5 ms·
I've actually lived with a DRE for several months, and he's a drinking buddy of mine (works at GM too). The first thing you need to understand is the pressure D
by valarauca1 12y ago
I've actually lived with a DRE for several months, and he's a drinking buddy of mine (works at GM too). The first thing you need to understand is the pressure DRE's are under.
It sounds odd, but General Motors is a large and complex entity. Their release system is old and buggy, not to mention never completely overhauled, just constantly having more checks ticked on when ever a recall happens. This is actually true at Ford too, the Big 3 hold on to technology a lot longer then other companies. Ford's time clock system is still ran on emulated System360's using MTS a circa 1967 OS.
Lastly DRE's are more of a projects internal sales arm (they sell the product to management. A DRE's job is to also get the test results from the test engineer, get it to the management, take the managements complaints to the designers/hardware engineers, and relay the tests plans back to the test engineers.
Basically high technical middle management. Their responsibilities at some companies may involve actually writing test plans, sometimes not. I don't believe GM does directly but somebody under the DRE does this.
Ultimately the DRE is just the guy who gets all the forms to all the right people so he can push the plans into the system. And takes all the responsibility when a product fails. On top of that your normally managing 5-6 products concurrently, each taking 18-72 months to clear the system. Your work load is basically endless meetings 500+ email a day, and 100+ phone calls.
- swimfar 12y agoDRE=Design Responsible Engineer
- valarauca1 12y agoDesign/Release Engineer. Its just a middle management fall man who knows CAD.
- jcampbell1 12y agoDRE = Design and Release Engineer.
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y agoIt sounds like the automotive manufacturing industry is ripe for disruption. Enter the likes of Telsa Motors. Being able to focus on two or three products, getting them right, being 'agile'. Of course, for the agile new company to survive there has to be old cumbersome companies for it to carve a market from. I have a hunch there will be others, probably 'cheap Chinese knock-offs'[1] that will outperform the incumbents on price and quality. Hopefully the whole industry benefits. 1. I use the term 'Chinese' in this phrase to represent any state actor who can rapidly deploy, or incentivise, manufacturing capability at a significant discount to their Western counterparts.
- valarauca1 12y agoThe auto-industry isn't easy. The money involved in these industries is massive, far larger then tech as Ford arguably the middle of the big 3 has 50% more annual revenue then Microsoft (who beats Google), and owns more then 200 billion in assets. >Enter the likes of Telsa Motors I don't think we can call Telsa Motors a success yet strictly speaking. When its own CEO states its stock is overvalued we need to reconsider out position on the company. Telsa has only had 1 profitable quarter so far in its entire history. >I have a hunch there will be others, probably 'cheap Chinese knock-offs I'm not even gonna talk about problems with Chinese steel, Chinese quality control, Testing, etc. Lets just focus on sourcing. Developing a car's transmission costs roughly 5-10 billion dollars. Its so expensive to do that really no automakers do it themselves, same with engine designs. They share these collectively. To disrupt the industry you need cash, and a lot of it. Metal dyes are outrageous, 250k to 500k+. The initial investments a company needs to break into the industry is stupid high. On top of that, as an in-experienced new comer it'll be challenging to gain the public perception of having a higher quality product, as your first attempt may not be. Products in the Auto-industry typically have decade long life spans, with half a decade spent testing them before release. So your trying get 1 billion in angel funding, for a decade you won't even be profitable?
- weland 12y ago> Ford's time clock system is still ran on emulated System360's using MTS Fuck! MTS? The Michigan Terminal System? I haven't heard that being mentioned since I was, literally, a kid. Even IBM considers that obsolete, and IIRC even development stopped about 15 years ago!
- valarauca1 12y agozOS and SystemZ's are backwards compatible to System360 for a reason. IBM may consider a lot of old stuff obsolete but their customers don't. A lot of the Detroit Metro UUG (Unix Users Group, the LUG is very small) people like to find some of the old tech in the basements of Ford and GM and use it for show and tell :)
- weland 12y agozOS and SystemZ are indeed backwards compatible, and not without reason, but stuff like MTS really is obsolete. Or at least I think it should be (I'm not involved in maintaining such systems, I just enjoy collecting old computers)