Work is a very vague term. Almost everybody in the world works, but that definition is so broad that it can cover everything from the cushiest corporate position all the way down to retail and manual laborers who spend 60+ hours a week sweating for every penny. As harsh as this can sound, I have always found the most physically demanding jobs to be the most rewarding and satisfying, such as mechanic or landscaping work.
One of my most stout beliefs is about how businesses are structured and how employees should be trained and hired. Regardless of the industry, anyone in a management position should have spent a significant amount of time in a position that they are going to manage. This accomplishes a few key goals that help keep a company and its employees stable and happy.
First, the manager has a firm grasp on exactly how much he can reasonably ask of his employees, and when to blow the whistle if quality or production start to fall. Second, this will typically eliminate or at least reduce tensions that can arise between laborers and their managers, which are often based upon not fully understanding each other’s responsibilities.
As many of you have seen, Volkswagen is in the eye of legal hurricane of their own doing. If you aren’t familiar with the story, choose your favorite search engine and look up Dieselgate for the juicy details. You won’t find anything this scandalous in US Weekly.
To summarize, Volkswagen lied about the efficiency/cleanliness of the new Diesel engine they offer in their small cars (Jetta/Golf etc.) in an attempt to keep them cheap, because if they were honest, they would have been required to design, engineer and implement an additional, expensive, exhaust filtration system.
As more and more facts about the case were unveiled, it was discovered that in the development stages, the powertrain engineering team had a meeting with the upper management and basically explained that they could have either the requested fuel efficiency or the requested horsepower/torque figures, but both were proving to be out of reach. Management’s reaction was to tell them is was most certainly within reach, and if they couldn’t reach it, it would be their jobs.
Within this there is an entirely different topic to discuss, the ethics every engineer has to choose to abide by every single day, and I have to say these engineers should have just moved on and freshened up the resumes, but that’s another discussion for another day.
Ultimately, the engineers found themselves between a rock and a hard place, and succumbed to the pressure. Admittedly, they used some pretty ingenious techniques to fool the system, but were ultimately caught, and are, as I mentioned, ensnared in a massive lawsuit.
The point I’m trying to make is that so often people work so hard to skip over all the manual labor and low level jobs and get a degree that allows them to laterally move into a high-level position. While I’m not saying every engineer should have spent 20 years as a technician before going to get their degree, I think that if you’re considering someday looking into warehouse management as a career, spend a summer or two being managed in a warehouse.
