Earlier in my career, I worked on a project that integrated a robotic body-welding line for Ford Motor Company. In those days, Ford used Kawasaki robots almost exclusively. They had a fixed hardware and software interface standard for each type of robot with a long and storied history.
My project began with an attempt to sell Ford on using a different, better (but more expensive) brand of robot, and a better (but again, more expensive) pinch-welding "gun." This process proceeded apace until about the 11th hour, when suddenly some intransigence from one particular individual at Ford suddenly forced everyone to drop the original plan, cancel the original hardware orders, and order Kawasaki robots. (The better weld guns, however, were kept.)
As the designated shop-floor "robot guy" for this project, I became involved after all the hardware components had arrived, had been uncrated, and were being assembled. Innocent of the consequences of this project's sordid history, I sailed blithely into the mess and set about putting together the various bits and pieces, as I had done many times already in my short career.
It didn't take very long to discover a serious problem.
Back then, the very old, set-in-stone, Ford/Kawasaki standard used a single multi-conductor cable to carry discrete I/O signals (24V DC and even, in some cases 120V AC) from the robot cabinet, through the weld controller, and out to the weld gun. For those of you not familiar with the term, a weld "gun" is the "pinching" bit that you see in movies like Minority Report, or any PBS special about the automotive industry. We encountered our problem when we attempted to wire up the new weld guns to the old cable.
The old cable provided only two signal wires for closing the pneumatic valves that operated the weld gun. The new weld gun required four wires. And the kicker was that although the Ford/Kawasaki standard had provided for several spare wires in its youth, feature creep over the ensuing years had whittled the number of spare wires down to one.
Before calling upstairs to the design engineers responsible for this strange turn of events, I pulled all the electrical drawings: the gun, the weld controller, and the Ford/Kawasaki interface that the Kawasaki robots had been delivered with. I discovered that they didn't match. It wasn't that I was overlooking something. No, this oversight had happened in the design phase, long before I ever got involved.
It wasn't hard to figure out what had happened: When Ford had demanded the last-minute switch to their standard Kawasaki robot, the controls engineers had simply swapped the electrical drawings without thinking about the fact that the weld guns were not the same units that the standard had been designed around.
Have you noticed that it's nearly always the electrical/electronic engineer that rides to the rescue of the management or even the mechanical engineers? How many times do the mechanics solve a problem in our electronics? It's been the story of my life in engineering :-)
Have you ever noticed how management, with the wisdom of King Solomon, often decides to adopt half a solution, without realizing that half of a solution isn't a solution, it's just another problem?
We can start talking trash about all EEs who inccurred emergent software hacks by failing to understand the complete system that their assigned module fit into.
2. Reminds me of a similar costly scenario I was involved in years ago, where the production mgt refused to buy the right sized (power) screwdriver for the line. Result, the screws didn't get torqued in enough, and the company paid dearly for material, labor and more while pursuing field replacements. And, yes, here too, an urgent SW hack was required to keep misbuilt hardware from doing bad things -- while still operating correctly -- until the equipment could be attended to.
3. I'm intrigued, hopefully without being nosy, about where and how the certain intransigent individual fit in things. A bean counter imported into production control? An design/production engineer who'd done great things back in the day, but having been promoted out of that scene persisted in "his way or the highway" control over his old venue? Some firebrand climber recruited from outside who wasn't going to risk slipping budget or deadlines, or crossing lines of normative behavior in order to keep his/her career on track?
I am not an Engineer. I am an Electronics Technician. What this generally means its that I get stuck with the stuff an engineer screwed up and have to make it work anyways, after engineering has used up all the time for the job. It has happened many times. The engineers have been told how important they are. They are rather well paid. But it comes down to some poor sap who has to get the product working when the delivery date has already been missed because the engineers didn't get their part done on time.
Delivery date is 12 weeks out. Assembly and testing will take 3 weeks. Any special parts will need to be orderred no later than 6 weeks out. So, Engineering comes out at 10 weeks and decides all this is rush because they waited until 8 weeks to figure out what was going to change to meet the customers requirements (which had been decided 6 MONTHS ago) and so the special parts won't be in until week 13. But it is the shops fault that the machine is late even though the engineers didn't have ANYTHING ready until week 10 of 12.
The person with the least control over the project is often the one with the most responsibility dumped on them. And could have probably had the new requirements designed at week 2 because he actually has to work with the finished product and the customer.
Yeah, I tend to (well HATE may be a bit strong...) dislike many engineers because they are so far removed from the final product that they don't seem to have much of an idea what is really involved in executing the idea. It works on paper...
Better treat the Engineering TECHNOLOGISTS with a lot of respect as they are generally the ones who find and solve the problem while engineering rides off on their white horses to joust with another windmill...
