What's your job about?
Fisher & Paykel Appliances designs and manufactures luxury home appliances. I’m in the electronics team, in the user interface (UI) team, and currently we’re finishing development on the UI software for a new induction cooktop product series.
In my day-to-day work, I’ll start the morning by leading a ten-minute standup where each person in the team gives an update on what they’re working on. Normally, that’ll be adding a new feature to the product, or fixing a bug in the product software. Sometimes there won’t be enough information to do the work, or new questions will come up during the work. We need to know how to get the information we need from the correct people and use our own judgement if that isn’t possible.
When I think I’ve completed my task I’ll test it out on a simulated product and example hardware, then try it on one of the real cooktops in our labs. If everything works, I’ll submit my code in a ‘pull request’ for my team members to review. Along the way, I’ll be testing and reviewing pull requests my team members submitted.
I don’t always work on the product directly. Sometimes I work on tools to make the life of my team easier, like automated pipelines, build environments, product logging, and automated tests. Whenever I do something new or tricky I make sure to document it on our company knowledge base, to ‘pay it forward’ to the next person so they don’t have to do the work again.
What's your background?
I’ve lived in Auckland all my life, from school to university and into the workforce.
I’ve worked full-time at Fisher & Paykel Appliances for over a year, but I started in my current position as an intern. I was offered a graduate position at the end of my internship contract, which I accepted. It was a big relief to go into my final year of university knowing that I would have a job at the end of it!
The internship was my first ‘formal’ engineering work. At the time, I was a third-year university student, and my only technical experience was from hardware and software design at a summer workshop the previous year. I remember feeling very underqualified when I was looking for internships—but then again, so did everyone I knew. Before that, I’d worked in retail and at an inbound call centre (where I automated some of the Excel data entry... which I suppose was the first ‘real-world’ applications of my degree!).
Of course, university wasn’t all smooth sailing. In my second year, I started having doubts about the direction of my career and life. COVID-19 was a big factor, but I also wasn’t enjoying some of my electives, and I felt conflicted when what I enjoyed didn’t always align with what I was good at. I decided to complete the year and ended up enjoying the second semester a lot more. By the time it was third year, I had the freedom to pick the electives I wanted and felt a lot more certain in my future.
I don’t have a pithy life lesson to share from that, other than that it’s okay to feel conflicted, and that sometimes you need to keep going until you’re certain one way or another. I think this is normal, and healthy, and, sadly, a part of life.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes, absolutely. Most of my colleagues went through university, and many started here as graduates (just like me), but that doesn’t mean someone with a different background couldn’t do it too.
As with all technical jobs, there’s a baseline level of domain-specific technical knowledge that you need to have to ‘get’ concepts, break down unfamiliar problems into parts, and recognise and solve those parts. There are many ways to get this knowledge, but university is probably the most common and accessible route. If you’re on the job, a can-do mindset, reading the documentation, and applying knowledge to different contexts will let you pick up a lot, quickly.
Project-management skills are also important for self-managing and acting with initiative, and you can learn them nearly anywhere. If you are at university, don’t undervalue your general engineering papers!
What's the coolest thing about your job?
One of the things I love most about my job is the size of the company. It’s a great feeling to finish work on a small feature, then step back and see it in a full product, a product that has a global advertising campaign and international factories manufacturing it.
I find it inspiring being a small part of something bigger, and empowering —individual contributions can have an out-sized impact when they have the leverage of the company behind them.
What are the limitations of your job?
The biggest limitation is having to make decisions in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty. Even when you have control over the problem, there’s too much to know to know it all, so the hard part is knowing what to know—and that’s nearly as hard! You need to be able to embrace a problem-solving mindset.
The responsibility of the job is what you make it. It is proportional to the stress and challenge, but also to the impact you make. You will need to learn your limits for being helpful while still delivering your responsibilities.
The commute: when Auckland traffic gets bad, it can mean over an hour and a half of driving each day. There is some flexibility in the start/finish times, but I work best in the office—I spend most of my day at work, so if I'm not around people it can quickly feel isolating.
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