Month: January 2026

My personal experience with job descriptions is limited, but I have definitely been impacted by it. As a project engineer working for a construction company, the role can vary based on the company and how they define the roles and tasks of a project engineer. We know from the lecture slides that a good job description has defined tasks and roles, as well as the knowledge, basic abilities, and skills you should have in order to do the job. This type of description is called the task-KSAO. Since the project engineer role varies so much from company to company, the best way I have learned to really know how a company defines the position is during the interview process. There are certain tasks and attributes that every company has their project engineer do, such as talk to subcontractors or request information from design engineers, but some tasks are job or company specific. These tasks usually aren’t listed in any job openings the company has, it’s something you have to ask during an interview. This can be frustrating because I have had multiple interviews where I find out there are job specific tasks or something about the role I don’t want to do, such as working crazy hours or traveling across the country for work. I understand that the unwanted attributes of a job usually aren’t posted on job listings, but I wish companies didn’t waste my time by not highlighting key features of the project engineer role.

Looking through the fortune 500 companies list, some companies really caught my eye, such as The Cheesecake Factory, Adobe, and NVIDIA. I chose The Cheesecake Factory because I absolutely love the food there, and I did not want top chose 3 tech companies. One thing that really stuck out to me about them was the awards they received a few years ago, specifically awards for best places to work as a millennial. This intrigued me because the service industry brings a variety of people into one place, and a company known to be a great place for a specific age of people means that the managers are trained to work and cooperate with a range of personalities.

The dessert display tempts as customers wait to be seated at the Cheesecake Factory restaurant in Marina del Rey.

(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

Next up is NVIDIA. I think management within the tech industry is very unique, because we all hear of how these companies have great benefits, employees work little hours, and that they have great working environments. After reading the article “How Google Sold its Engineers on Management” By David A Garvin, I discovered that it was actually very difficult for tech giants like Google to manage their engineers like they do now. In 2002, Google actually tried to run their company with zero managers, but unfortunately that didn’t work. Google found that an effective manager in the tech world needs a large amount of employees to run. “It’s not uncommon to find engineering managers with 30 direct reports… that’s by design, to prevent micromanaging. ‘ There is only so much you can meddle when you have 30 people on your team, so you have to focus on creating the best environment for engineers to make things happen.’ ” (Garvin 2013). With this in mind, let’s look at NVIDIA to see what makes them successful. NVIDIA struck out immediately to me, as some of their top comments were “Management is honest and ethical in its business practices” and “I believe management would lay people off only as a last resort.” Clearly the employees at NVIDIA believe in their management. They have also been ranked as a top 5 best tech company to work at for the past several years.

The biggest HR theme I’ve noticed with the tech companies are two ideas. The first is downplaying hierarchy through the company, and the other is having an extensive recruitment process. Tech giants try and recruit those who are self sufficient, goal oriented, and don’t need micro managed by a manager. What they need from a manager is someone who can successfully lead them in the right direction and help them achieve their goals.

As for the type of manager I want to be, I want to be someone who has a strategic plan for a problem we are trying to solve by utilizing a mission and the values that we are all aligned with by our company. In lecture 2, it was dic