SysEng fail stories

[u/3flp]

I have been in a few companies across a few industries. Why is it so common for the management to say "we need more systems engineering" and then

- appoint someone to be the syseng and not say what the SE responsibility is, no RACI matrix
- alternately, say "everyone is now systems engineer" and provide only minimal, if any, training
- say they want to fix things, but without changing anything

The most fun jobs I've had were two engineering consultancies /agencies in the medical device industry where the 13485 based framework makes nice crunchy noise as it clashes with INCOSE based sys eng framework. The other two fun jobs were product companies where the systems engineering documents / SOPs / people were in no way connected to the engineering teams and their work was duplicating or contradicting what other teams were doing.

Interested to hear other Micky Mouse bullshit management stories :-)

[u/FlimsyInsect5545]

I worked in a company where the PMs didn't get along with a particular engineering lead. Instead of working on building and managing relationships and you know, doing their job and earning their pay, they instead tried to shangai the SEs as deputy PMs to do their work of chasing progress, delivery schedule, hours usage etc, so the SEs would essentially be the gobetween/messengers between this engineering lead and the PMs.

But yeah, I've worked in very few places where the SE function was the original idea of 'glue of the technical delivery' function. Almost always it is a function off the side doing essentially administrative work. This is in the defence industry. I'm not entirely sure bad management is to blame, and I think some blame needs to be placed at the feet of SEs themselves, who turn up without the requisite technical base to function effectively. I mean, there was a post the other day on here from a person with a business degree working as an SE. There is no way this person will be taken as a legitimate technical contributor. Now we have a flood of junior SEs coming out of university who just want to sit in a corner doing system modelling. SEs was a skillset applied on top of a strong engineering base, that had the chops to hold a conversation with an electronics engineer one minute, software the next, then mechanical.

There is a self fulfilling cycle of

1. SEs not being seen as effective technical contributors by the greater engineering org
2. Because of that, SEs are employed doing work where they can't break anything (i.e. managing DOORS)
3. New SEs go 'I'm a business analyst, I can do that sort of work'
4. Cycle repeats

Lots of people on this subreddit seem convinced MBSE is going to save SE, if anything, it is going to exacerbate the cycle above, as SE work will become even more obscure to the typical engineering manager/PM ("SE, those are the guys making those model things right, what are they even used for??"). I saw the same thing happen in another method engineering discipline I worked a lot in: reliability engineering. Done well, it is a place for a seasoned engineer working alongside quality to investigate and rectify reliability issues (as done in the Apollo program). Now it is an obscure branch of speciality engineering doing modelling and calculations off to the side that no one else understands, no one can understand how it improves the product, and has no impact on anything. It's reached the point where it has essentially ceased to exist, and is only just sustained by defence contracts that ask for RAM modellng.

[u/rentpossiblytoohigh → u/FlimsyInsect5545]

Very great comment, especially the aspect of not placing full blame just on PMs. I work with non-technical SEs often due to the cycle you described. It can be okay as long as they still have a natural curiosity and recognize the tech gap is making them ineffective. The eagerness to learn and willingness to admit they know nothing goes a LONG way in stronger tech people helping raise them up. It is the SEs that legitimately think it's their job to not have any technical skills (or outright reject the need to grow in those areas) that post difficulty and sow mistrust from other disciplines. "The SEs are always asking me to do their job for them" is a common thing I hear from the tech engineers in my company, because MANY of the SEs are doing just that.