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I interned with General Electric as an MRI field engineer (repair/install/maintenance) and some people would talk negatively about the intellectual capacity of

I interned with General Electric as an MRI field engineer (repair/install/maintenance) and some people would talk negatively about the intellectual capacity of the appliance (and other) field staff. For the average HN user I'd assume they'd be able to work on any appliance or MRI machine fine given the appropriate resources and documentation. edit word edit: i've also done residential work for a software engineer before who did not know how to turn a phillips head screw - but he seemed like an extreme outlier

dfox 4y ago
I spent better part of today by reading through service manuals of various test and measurement instruments. It is not that hard to assume that half of the content (eg. ridiculously detailed step by step procedures for doing obvious things) is there because of the expectation that the field repair staff cannot really think. One would ask whether general disappearance of component level schematics from such manuals in this century is not also caused by the same assumption.
- dieselgate 4y ago
  It's sort of weird, from my engineering background i'm used to the expectation of being able to "derive" an answer from working with first principles. But that's not really how a lot of "technician" work is done - same for cargo cult programming. But suppose that's a benefit of modular/component based systems as you can just replace a part and expect it to "solve" a problem. There's a lot more stuff to it, though.