Way back in the late 1980s, a good friend who had been foolishly fired from QSC Audio Products had landed on her feet in medical device manufacturing and was making more money than I’d ever imagined earning. We had worked together in our little company’s manufacturing engineering department and we’d both soured on the company’s political environment. She was still trying to tread those murky and troubled waters and I’d evacuated the front lines for Tech Services and a tiny fraction of the employees and politics. After I left the engineering department, the politics continued to become more convoluted and totally unproductive and in one of the wild fits of irrational decisions, she was fired. I don’t think she was unemployed for a week before a company in Temecula, California {ACS, AKA Advanced Cardiovascular Systems) picked her up as a senior manufacturing engineer. A year later, she was making more than twice what I was making back at QSC and I was contemplating some sort of move. We’d stayed in contact and, when she heard I was thinking about changing careers, She tossed my name into the hat for a manufacturing engineering position at ACS.
I had a lot to think about when it came to the whole idea of a career change. I was pretty solidly positioned at QSC, even if the place seemed about as stable as a skyscraper during earthquake liquefaction. Pat Quilter and I are, and were, friends and he had defended me and my work many times over the years that I had been with the company. When I moved from Manufacturing Engineering Manager to Tech Service manager, the department was a one-man disaster. The previous department manager was a nice enough guy, but he was a mediocre-to-terrible technician and spectacularly disorganized. Thanks to his inabilities as a technician, the department was full of waiting-to-be-repaired products that had been there for well over a year and had developed a reputation for being a black hole for customer service. It didn’t take me very long to realize that I needed help if I wanted to get that mess cleaned up in one lifetime. I had left Manufacturing Engineering because I had burned out on being a manager, but within a few months I was managing three technicians and a customer service clerk. That was, still, dramatically less of a load than I’d had in manufacturing engineering where more than 100 people worked for me.
As a, more important to me, side issue, I was less than a year away from graduating with a bachelor’s from Cal State Long Beach after more than 20 years of night schools and colleges scattered from Kansas to Texas to Nebraska to California. There was a Cal State University near Temecula but it looked like changing schools would mean setting myself back more than a year for graduation. That was no small complication.
Because my friend really wanted me to get the job, she had gone way overboard in prepping me for the interviews. On the first pass, I interviewed with a half dozen engineers and three upper-level executives. Apparently, several hundred people interviewed for that job and I was one of few who didn’t have an engineering degree. Probably thanks to my friends prepping and hopefully due to my extremely varied experience, I was one of three people who were called back for a second interview.
My friend had sat in on a few of those interviews and she had created a checklist for me with all of the correct answers for the interview questions. There was one question that the department head had asked repeatedly and she knew was a deal breaker, “You’ve been working on a major project for months and, just before putting it in place, your manager wants a detailed explanation of the project and it’s advantages before you get started. What do you do?” The “correct” answer was “I wouldn’t be in that position because I would have kept my manager informed and in the loop at every step of planning.” Easy, right? That, of course, assumes the manager is smart enough to understand the details, involved enough to bother with keeping track of the project’s progress, and possessed several other qualities that I have rarely experienced in mismanagement.
I went into the second interview knowing the right answers to every question I’d be asked, but I was also becoming less interested in moving to Temecula, Southern California’s high desert, and, while the money was tempting, the flaws in the ACS management’s thinking were beginning to cool off any thoughts I had of changing jobs. And while “the right answer” for this one question was hanging out there for easy picking, it wasn’t the right answer for any experience I’d ever had. The real right answer, and the one I gave for the question, was “I’d convince my manager ‘the project was his brilliant idea and that I’d just tried to implement it to my poor ability.’ For probably the 1,000th time, I’d go over the details, giving him credit for all of the complicated parts and asking what he thought I’d misunderstood.” In my 30 years of experience in engineering and management, that was all it usually took to get a lazy, uninvolved, over-paid executive to go back to sleep and get the hell out of my way.
Obviously, that wasn’t the “right answer” and someone else got the job offer. ACS had some FDA problems and was absorbed into the Lilly/Guidant disorganization, where we’d meet again in 1996. The insane workload caused my friend to develop a collection of medical problems that, eventually, forced her to back away from a life-destroying corporate life. I finished my degree at Cal State Long Beach and followed that with one really awful career decision that took me about a half-year to recover from. Knowing what I know now, I realize that I might actually be rich in retirement, if I’d have toed that big fat line, but I might also hate myself. I spent more than enough time in medical devices and a Fortune 100 nightmare. An extra decade of that could have been a real disaster.
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