The real lingua franca for engineers is mathematics.
At several former employers, I have found it helpful to:
- Develop spreadsheets to make the boring stuff go faster, or be better organized.
- Keep daily 'chron' files for each project and one as a sort of daily diary. No opinion or conjecture, just a record of what happened, who said what to whom, what broke and when, that sort of thing. Documents of this sort can be helpful when lawyers come snooping around and your memory is not sufficiently precise. Keep these files on a thumbdrive in your pocket.
- Make math models of the product, so as to better understand how it works, and maybe to help predict how proposed changes will screw it up, and to try and put some actual physics underneath the 'lore' and 'stuff that everyone knows'.
- Retain a copy of the internal phonebook, because names get fuzzy after a few years.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA