Immediate Supervisor

I had an interesting small company experience this week. On the day of tapeout the vendor we work with for layout made a small circuit change suggestion. It might have helped with a problem which we had already dealt with by eliminating the root cause and really I don't think it would have even helped. But it was the day of tapeout and so I figured I should check with someone to make sure they agreed. I did check with a coworker and she agreed but she is also just a couple years out of school. So normally I would check with the experienced analog engineer, but he was on vacation. Next thought was my boss - also on vacation (the chip had been delayed a few times so it wasn't so strange that they both had vacation scheduled then). Ok how about boss's boss - off on a business trip. And boss's boss's boss - also business trip. Then it struck me - for that one day my immediate supervisor was the CEO of the company! I paused for a bit before bothering him with this, but figured better to go ahead and ask.

Luckily the CEO is an electrical engineer and is very hands on so it was not too odd asking him about this and he knew what I was talking about, but still struck me as funny that I stopped by the office of the head of the company to ask if we should add a couple diodes or not.

Something struck me as I was writing this. If you look at it from the CEO's side - he's running the company, but at the same time still gets to be involved in low level engineering decisions - this may not sound like a good thing to some people reading this - but I think anyone who is an engineer understands what I am saying. To me one of the big detractors of going into management is not getting to do engineering anymore (yes I know you have a big impact by leading the engineers but you don't get to actually do the technical work). But maybe if the company is small enough then you could reach a reasonable level of management and still have enough exposure to the technical work to keep it interesting - not really sure seems I'm coming up with this as I write but just a thought (basically I am thinking out loud, but not out loud...)