4 ms·
I don't understand this logic. Yes, in a start-up, having multiple skillsets and job overlap comes in handy. In the corporate world, however, that MechE will l
by redrobot5050 16y ago
I don't understand this logic. Yes, in a start-up, having multiple skillsets and job overlap comes in handy.
In the corporate world, however, that MechE will likely never do anything but CAD up parts. They will have a machinist on staff to make his creations. Just like how corporate programmers don't need to build their own computers or run the company's IT.
A better analogy might be a story of a friend of mine from graduate school, Chuck. He, and another grad student we'll call Mike, got their first year of graduate funding through a professor with very little grant money. It was very important that Mike had machine shop skills and could build some of their research equipment for the lab. Mike made a name for himself -- he wasn't a very good machinist compared to the guys on staff -- but he was building the needed equipment, even if it was very time consuming.
Using this humble lab, Chuck and Mike worked hard for their professor and eventually got lots of funding. It got to the point where the funding was so much, that time was more a concern. Chuck could then overnight parts from electronics catalogs and conduct research faster/better than Mike, who despite having this funding, continued the frugal habit of machining all his own parts. Mike eventually got disciplined (for not moving fast enough in his research) and frustrated (he fixated on the fact that his skills helped them get the funding in the first place).
TL;DR: When Time becomes greater than money, I'd rather have the CAD guy CAD it up, and the machinist make it.
- gaius 16y agoBecause without the ability to machine it, you have far less of an insight into how hard it will be to do so, or how long it will take, or how much wastage there will be. That can have an orders-of-magnitude effect on the cost. In your story, Chuck is ordering parts sure, but the guy who designed those parts was a specialist in designing parts... In my first year of Mech Eng they sent us all off to a machine shop to learn to weld, use a lathe, etc, I couldn't give an example to you now, but it really does make a difference, you start to think as well as "how will this work" but also "how will this be made", "how can this be repaired", "how will someone get at this part to replace it", etc etc.
- joe_bleau 16y agoExactly. I can't tell you how many times I've heard my dad (a lifelong precision machinist) complain about the quality of drawings from CAD jockeys that have no clue about machining processes.
- redrobot5050 16y agoThis is like saying that Apache is a bad web server because IT people complain to the System Architects over how hard it is to harden it for PKI and use in Top Secret Environments. Odds are the IT monkey doesn't know what he is talking about anymore than the lathe monkey. Both have a false sense of expertise because they see their field as "equal".
- joe_bleau 16y agoI doubt you'd call a tool and die man a "lathe monkey" if you had much experience in the chip making world.
- redrobot5050 16y agoare we talking about integrated circuit chips? Because everyone in the EE/SOC world mocks the VLSI monkeys. Its a $120/hour CAD jockey job. It's an entirely different skillset and mindset to adapt an ISA to hardware than is to make sure there's no overlap.
- gaius 16y agoAn architect who isn't also a hands-on practitioner is making decisions based on nothing more than the vendor's advertising. Remember that.
- redrobot5050 16y ago>In your story, Chuck is ordering parts sure, but the guy who designed those parts was a specialist in designing parts... Exactly. In the long run, re-inventing the wheel is costly. Costly enough that Chuck graduates with his PhD, while the other ends up failing out and working at a machine shop. Also, a constant criticism of Chuck's counterpart, Mike, was that everything he built was constantly over-engineered, and took to damn long. If anything, his machine shop experience hampered his ability to design or refine his design skills past an undergraduate level. A semester of welding, lathing, and whatnot will likely not help a professional MechE, as easily half their CAD designs will be fabricated completely by machine. Understanding a precision machinist's complaints will not come into the field.
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y agoI'm guessing you've always been a programmer? The problem is that it is entirely too easy to "CAD up" a design that is almost unmanufacturable, or that is ridiculously difficult or expensive to manufacture. Having experience actually building or fixing things is a hedge against this. Years ago, young engineers fresh out of school were put to work on the production floor for a few months to learn these lessons. When I graduated as an EE, the small company I went to work for wouldn't let me do anything other than documentation and repair for a year for the same reason. It was an extremely valuable year!