Every time someone outside of the automotive industry asks me what do I work with, I find myself in a quite funny situation. Most of the people know what SW development is, they know that the people that create the apps on their phones are the SW developers. Everyone has seen a PCB probably, so they would understand what HW development is about. Mechanical guys also have an easy way to explain their daily work, everyone knows what a cogwheel is. But what about systems engineering?
Not so long ago my organist friend of 10 years asked me what do I do for a living actually? Other than I work on XX product I couldn’t really translate my work into everyday language. Because how would telling that “I negotiate and break down the customer specification, design the functional behaviour and carry out safety work needed for ISO26262 compliance” sound to my musician friend? Encrypted probably. And even if I say “systems engineering” that also doesn’t help a lot, since it could mean anything.
At the start of my career even as an engineer from a prestigious university it took more than a year to wrap my head around requirement management, traceability, coverage and other metrics, and most importantly the significance of requirements. If I say “I write concise paragraphs about how the product shall be” most of the people would think about a law related position.
So recently I came up with this example:
Imagine that a customer wants to build a billiard table, from a carpenter who doesn’t know what billiard is. So the customer tells the carpenter that he wants a table covered in green fleece with 6 holes. Then the carpenter delivers a table to the customer that is fully wrapped in green fleece and has 6 holes equally spaced in the middle. Now, I’m working for the carpenter and my job is to ensure that this doesn’t happen and even to make sure that the table will not collapse or harm anyone.
This still doesn’t describe all the aspects of this “technical janitor” kind of role, where you get involved in a huge variety of tasks sometimes feeling like an octopus with each leg in a different area, but maybe gives a hint about the importance of systems engineering.
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