hours of presentation.
More information and many resources on http://www.civilpark.com

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A brief discourse on a new workflow software paradigm.

I am often asked “why should I use workflow software?” To which I often retort “why use software in the first place?” We use computer systems to make life easier for ourselves, but at a more basic level we use them to replace ourselves. Computers have moved away from being calculators into the realm of worker surrogates. In short as systems become more and more complex and are required to replace more and more human tasks they need to behave more and more like humans. To extrapolate further their brains need to work like our brains, hence neural workflow.

Traditional systems are process oriented. They behave like circuits. They have AND Gates, OR Gates decision points etc. A workflow instance is started and a process is followed until that instance comes to some sort of resolution. This is not how people work and ultimately not how highly optimised organisations should work. When we have an idea to do something we usually start with a strategy to come to a resolution. In following the strategy we are often required to complete several unexpected sub-strategies to come to the resolution. We also may need to re-evaluate our strategy entirely and adapt the strategy for the next time we need to employ it.

Take the example of a help desk request. A request comes in and we think we have sent it to the right place for a resolution. If we have not we need to re-evaluate the process come up with some new strategies then trial those strategies over time to find the ones that best solve the different requests we may get. These new strategies may also need to be approved by others within an organisation and thus we may want to create a whole range of different types of activities resulting from this one initial support request.

Traditional workflow systems would have considerable trouble with these types of problems.

Enter Neural Workflow….

Unlike the source and sink model of traditional workflow systems a neural workflow system is set up in a neural network like our brains. Events can trigger signals from all over our brain these events then give rise to strategies for resolutions, over time our brain modifies itself to adopt the strategies it has found to most successfully resolve situations. Employing a neural workflow system could allow an organisation to function like one large brain with the benefits there of.

Neural Workflow requires several key points of functionality. First the system needs to easily adapt over time. Second the system needs to have the ability to score success and failure. Third the system needs to be able to trigger any activity based on the results of any previous activity. Finally the system needs to provide high visibility so tracking of all the different tasks and flows is easily understood.

Show me the Money….

A neural workflow system is superior to a traditional workflow system in that it provides a method of perpetual efficiency improvements or to put it another way it provides a cost saving continuum.

For more information please check out
http://webandflo.com/

Craig Cameron is employed as the Chief Technical Officer at Web and Flo Pty. Ltd. Craig has been developing applications in the workflow software industry for over 6 years. Copyright Web and Flo Pty Ltd 2005

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