In my engineering work place, there have been a few initiatives to better
define, even quantify, engineering work. But all have come to naught. It
seems that the work content changes more rapidly than any grading system
can react. "Evaluation" remains subjective, no grade assigned. But...
The point of another contributor about salary is always a major area of
contention. There's nothing subjective about the number of dollars on a
check. And one would like to think there's some relationship between
one's job performance and the pay for it. The solution here is a relative
ranking (subjective) of individuals within an engineering specialty. That
provides at least a starting point for debate over what my salary should
be and what kind of pay raise it would take to get there.
Another major issue is career development. An evaluation system
instituted a few years ago was intended to cause dialog between an
individual and a manager about what the current position really requires
and how well one is meeting those requirements. This is also very
subjective, though far more definite than the previous method, and one can
find a few numerical measurements. Again, being subjective, personalities
get involved (yes engineers do have them), and there are varying levels of
application. The nature of the work precludes building a checklist of
things to do to build a career.
It's generally agreed by all concerned that a strictly quantitative system
would be unrepresentative--focusing on a single facet of engineering
activity to the detriment of others (ref-Dilbert's example of rewarding
programmers for number of lines of code written or number of program bugs
fixed).
Karl Koenig
--"Karl V. Koenig" <Karl.V.Koenig@boeing.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>