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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: kids these days
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2024 16:21:43 +1000
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On 3/10/2024 3:06 am, Cursitor Doom wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Oct 2024 16:45:37 +0100, Clive Arthur
> <clive@nowaytoday.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On 30/09/2024 19:11, john larkin wrote:
>> <snip>
>>>
>>> If they get the DC part about right, I ask them for any other
>>> comments. All sorts of things could be mentioned.
>>>
>>> With the base looking at 5K, it's unlikley to oscillate. It would be a
>>> miracle if any kid even mentioned emitter follower oscillation. Or
>>> noise, or tempcos, or anything else.
>>>
>>
>> Along with a colleague, I interviewed someone for a repair technician's
>> job a few years back.  Among the questions was a simple common emitter
>> single transistor stage which we asked him to explain.
>>
>> He blew us away.  He knew *far* more detail than either of us.  Turned
>> out he was a shit-hot analog designer looking for a less stressful job
>> as he wound down to retirement.  He turned out to be brilliant at his
>> new job, and mentored a lot of younger people.  He left when the company
>> was bought by a large US corporation with the concomitant mind-numbing
>> treacle-wading bullshit. [Me too!]
>>
>> [Among the other questions were to make an Xor using two-input Nands,
>> show a methodology for calculating a square root where that function
>> isn't available, and tell us at what temperature solder melts.]
> 
> You were lucky, then. Designers typically don't make good repair
> technicians and vice-versa. The two types think in fundamentally
> different ways.

One has to wonder why Cursitor Doom thinks that he knows. He isn't 
either. Repair technicians typically have to work out why a device isn't 
working, which is a process of forming hypotheses and testing them.

Designers tend to come up with hypotheses faster than repair 
technicians, so they don't test them as thoroughly, but they do tend to 
fix things faster.

At Cambridge Instruments the design engineers frequently got called in 
when some expensive production machine wasn't meeting its performance 
tests, and we frequently did well. We cost twice as much per hour as the 
technicians, but a million dollar machine sitting on the production line 
didn't make any money at all until we could ship it out.

Our chief engineer got shipped to America once to a machine that wasn't 
passing it's acceptance tests, and solve the problem instantly by 
recognising the ancient hydraulic lift that took him up to machine under 
test.

It had an associated magnetic field due to the big lump of iron involved 
and our machine was sensitive enough to the local magnetic field that 
the lift going up and down messed it up.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney