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What exactly is radio
"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* |