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From: piglet <erichpwagner@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: kids these days
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2024 09:45:37 -0000 (UTC)
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Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
> 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.
> 

Yes, a repair technician has the great advantage knowing that the item at
one point did work. Much more interesting/challenging is dealing with
production line rejects - apart from the usual pcb hairlines, diodes wrong
way, PNP for NPN etc my proudest moment was sleuthing a resistor network
that was mislabelled at source, instead of having one common they were
isolated, never used that vendor again and instigated goods inwards
electrical test.


-- 
piglet