Anyone who has been an engineer for a respectable length of time will notice that they have a collection of hats. There is a hat for being a system engineer and doing requirement definition, there is the system architect hat for doing requirements analysis to come up with an architecture for the system. There is the system designer hat for taking the system architecture and requirements analysis and doing the system design to create the high level design documents for the system. We even carry some of our older hats so that we may do detailed design and even code of the more critical parts of the system. We even have a management hat that we must don on occasion to lead a project out of the darkness. There are many other hats in our collection, but one of my favorites is the mentor hat.
As a senior staff engineer, I get to work on many different projects. Due to my vast experience, I may work on proposals, develop algorithms, define requirements, design systems, or develop special tools and applications. When necessary, I will even manage a project.
When I developed the algorithm for compositing the images for the various vehicles and accessories, we had a collection of graphic files that were created using incompatible tools and formats. The composite engine works only because it can identify which tools were used to create the images and applied the correct algorithms to do the overlays.
Writing requirements definition is always a challenge for creative engineers. There is a tendency to try do design the system when all we are supposed to be doing is defining the system. I have had to dicipline myself to concentrate on the "what" when generating the requirements definition, and save the "how" till I am doing requirments analysis and software design.
I enjoy being a mentor. We are what we are today because our predessors have shared their knowledge with us. It is sad that the corporate lawyers have teamed up to create blockades to prevent us from sharing our knowledge. The knowledge I have today did not come about as a result of my current company, it took many projects working with many engineers, and I learned from every company, every project, and every engineer along the way. So who owns my knowledge. If I don't share it with someone it will go to the grave with me. How much knowledge have we lost because a blockade prevented an engineer from sharing.