4 ms·

I work in manufacturing and sometimes stuff like this happens despite controls in place. You can get technicians/assemblers who just take it upon themselves to

I work in manufacturing and sometimes stuff like this happens despite controls in place. You can get technicians/assemblers who just take it upon themselves to fix a problem rather than notifying anyone. To them it is no big deal (i.e. doesn't warrant mentioning to engineering), so it must be "no big deal".

danielfoster 3y ago
Pressure to perform?
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  I would suspect more "get'r'dun".
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  At least in the instances I have encountered, it came from a place of well meaning combined with overconfidence.
  - ncr100 3y ago
    Is "Irresponsibility" I feel -- without any true blame / shame though. Complex work is hard. Self-management is a big, under-appreciated part of that. So Irresponsibility maybe not on the individual Worker's shoulders, but on all of us for under-appreciating the risky challenges of being a motivated worker in a complex job. ? EDIT: here is the flaw https://www.tiktok.com/@el.chepito1985/video/7357758176504089898 https://www.tiktok.com/@el.chepito1985/video/735775817650408... yeah IDK if the Worker is to blame, seems like an obvious design flaw, e.g. they should not rely on 'soap' to keep a flat pedal cover attached to another flat pedal.
    - cogman10 3y ago
      I actually blame the engineering/design department for this one. The soap revealed the issue, but why aren't the peddles a single piece? Why do they have a sticker on them? Even without the soap step, what happens if the cabin gets too hot or the factory has too much dust in it? If you look at your car's peddles (and I'm including mine, a Tesla model 3) you'll notice they are basically a single piece mechanically fit together. Not some sticker glued for style.
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      Right, it's always dependant on circumstances. I try to stress as much as possible that you always need to design things in such a way that even the dumbest, newest assembler will still be able to build it correctly. And often times we review drawings/instructions and find lots of poorly outlined procedures. But sometimes you get something like "The blue wire ran out, but I still had a bunch of light blue, so I just used that instead". It can be a killer.
- gazelle21 3y ago
  [dead]
- brabel 3y ago
  No... I've been a maintenance worker. If you needed "Engineering" to help you fix every problem you faced everyday in a production line, the Engineer would need to come to work with you every day. If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up" came down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a strong reason to do so as the company will be losing millions while you wait :). You just solve problems all the time, every day, and it's really up to the technician to know when something requires notifying Engineering or not. Notify too much and they'll get rid of you for being annoying... notify too little and shit like this can happen, but in the very large majority of cases, it doesn't.
  - er4hn 3y ago
    I haven't been a maintenance worker, but I've worked as an SWE in a company with a large IT dept. Sometimes it's faster to work around them to find solutions to doing your job. Both sides have good intentions but the IT dept. cannot move nimbly. Same story everywhere.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    I don't have a problem with technicians solving problems. But as an engineer I would like to codify the solution so that A) we're implementing a controlled process and B) if there's a better solution out there I can make that recommendation or fix the system. When you take it upon yourself then problems only happen if you don't communicate.
  - Freedom2 3y ago
    > If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up" came down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a strong reason to do so as the company will be losing millions while you wait Then what was the whole point of the Andon cable lesson that American manufacturers had to learn from Toyota?
rootusrootus 3y ago
Human nature. I run into this all the time. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked a user "Why did you not just mention this was not working right and you are working around it? We could have fixed this, but if you do not say anything it might be a while before someone on the dev team notices."
- agumonkey 3y ago
  There's something difficult about notifying problems. You might make people angry, you might feel like a moron because you misunderstood, or guilty because you worry how they feel.
  - bgirard 3y ago
    Agreed. For me it's often the time it takes to find the contact to notify, start a conversation, update the conversation, wait for the issue to be picked up, wait for the software to be updated. Now repeat for everything you notice. If I did it for everything I encountered I wouldn't be doing my core work duty. It's more pragmatic the majority of the time to work around the issue and immediately get back to work.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    Wait, don’t car assembly lines have a big red button you can push if you find a defect? Haven’t they for many years? Does pushing that button really make everyone angry? That’s not how I had envisioned car manufacture at all.
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      You're right, in some settings there's everything in place to ease communicating issues. But what if it's not something clear enough to trigger it ?
      - singleshot_ 3y ago
