Work Stuff

My week of training is over, and unfortunately I got a lot to do this week so it's back to overtime schedule. No more getting home at 4 and playing Starcraft for hours.

Tomorrow is a big "design review" for the project I'm working on. I remember when we had a design review for ECE Senior Design, where we had to meet with the head professor and our TA for like 15 minutes to explain what we were doing. It was kind of a big thing at the time, but wasn't that bad, especially cause our TA was somewhat of a putz and didn't really seem to care if we were making progress and stuff.

Well, this time the design review is 6 hours long and there will probably be at least 20 people participating or so. Including the big cheeses, the 3-star "Top Secret" guys who call the shots. And I think the program director will care if we are making progress or not.

When people ask me where I work and what I do, I'm not sure what to say. Most people haven't heard of Northrop Grumman unless they are interested in military technology or they watch CNBC a lot. And the title "Systems Engineer" is kind of vague too.

Well, in case anyone who reads my blog is interested, I will shed a little light on my company and what I do. If you aren't interested, skip this entry.

First of all, the government does not design and build a lot of its own defense equipment. When you watch the news, almost all of the major integrated weapons systems and technology are actually built by the private sector.

This is where defense contractors come into play. Say the government wants a new fleet of short range fighter jets to stock its aircraft carriers. They announce a request for these jets, listing the specifications that the finished product must meet - things like top speed, fuel capacity, or minimum landing/takeoff distance.

Given these requirements, the defense contractors research the project and come up with competing proposals, detailing things like the costs and time needed to complete. The government looks at proposals from the various contractors, and awards the contract to the one with the best proposal.

The major companies we're talking about here, other than NG, are players like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, or General Dynamics. To give you an example of how the industry works, Raytheon owns the contract for the Patriot Missile System (I think Lockheed is a subcontractor that makes the actual missile), which a lot of people who remember the first Gulf War know about. Every time the government needs more Patriot Missile Systems, it goes to Raytheon and asks them to build more at a set price. In some cases, the military will take over a contract, in which case it takes all the design material and program information so it can manage and manufacture the product itself.

Northrop Grumman is composed of several individual sectors, such as Integrated Systems (builds fighter planes, bombers, etc), Information Technology (handles websites, network infrastructure for the White House and other gov't organizations), and the sector I work for, Electronic Systems.

So, at Rolling Meadows and our headquarters in Baltimore, we don't actually build the B-2 Bomber or aircraft carriers that Northrop is known for. But, we do work on some of the most critical systems that the military needs in the modern age.

For example, a big thing right now is Infra-red Countermeasures (IRCM). You may have heard in the news about the growing threat of heat-seeking Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs) being used by terrorists and enemies to shoot down our aircraft, aimed at military jets and now at commercial airliners as well. Traditionally, the method of defeating these missiles is to physically launch decoy flares from your plane, hoping that the heat from those flares will attract the missile away from yourself. Unfortunately, the newer generation of heat-seeking SAMs are smart enough to ignore the flares and hit the target anyways. The idea of IRCM is to use IR technology to generate a heat image projected away from the jet, which works better to confuse and defeat the so-called "smart missiles". Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems is currently the only provider of an effective and working design of IRCM, which has been used in recent military campaigns and is being used on aircraft in Iraq right now.

As for me, I'm just a peon among over 100,000 employees spread across the country. Officially, I'm an entry-level engineer that works mostly in EE applications. I have 2-star (Secret) clearance but currently I'm not doing any classified work.

Typical day? There isn't a good answer I can give to that question. Basically, I work on projects with other engineers. The fundamental definition of an engineer is someone who is given a set of requirements and "engineers" solutions to meet them. Throughout the course of the large-scale projects we work on at this company, there are literally hundreds or thousands of requirements to meet. This translate to a pretty wide range of jobs and things that need to be done.

Most of the time, I'm at my desk working on my computer. I use the common programs like Microsoft Excel and Word a lot, but also drawing programs like Visio, a requirements managment tool called SLATE, and my training last week was for LabWindows, which uses a lot of C language programming.

I've spent some time in the lab too, which was actually pretty similar to lab in college. Running tests, taking measurements, plotting stuff on oscilloscopes, talking about sports, and then doing writeups afterwards. Typically, I like being in lab more than being at my desk because I get to work with some pretty cool and advanced stuff.