You paint "engineers" with a very broad brush. I, for one, reject your argument & your thesis. I have been practicing the art & science of electro-mechanical design engineering for the better part of 50 years, and I can assure you that in every company that I've been employed, ALL the (degreed) engineers were VERY intimately knowledge of EVERY piece of equipment or product that left their cubicle & went into production. And, EVERY engineer was directly responsible for EVERY shred of paper relevant to the project. Now, this was true in my experience whether the company had 2 engineers or 22 engineers! And, I can further assure you that EVERY engineer in every environment also had a toolbox w/ all sorts of "goodies" packed into them. Not one fellow engineer was an "Ivory Tower" fellow, who had only two items.... his slide rule & a pencil sharpener!!!!
Being jaded and cynical is not always a bad thing. It had taught you to have an answer before the question was asked. Curious that your hack was adopted in the company with the new weld guns instead of requesting the extra wires on the Kawasaki robots to use the new weld guns with all of their features.
There's enough blame to spread around, no doubt. As a field engineer the bane of my existance used to be the sales reps. They would sell a system and promise the customer that their new equipment would not only perform flawlessly, but it would also fly around the room, deliver the daily paper, lay an egg, and fry it up for their breakfast. Fast forward past the contract signing to the day the equipment arrives onsite and yours truly is now tasked with the responsibility of getting it up and operational. As the aforementioned system is being brought up and configured the customer's rep will inevitably walk into the room and want to see some flying and egg laying, whereupon it became my job to A.) Keep the stunned, bemused and disgusted "they've done it to me again" look off my face, and B.) Try to carefully explain to the customer what the equipment will and will not do in the real world, not "Salesman Nirvana". I've noticed a consistent reaction amongst customer reps: They inevitably try to explain to you how you are wrong, and what their 'special' package will allow them to do (along with dark rumblings of how they have hinged their company's future on that specific non-existant feature), and, once you have gotten finished explaining the facts to them, they get on the phone with your upper management and demand that your company send out another, more experienced tech who knows how to configure the aviation and egg production features... in short, it's MY fault and couldn't possibly be that the sales rep might have stretched the truth just a little bit....
Well, I'm a firm believer in hardware/software co-design. I spent 15 years or so doing logic (chip or card) design and can remember probably half-a-dozen instances where the software/firmware folks bailed the hardware guys out. Even a couple where The hardware folks told the software folks exactly what needed to be done.
I've had to deal with both types in my long career over DECADES. I WILL say it: The MAJORITY of the new, freshly minted so-called " engineers " barely make it out of the 90 day evaluation period. The ones so arrogant that they think their **** doesn't stink usually gets the door before they screw up a profitable, working company.
ThereWAS NOT a formal title of TEST ENGINEER when I started work in Silicon Valley; there was NOT a real career path at the SJSU School of Engineering, just Power Transmission and Electronic Controls ( like the old E/M stuff ). Many people come out of those types of programs with the same ARROGANCE that they had to endure as students.
I was very naif about how much POLITICS was part of the unofficial coursework. It wasn't about " Learning How to Learn " which was my reason to carry coursework along with my full time job at AMD. I was learning FAR more from AMD than the stuff I was exposed to at SJSU.
This finally came to a head when I took a course in MatSci as part of the Engineering Common Core. I listened to the prof for about half the period when the subjet of creating semiconductor materials was being LECTURED to all of the unknowning students. I made the mistake of CONTRADICTING the IGNORANT prof by saying " We don't do that anymore ". The upshot was that I only got a " D " handed down and I said " enogh of this ****, dropped out and went to Foothill College where learning was far more enjoyable and more well rounded.
Meanwhile, I was offered a management job and a start up the corporate ladder. I never wanted a desk job, but that was where the money was at that time.
The gotcha in all this: Many Engineers BROKE the factory floor test systems and it was our duty to repair and re-calibrate by the next morning's 1st shift. Myself and several others ( still with the title and semi-non-exexempt status of Senior Test Tech ) were responsible for keeping the Test Floor WEEKLY goals no matter how much equipment got broken.
I'll skip over the 30% raise job hopping or the " training " of a DeVry grad that fit the above description. and get to the reasons why the Cray research job was the prize many people wanted but never got.
Many of the skills that Cray Research needed were not taught in any formal Education system at that time. I was told that " We dont have time to retrain someone out of Grad Schol and have to dealing with an " unlearn " environment. After I put together a homemade Test System out of spare parts and a visit to Kiethley Instuments, I was gven my first goal. Repeatable numbers critical to Cray Hardware Design. ( I still refuse to make those numbers public ). THAT got me my first NDE title, I have many others. I've taken two management jobs and regretted both of them.
When you take any job as a contractor, your best information about a person is their " ME WALL " . The most important people in a company usually do not have one. They don't need a reminder that they are GOOD at what they do...
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