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Szczepan Bialek · July 12th 12, 08:36 AM posted to rec.radio.amateur.antenna

"Jeff Liebermann" napisal w wiadomosci
...
On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:04:43 -0000, wrote:

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.

True for most companies, but not true for every place that I've
worked.

It is not true for every R&D place.

There no "draw up the formal schematics, or type up the documentation"

The each prototype is simmillar to something older.
The R&D people take the copy of the simmillar documentation and change the
identification number and dimensions, materials etc..
The new prototype documentation is ready in a few hours.

One such small company made it a point of having the engineer
personally perform every step of the production cycle from incoming
inspection to shipping. At some point, I did incoming inspection
(QA), parts stuffing, wave soldering, lead trimming, final assembly,
cable harnesses, production test, QA test, burn-in setup, and
shipping. There was no attempt utilize expensive engineering talent
for these jobs. It was a very necessary learning experience that paid
off handsomely in improved efficiency. It's one thing to stand aside
and just watch someone do their job. It's quite another to actually
sit down and do it. For example, we had a small 3 turn coil that was
hand wound on a form. Production people could average about 5 coils
per hour, which stunk. I sat down for several hours, made numerous
changes, found numerous problems that nobody bothered to identify, and
was able to crank out about 40 coils per hour. However, my fingers
felt like they were going to fall off after about an hour. This
wasn't going to work. The experience was sufficient to justify the
design and construction of an automatic coil winder, that could do
about 200 coils per hour.

When I worked for larger companies, I did much the same thing. I
experienced some initial resistance but got the attention of
production by breaking a few rules, but which dramatically improved
efficiency. I arranged to have the drawings and assembly instructions
translated into several languages. While assemblers were expected to
know English, they were not proficient in technical English. From
then on, the suggestions and changes came quickly. Unfortunately, I
still had products to finish, but was allowed about 25% of my time to
do the production engineering function.

An engineer (or manager) that sits behind a computer, never leaves the
office, never sits on the production line, never understands how
things are built, and never has an understanding of anyone elses job,
will eventually make some rather nasty mistakes. Using engineering
talent for these functions is not a good idea for extended periods,
but is a good idea for the short periods needed to gain the necessary
experience.

Incidentally, in the distant past, one of my consulting jobs was
cleaning up the computerized RF board layouts produced by an
assortment of PCB designers, that didn't seem to understand that RF
travels in roughly straight lines, and that bypassing requires a low
impedance ground, not a mass of spaghetti wiring.

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.

Likewise. Unfortunately, production test was reluctant to call
engineering for help because we would tend to be rather disruptive.
When I had to fix things using paper reports (usually incoherent) and
ECO's (engineering change orders), it took much longer and many tries
to fix it correctly. When I sat down and saw the problem for myself,
it was usually fixed the first time, and usually without attendant
piles of paper going in both directions. I couldn't do much of that
at larger companies, but when I was asked for an overnight solution,
that was the only way.

It is obvious that you was working in R&D places.

If a prototype is a succes then the formal documentation is made by another
staff.
S*