        I completely agree with you that some errors could be missed if no one noticed them. This seems entirely separate from the idea that people could become angry if the line were stopped, but of course you are right.
HarryHirsch 3y ago
An unapproved in-production change of a safety-critical article is "no big deal" to them? That bespeaks a Boeing-like safety culture.
- jmspring 3y ago
  It seems typical Elon Musk to me.
- michaelsshaw 3y ago
  Tesla desperately wishes it could have the safety culture of Boeing.
ncr100 3y ago
I speculate in a Musk company, this "I will fix it" attitude would be promoted. "I sleep on the floor" .. "You're fired for not proactively fixing a problem I just thought of a solution to". Is my speculation off-base?
- _ea1k 3y ago
  There's an old story about toothpaste boxes and solving the empty box problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/2o9dho/the_empty_toothpaste_box_problem/ https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/2o9dho/the_emp... I've always suspected it was apocryphal. But just think, if the workers had installed that fan beforehand, we might be reading a story about how important workers are at solving little production problems. Everyone thinks this mentality of having workers fix problems is great, until they use soap to put glued parts on.
nabilhat 3y ago
It's a design error from the start. The workaround shouldn't have happened, but is only one of countless ways this would have inevitably happened anyway. Glue has a lot of failure modes. Correct application can't be reliably tested non-destructively. Product variances are often very hard to detect. Degradation with age and physical use can't be reliably forecast. Three pins on the back of that appearance plate that push into starlock style fasteners in the pedal are cheaper than the appropriate glue, faster to install than glue, more reliable, trivially verified, impossible to misalign, and that's why it's a common solution that auto manufacturers use in this exact application. This was a confoundingly stupid place to rely on glue.
- Draiken 3y ago
  This is an underrated point. A lot of focus has been put on manufacturing procedures when this could've been avoided entirely in design. IDK anything about manufacturing so I wonder if this was due to incompetence, to save costs, ignorance or something else?
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    Why not all of the above?
- FredPret 3y ago
  Correct - a great design is also easy / automatic to build correctly. This is vastly easier said than done when you have a complex product with many components. I remember reading about the original iPhone's manufacturing operations in China - how the Apple engineers spent a ton of time making sure that the right way is also the easy way for the factory workers.
themaninthedark 3y ago
Same, I work in manufacturing(not automotive but heavy construction equipment) and see things like this all the time. Workers think they understand/ don't think engineers understand or want to do it faster/easier than what they were shown. I have no knowledge of Tesla but here would be my guess: Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip it on. Story time: Called out to final assembly, machine starts and runs but not moving. Troubleshoot and find brakes not releasing. further troubleshoot and find it is due to pressure not getting to brakes(configuration is such that brakes come on if there is loss of hydraulic pressure). Replace hydraulic line, machine is working. Remove contaminate from line, no one know what it is. Assembly pointing fingers and saying sabotage. I walk around the assembly area, I find that paint decided to use packing peanuts to mask holes that the hydraulic fitting go in instead of masking tape as directed. The packing peanut tore while being removed and the assembly working inserting the fittings did not notice.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  > Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip it on. TBH, something like this might even get approved by a foreman. "Thanks for coming up with a clever way to save a few seconds on assembly!"
downrightmike 3y ago
Definitely not the Total Quality Management model. If management and engineers can't be bothered, this shit happens.
germinator 3y ago
It's easy to portray it as arrogance, but in manufacturing, you run into small problems and ambiguities all the time. By analogy to software engineering, do your bosses or clients give you water-tight, formal specs for the software you need to build? If they could do that, they wouldn't be needing you in the first place. We zero in on situations like that and pretend that it's the worker's fault for making the wrong call, but we ignore that if they didn't make the right calls a thousand times before, nothing would ever get done. In this case, if pedal cover is a friction fit and can slide off and get jammed in between panels, this doesn't sound like an assembly mistake but a pretty major design error, right? Your designs should be resilient. What if the owner sprays WD-40 on a squeaky pedal and the cover slides off?
- Melatonic 3y ago
  Exactly - especially in a TRUCK of all things. The pedal area should be expected to get getting all kinds of crud and crap in it and be cleaned regularly and be extra durable.
enaaem 3y ago
The fact that Musk publicly blames the fault on workers, shows that Tesla is already behind Toyota in philosophical thinking.
anon373839 3y ago
I don’t know anything about manufacturing, but the main thing that stood out when I toured the BMW plant in Munich was how ruthlessly efficient and regulated every step of the production process was. It’s hard to imagine there being any time for improvisation, or any ability for it to go unnoticed. Is Tesla’s production process just looser?

danielfoster 3y ago

Pressure to perform?

