Question of the Month: Should professional engineers have home labs?

Q1) Everything that needs security clearance or classified equipment will never see a WFH lab. Unfortunately I am in this situation right now. 

Q2) Anything needed for stand alone development is reasonable, as soon as it comes to integration or transfer to production, EEs need to be on-site. There are interesting options for remote debug (mostly firmware, because for HW debug somebody still needs to attach the probes) popping up, might be a nice topic for a learning module. 

 - W.

My company is not structured to do much lab work at home. There are lots of classified projects, equipment needs to be properly calibrated, most equipment is shared amongst staff, (there is not enough for everyone to have a full set), lots of collaborative hands-on work and we use third party test facilities to certify products.

We can take equipment home if needed and we sometimes do, but it doesn't stay at home. I have my own lab at home, so I don't need to use company equipment.

Most engineers I know don't like to do lab work at home and don't do it as a hobby.

I think there is always a lot to learn and the more time spent on it the more beneficial it will be to an individual's career, but it is more about the number of hours than the location.

I do not like to "contaminate" my home computing systems with corporate security crippleware. I carry a corporate phone, but barely use it.

Throughout my career it would have been useful for me to have a company sponsored home lab, but I think this is the exception rather than the rule.

My reply is complicated.

I work for myself so my work lab is my own. It's in a factory unit 14 miles from home ( a bit far, 2 miles would be ideal).

If I want to do my own stuff I can, but I don't want to take work home. It's good to keep them seperate. I don't see work emails at home (don't route them to my phone at all).

It would be very expensive for companies to duplicate a good lab environment at every engineer's home.

The main thing I miss about working on my own is the opportunity to bounce ideas or problems off other people, thats probably why I support E14.

MK

michaelkellett said:

bounce ideas or problems off other people

I think there's a lot of unspoken value in this. Regardless of if the other person is even technical.

I think in this community it is called "Blue man debugging". Sometimes they respond with wild hand waving. 

Good points. Bouncing ideas could  be, should be, would be a useful activity, but even in a building full of staff it can be rare. You have need-to-know directives, silo mentality, turf protection, idea hoarding, IP paranoia, personality conflicts, fear of ridicule, image protection, credit competition, introversion and fear of negative criticism that can all effectively torpedo any hope of decent interaction. It would be nice to be able to combat these road blocks, but it can be a full on war zone, complete with land mines, snipers, mortars, drones, cruise missiles and IEDs. Maybe even chemical warfare. 

Sometimes being a one man operation isn't so bad.

Those rubber ducks really get around...

A good mentor is .... (fill in your own superlative).

Dropping around 28,000 of them into the Pacific Ocean in 1992 probably didn't help

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Floatees_spill

I sort of fall into the same category as you michaelkellett. On and off throughout my career, I have worked for myself (part and full time consulting). After retiring from full time work (the very next day) I continued to consult.  Back when I was starting my own company (and also doing consulting), I started to seriously build up my home office.  Now, after 7+ years of retirement, I am continuing to expand my home office (buying and building tools/instrumentation, along with getting some great pieces of equipment from element14 roadtests).

More directly, to the question, "Should professional engineers have home labs?" I think that there are good reasons to provide/loan employees equipment to allow them to be more efficient in their product development.  There have been times where I have been allowed to work from home for extended periods, and I was provided with the necessary tools to preform my job, from computers to a wide range of test equipment.  While developing some automated test equipment, I had built a desktop version of one of our testers that I had in my office, so that I could easily test the code that I was developing.  When I had a serious injury, and I was unable to drive, I had some friend load up my computers and test equipment from my office and deliver it my house.  While I was recovering, I was able to work from home (and this was back in the late 80's when working from home was not very common). Should an employer supply their engineers with everything they need to work from home?  I am not sure that in all cases that would be financially feasible.  I have had difficulty justifying the purchase of equipment that could be used by all members on site, having to do that for all engineers working at home would be nearly impossible.