Women in the engineering profession

Which soft skills do you think are indispensable in your job?

Communication skills. Many projects are simply very complex. It is therefore not possible to go it alone. We have to overcome the challenge as a team. So it’s no good just working alone with your own computer; you also have to exchange ideas with others and think outside the box a little. My department in particular is a kind of bottleneck or interface: the hardware is there, the software also has to be completed in order to finalize a project. There are also documentation obligations. No major project can be successfully implemented without an intensive and constant exchange, even across departmental boundaries.

Is there an insider term that no one outside our industry understands? Or a common prejudice that we can refute here?

One insider term, for example, is “smoke testing”, which is often used as a joke. The term originally comes from electrical engineering: you connect a piece of hardware to be tested somewhere and if it doesn’t smoke, we know that it works. We now also test certain functions in this way and refer to it internally as the “smoke testing principle”.
A common preconception, which I am always happy to refute, is, also with reference to the previous question, that you perform your tasks single-handedly and mindlessly in front of the computer. Projects can only be tackled with a high level of communication and a certain ability to work in a team, as conflicts also need to be resolved within the project and a constructive exchange must take place.

Do you have a favorite task, a favorite activity at AITAD where you can get into “flow”?

I actually have several favorite tasks. For example, I recently had to develop a more complex driver – this is the lowest layer of software that accesses the hardware directly. It was actually a data sheet of over 100 pages with lots of registers that I had to understand and implement in a modular way. It was incredibly fun because I could work with a good structure and didn’t just have to program down procedurally. That was a great task, but basically I enjoy all tasks because we can always work with the latest technologies and a lot with my favorite programming languages C and C++.

Read the entire interview at elektroniknet.de (in german)