ProllyInfamous 3y ago
I would suspect more "get'r'dun".
Workaccount2 3y ago
At least in the instances I have encountered, it came from a place of well meaning combined with overconfidence.
- ncr100 3y ago
  Is "Irresponsibility" I feel -- without any true blame / shame though. Complex work is hard. Self-management is a big, under-appreciated part of that. So Irresponsibility maybe not on the individual Worker's shoulders, but on all of us for under-appreciating the risky challenges of being a motivated worker in a complex job. ? EDIT: here is the flaw https://www.tiktok.com/@el.chepito1985/video/7357758176504089898 https://www.tiktok.com/@el.chepito1985/video/735775817650408... yeah IDK if the Worker is to blame, seems like an obvious design flaw, e.g. they should not rely on 'soap' to keep a flat pedal cover attached to another flat pedal.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    I actually blame the engineering/design department for this one. The soap revealed the issue, but why aren't the peddles a single piece? Why do they have a sticker on them? Even without the soap step, what happens if the cabin gets too hot or the factory has too much dust in it? If you look at your car's peddles (and I'm including mine, a Tesla model 3) you'll notice they are basically a single piece mechanically fit together. Not some sticker glued for style.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Right, it's always dependant on circumstances. I try to stress as much as possible that you always need to design things in such a way that even the dumbest, newest assembler will still be able to build it correctly. And often times we review drawings/instructions and find lots of poorly outlined procedures. But sometimes you get something like "The blue wire ran out, but I still had a bunch of light blue, so I just used that instead". It can be a killer.
gazelle21 3y ago
[dead]
brabel 3y ago
No... I've been a maintenance worker. If you needed "Engineering" to help you fix every problem you faced everyday in a production line, the Engineer would need to come to work with you every day. If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up" came down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a strong reason to do so as the company will be losing millions while you wait :). You just solve problems all the time, every day, and it's really up to the technician to know when something requires notifying Engineering or not. Notify too much and they'll get rid of you for being annoying... notify too little and shit like this can happen, but in the very large majority of cases, it doesn't.
- er4hn 3y ago
  I haven't been a maintenance worker, but I've worked as an SWE in a company with a large IT dept. Sometimes it's faster to work around them to find solutions to doing your job. Both sides have good intentions but the IT dept. cannot move nimbly. Same story everywhere.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  I don't have a problem with technicians solving problems. But as an engineer I would like to codify the solution so that A) we're implementing a controlled process and B) if there's a better solution out there I can make that recommendation or fix the system. When you take it upon yourself then problems only happen if you don't communicate.
- Freedom2 3y ago
  > If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up" came down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a strong reason to do so as the company will be losing millions while you wait Then what was the whole point of the Andon cable lesson that American manufacturers had to learn from Toyota?

rootusrootus 3y ago

Human nature. I run into this all the time. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked a user "Why did you not just mention this was not working right and you are working around it? We could have fixed this, but if you do not say anything it might be a while before someone on the dev team notices."

agumonkey 3y ago
There's something difficult about notifying problems. You might make people angry, you might feel like a moron because you misunderstood, or guilty because you worry how they feel.
- bgirard 3y ago
  Agreed. For me it's often the time it takes to find the contact to notify, start a conversation, update the conversation, wait for the issue to be picked up, wait for the software to be updated. Now repeat for everything you notice. If I did it for everything I encountered I wouldn't be doing my core work duty. It's more pragmatic the majority of the time to work around the issue and immediately get back to work.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  Wait, don’t car assembly lines have a big red button you can push if you find a defect? Haven’t they for many years? Does pushing that button really make everyone angry? That’s not how I had envisioned car manufacture at all.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    You're right, in some settings there's everything in place to ease communicating issues. But what if it's not something clear enough to trigger it ?
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      I completely agree with you that some errors could be missed if no one noticed them. This seems entirely separate from the idea that people could become angry if the line were stopped, but of course you are right.

