tasks to do for a hardware design engineer

[buenos]

hi

what tasks a hardware design engineer has to do?
i am asking this because i think in my job i do too much "other" things.
my job title is "hardware design engineer". in the job advertisment and on the interview, they were only talking about the hardware design part, but they didnt mention that it is only about 25% of the job. interestingly, some of the older employees get 50-80% design work.

percentage of time, these things are what i have to do:
- 25% hardware design
- 20% customer support, based on other engineers earlier designs
- 10% creating paperwork for series production, manufacturing test procedure development, manufacturing paperwork, ECOs...
- 10% board bringup, comissioning.
- 5% nothing
- 30% "design prooving". this is extensive tesing, after bringup, but before a product can be released to the market. compatibility testing, installing OS-es, thermal testing... i think this should be done by someone called "test engineer".


so the question is:
- how much are the percentage numbers at your jobs, guys? -
please only those people answeer, who are actually working in a position titled "hardware DESIGN engineer"

 

[ChrisC]

It sounds as if you're new to this particular company. That being the case, it's not entirely surprising that you're being given stuff to do that *someone* has to do but which might not grab the interest of anyone else, or because giving the work to you means not having to try squeezing it into the possibly already critical schedules of your colleagues. Take it as an opportunity to learn more about the other products the company has developed, and to get up to speed with all the company procedures.

Having said that, looking through your list of tasks, I don't really see anything there which is notably out of place unless you're working for a company where some/most/all of the stuff listed below "hardware design" is supposed to be handled 100% by other people leaving the design team totally isolated from the outside world. I've yet to work for a company where this is the case - even when you've got test, manufacturing, customer support, marketing, purchasing etc. etc. departments doing most of these tasks themselves, chances are you'll still have to do at least *some* of it yourself.


So to answer your question, in the short-ish term it depends. One month/quarter/year you might find yourself doing next to no new design work and a lot of legacy support/upgrade work, or catching up on all the documentation you put off during your last spell of intense development. The next period it could all swing around and you're so busy with fresh designs you don't have time to think about anything else.

Longer-term (say over 2-3 years), it should start to average out a bit more evenly - in my experience I'd say new product design (which for me includes the "bringup/commissioning" and "design proving" steps you've listed seperately) has taken up about 70% of my professional career, documentation around 20%, and legacy support around 10%. Which really isn't all that far off the percentages you've listed.

 

[buenos]

hi

thanks.
actually it is already my second year here.

in my previous job, it was (i think this division makes more sense):
65% hardware design
- 0% customer support, based on other engineers earlier designs
- 1% creating paperwork for series production, manufacturing test procedure development, manufacturing paperwork,
- 3% other paperwork
- 15% board bringup, comissioning.
- 0% design prooving
- 16% other, legacy stuff and preproduction board testing.

about the documentation: i think there are 2 kinds of documents to write by a hardware design engineer here:
a) hardware engineering, software requirements and sales documents/manuals.
b) detailed control over the series production. at the production department, there are no engineers dealing with these, there are only managers and technicians.
i think b- should not be done by the same person who designs the circuits. it is a different profession.

i would like to know how much design work other people do at different companies, as a statistics. there are job titles like "electrical engineer", "electronics engineer" or "hardware engineer", but i am interested about these numbers for the "hardware DESIGN engineer"