One of the joys(?) of working at a small company is that you get to experience multiple jobs.

As a young engineer, I believed that the only tough jobs were engineering, and the rest of the company was filled with fools. They were fools because they had simple jobs, and yet could not seem to accomplish their jobs in a timely manner.

Inwardly, I laughed at the guys in shipping. It took them a half day to ship something, while I could drop something off at Fed-Ex in a few minutes.

Time passes, and now I am responsible for shipping too. And suddenly, it is not that simple. It can take me 2 or 3 hours to ship 10K parts. Make the boxes. Get the boxes labeled with 2D bar codes. File export documents for permission to ship them to Botswana. Check to see what import documents are required. (Does everyone know about the no-wood certification for China?)

Now that I do all of the jobs, I have found out that they are all pretty tough.

And I have to say I enjoy engineering the most. It is one of the few jobs where it is your intellect versus logic (or physics). In most other jobs, it is you versus other employees, or just plain hard work. (Cleaning toilets included!)