HarryHirsch 3y ago

An unapproved in-production change of a safety-critical article is "no big deal" to them? That bespeaks a Boeing-like safety culture.

jmspring 3y ago
It seems typical Elon Musk to me.
michaelsshaw 3y ago
Tesla desperately wishes it could have the safety culture of Boeing.

ncr100 3y ago

I speculate in a Musk company, this "I will fix it" attitude would be promoted. "I sleep on the floor" .. "You're fired for not proactively fixing a problem I just thought of a solution to". Is my speculation off-base?

_ea1k 3y ago
There's an old story about toothpaste boxes and solving the empty box problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/2o9dho/the_empty_toothpaste_box_problem/ https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/2o9dho/the_emp... I've always suspected it was apocryphal. But just think, if the workers had installed that fan beforehand, we might be reading a story about how important workers are at solving little production problems. Everyone thinks this mentality of having workers fix problems is great, until they use soap to put glued parts on.

nabilhat 3y ago

It's a design error from the start. The workaround shouldn't have happened, but is only one of countless ways this would have inevitably happened anyway. Glue has a lot of failure modes. Correct application can't be reliably tested non-destructively. Product variances are often very hard to detect. Degradation with age and physical use can't be reliably forecast. Three pins on the back of that appearance plate that push into starlock style fasteners in the pedal are cheaper than the appropriate glue, faster to install than glue, more reliable, trivially verified, impossible to misalign, and that's why it's a common solution that auto manufacturers use in this exact application. This was a confoundingly stupid place to rely on glue.

Draiken 3y ago
This is an underrated point. A lot of focus has been put on manufacturing procedures when this could've been avoided entirely in design. IDK anything about manufacturing so I wonder if this was due to incompetence, to save costs, ignorance or something else?
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  Why not all of the above?
FredPret 3y ago
Correct - a great design is also easy / automatic to build correctly. This is vastly easier said than done when you have a complex product with many components. I remember reading about the original iPhone's manufacturing operations in China - how the Apple engineers spent a ton of time making sure that the right way is also the easy way for the factory workers.

themaninthedark 3y ago

Same, I work in manufacturing(not automotive but heavy construction equipment) and see things like this all the time. Workers think they understand/ don't think engineers understand or want to do it faster/easier than what they were shown. I have no knowledge of Tesla but here would be my guess: Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip it on. Story time: Called out to final assembly, machine starts and runs but not moving. Troubleshoot and find brakes not releasing. further troubleshoot and find it is due to pressure not getting to brakes(configuration is such that brakes come on if there is loss of hydraulic pressure). Replace hydraulic line, machine is working. Remove contaminate from line, no one know what it is. Assembly pointing fingers and saying sabotage. I walk around the assembly area, I find that paint decided to use packing peanuts to mask holes that the hydraulic fitting go in instead of masking tape as directed. The packing peanut tore while being removed and the assembly working inserting the fittings did not notice.

_ea1k 3y ago
> Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip it on. TBH, something like this might even get approved by a foreman. "Thanks for coming up with a clever way to save a few seconds on assembly!"

downrightmike 3y ago

Definitely not the Total Quality Management model. If management and engineers can't be bothered, this shit happens.

germinator 3y ago

It's easy to portray it as arrogance, but in manufacturing, you run into small problems and ambiguities all the time. By analogy to software engineering, do your bosses or clients give you water-tight, formal specs for the software you need to build? If they could do that, they wouldn't be needing you in the first place. We zero in on situations like that and pretend that it's the worker's fault for making the wrong call, but we ignore that if they didn't make the right calls a thousand times before, nothing would ever get done. In this case, if pedal cover is a friction fit and can slide off and get jammed in between panels, this doesn't sound like an assembly mistake but a pretty major design error, right? Your designs should be resilient. What if the owner sprays WD-40 on a squeaky pedal and the cover slides off?

Melatonic 3y ago
Exactly - especially in a TRUCK of all things. The pedal area should be expected to get getting all kinds of crud and crap in it and be cleaned regularly and be extra durable.

enaaem 3y ago

The fact that Musk publicly blames the fault on workers, shows that Tesla is already behind Toyota in philosophical thinking.

anon373839 3y ago

I don’t know anything about manufacturing, but the main thing that stood out when I toured the BMW plant in Munich was how ruthlessly efficient and regulated every step of the production process was. It’s hard to imagine there being any time for improvisation, or any ability for it to go unnoticed. Is Tesla’s production process just looser?