When I'm not at my desk or in lab, it usually means I'm at a meeting. I have come to hate meetings, but a lot of times they are necessary in order to get things accomplished. The thing that sucks is that I usually don't really have to be present, cause they don't need any real input from me, but I still gotta be there in person. Then they always seem to drag on for way longer than planned. Plan on burning at least 2 hours per meeting is what I've learned.

The worst meetings are the "first thing in the morning" conference calls with the east coast, cause those foos are an hour ahead and that means I gotta wake up and come in an hour early. Of course, half the time I get there on time, and the meeting doesn't start until like 40 minutes later when everyone else arrives. The thing to remember is, there's a difference between "7 o'clock" and "7 o'clock sharp".

So, do I like my job? I don't know how to answer that one either. I guess I could say that it's pretty close to what I expected, which is good. I don't jump out of bed every morning and race to work out of sheer excitement, but I don't ever dread going to the job either.

There are a lot of positive things I could say about this job. Of course the salary and benefits are nice, for someone coming straight out of school. At least it's pretty standard for engineering positions.

Another big thing is that most of the people I work with are pretty nice. Engineers tend to be pretty down to earth, and while they all like to complain about being underappreciated, I think deep down they are happy with what they're doing. Compared to the business world, say a consulting or sales position, this environment is much less cutthroat in a corporate sense.

In a way, it's good to be challenged by stress and people around you, and I think I will eventually want to experience work in a business-type field. But in the long term, it probably takes its toll on you as a person. I don't want to end up being a heartless CEO who has billions of dollars and grand achievements, but is a failure as a family man and lacks moral standards.

The actual work is a positive as well. You find probably more cutting-edge technology in the defense industry than in commercial industries. And I like the fact that I'm not entirely focused on hardware or software, signal processing or power engineering, but I get a taste of a wide range of topics across the broad scope of electrical engineering.

There's a few negatives I could think of. I said earlier that the people were nice, which is true, but at times it would be nice if there were more younger people, and if there were more non-engineers around. I don't care that there's no hot girls here, cause it seems kind of lame to be meeting chicks at your job, and I got a woman already anyways. But if I had a choice, I probably wouldn't ever hang out with any of the people I work with. Not that I'm Mr. Cool or whatever, but most of these engineers are even nerdier than me. Hard to believe, but I'm serious.

It's ok though, cause I don't really need to socialize with the people I work with. I like hanging with my old circle of friends plenty enough.

The other drawback to being an engineer is the limited opportunities. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't think there's much in the way of career advancement for most engineers. You get raises and promotions, but in the end, you're always working for the higher-ups. That's fine for a lot of people, I guess, but I do expect out of myself in life that by the time I retire, I will have reached the level of the "higher-ups" I'm talking about.

With an ordinary bachelor's degree at this giant corporation, that's pretty unlikely to happen spontaneously. So I don't think I can be too content and comfortable too stay where I am. At least in a few years, I'll most likely pursue an MBA or Masters in Engineering. And at some point, I will have to take the initiative to move on and shoot for higher goals. But that's in the future.

Overall, I would say that I'm happy with where I am right now. I do feel lucky to have this job especially in light of the poor economic conditions. When people ask me how the job is, I usually say "it's ok" or talk about how busy I am, but when I think about it, I really do like it.

For more information, go to northropgrumman.com and read the FAQ.

BASEBALL

Last night was a greatly anticipated event for me. Even though I had been talking about it for weeks, it didn't really hit me that baseball season was starting until the first pitch of the game.

During the national anthem, they had 3 Navy fighter jets fly over the field, which was cool. I couldn't see what kind they were, but they looked like Boeing F/A-18 Hornets. Too bad they couldn't score any Northrop B-2 Stealth Bombers or Grumman F-14's, those are way cooler.

Anyways, before the first half-inning was over, my boys were a combined negative 2, thanks to Troy Glaus' fielding error and A-Rod's GIDP. Not a great start to the Dudlings' year, but it's a long season.

So a couple innings later, A-rod comes up to bat again and this time, launched a monster shot deep into the left field seats. That got the juices flowing in me real quick. The only bad thing was how he did a little happy trot and winked at the dugout on the way around the bases. That's the first time I've seen him be cocky in a game. Not that he hasn't earned the right to be cocky, but hopefully he doesn't turn into an punk and start playing like crap this year. Then again, I like Bonds even with how he's an ass and watches his homers and stuff.

Tonight, more fun on the diamond: two of the best active pitchers alive, Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux get the call for my team. Too bad they are like a combined 800 years old. But it don't matter, they're oldies but goodies. As long as their arms don't fall off I'll be happy.