Questions You Should Be Asking
Today we talk about four questions you should be asking all the time.
Before we get into the questions… Let’s take a quick minute to convince you that asking questions is worthwhile. As long as you’re not asking dumb a** questions you could answer yourself, please ask questions. I personally would rather you ask me a question than for you to needlessly spin your wheels (and waste my budget). And I also do not want to get an end product I’m ultimately not happy with and don’t have time to fix. Finally, if you’re nervous, just give it a try. Most people actually like helping others. You’ll be surprised at how many people are happy to help you. Investing in educating younger engineers is technically part of the job. More often than not, people are willing to take time to answer your questions.
What’s the expectation? Before you dive into a task, you should really know what level of effort is expected. This includes the allotted budget, but also the expectation of the end project. This is the minimum baseline communication that you need to accomplish for literally any task. Otherwise, you could start diving into a finite element analysis when the expectation was a back of the envelope calc or you could start creating a memo when the expectation was a fully fleshed out report. No one is happy when the product is less than expected or when time was wasted on excessive effort. But this is easily avoidable with asking simple questions to understand the expectation. What is the budget? What is your vision for the end product?
Why this and not that? This is an extremely informative question engineers should be asking all the time. Understanding why an engineer or project manager prefers something over the other is valuable data to have for your own decision making in the future. You might learn that this engineer prefers sacrificial steel thickness to coatings because they would rather have the entire steel section corrode evenly than to have a specific weak spot at chips in the coating. You might learn that this other engineer prefers to avoid a specific manufacturer because they straight up suck a**. You can learn a lot by just asking why. Ask the question, absorb the information, and become a better engineer.
Are there any helpful resources I should know about? Find out what references, standards, codes & regulations, example projects, calculation templates, etc. are available to you to accomplish the task at hand. Calculation templates are a huge timesaver and you’re really going to want to know if any are available to you. Knowing your resources can help you accomplish your tasks more efficiently and can be especially helpful to the “go-getter” type people. Being a go-getter is an awesome personality trait, but can get you into sticky situations when you google an obscure formula from the internet when you should have pulled the equation from a specific code. It takes a quick minute to ask about resources and can save you from the hours of googling and looking dumb later.
What’s the point? You probably need to phrase it differently when directing the question towards others, but this is an important question you should know the answer to. Understanding how your task fits into the big picture is essential to being good at your job. See my Think Big post for more details.
Now you’re ready to ask away!