Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Mon, 09 Jul 2012 20:21:55 -0500, John H. Guillory
wrote:

Engineers are known for knowing all the
knowladge to pass a test, yet not a single bit of real-world usage.

I are an engineer and I know which end of the soldering iron to grab.

Eg. An engineer can design the complete working schematic for a ham
radio, but when it comes to putting it together, he may have the
hardest time stripping the wires, soldering the connections, etc.

Nope. These daze, engineers do all their design work on a computah.
The design process is called direct to manufacturer. There is no hand
built prototype stage. They don't need to strip wires or solder
anything. Worst case is they might use a hot air SMT rework station
to replace a part, or fix a layout error. If it doesn't work right,
the engineer goes back to the computah simulations, fixes it, and has
the prototype shop robots build another revision. These are todays
engineers, not the cave man variety (like me) that had to build their
own prototypes, strip their own wires, and steal parts from production
to build prototypes. Those days are long gone, except maybe in garage
operations. Open a cell phone and tell my you can build it by hand
with your soldering iron and wire stripper.

Unless you were in a very small operation or talking about REALLY ancient
times, engineers as a general rule never did mundane tasks.

Those were left to other, lesser paid people, like technicians, draftsmen,
and typists.

No one in their right mind would pay an engineer to build and test a
prototype, draw up the formal schematics, or type up the documentation
when there are other people who could do that faster and at a much lower
hourly rate.


But
gosh darn it, once it's completely together, and fired up.... The
engineer would then listen carefully and hear a distorted sounding
voice and insist that the antenna wasn't working to full potential,

Baloney. It's the marketing and sales guys that evaluate how
something sounds. Engineers use test equipment that measure how it
sounds, how well it works, and whether it complies with a multitude of
specifications. The numbers are far more sensitive to anomalies than
a talk test. On a rare day, there may actually be a talk test, but
that's unusual. Incidentally, you can see distortion on a scope long
before you can hear it.

Most of the places I worked, the testing was done by techicians who
wrote up a test results report for the engineers and the engineers
only got involved if something was hinky in the test results.