this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Well, there's another side to this, of industrial ergonomics. The system assembled\built is supposed to be easily divisible with clear documents into simple non-ambiguous tasks which can be given to those blue-collar people. If the engineers designing it failed at that stage, you can't blame blue-collar people for not being able to grasp something above their pay grade. They should be shown a few pages with "screw that with this, grease with such amount of that" and that should be enough.
Ergonomics seems to be having its own dark ages as an area these days. Both in consumer and in industrial stuff.
I don't know about that, we have the same problem in civil engineering. At some point you just have to say that if someone can't read a drawing and do what it says they are not doing their job properly. If that means you need an engineer on site to read and interpret the drawing for people who can't or won't read then so be it.
As an engineer who documents things compulsively and spends a large amount of time ensuring my documentation is clear, nothing pisses me off more than when people refuse to read documentation. I am hired to perform technical tasks, not to read documents I already wrote for others. It's like people are illiterate or unwilling to spend any amount of time parsing data to find what is needed.
How close do you work with your users?
Very. I'm on the floor with them every day.
I'm so, so sorry. There should be buffer peeps that understand both sides at least a bit. What works in CAD doesn't always work in the shop, what the shop wants isn't always something that meets reqs. I've seen both fuck shit horribly.
If you ask for an intermediate you get a manager favorite that isn't useful. Corps are inherently inefficient. It's a shitty life.
Yeah that's exactly how I feel about it as well. Concrete spec is the classic one, you write a spec saying what you want and ALWAYS get a TQ back saying "hey can we use this completely different type of concrete from the supplier?". Complete waste of time.
In aircraft, with unions, that always falls on the company. Management is too busy sucking the next level's dick or too fucking stupid to do anything but shuffle problems. It's special.
I think unfortunately most people shy away from technical things including reading technical documentation. The answer to that problem is to have someone in the team on site who does read it and supervises all the people who can't or won't (i.e. an actual engineer). I can see how the profit motive drives companies to cut these people out but it should be seen as essential part of the process for safety reasons.
In civil / structural engineering, quite a lot of UK legislation and codes of practice has been developed following government reports into engineering failures, such as:
Loddon Bridge disaster --> Bragg report --> BS5975 code of practice for temporary works design
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loddon_Bridge_disaster
West Gate Yara bridge collapse --> Merrison Report --> system of independent design checking and competency requirements
https://www.istructe.org/resources/blog/learning-from-history-box-girder-bridges/
I'm not an aerospace engineer but I'd like to think that something similar will happen in this case, although to be honest I'd be surprised if the legislation doesn't exist already.
In industrial engineering we do do that and we break it down into plain English. And sometimes they even make the operators actually fucking read what we wrote
Think about it this way. Nobody starts off knowing or having mastery of a task. Military aviation works on this principle. That a person should get an MOS out of boot, go to school to learn some basic background about the job (ideally), or to a training command to learn the hands on about the job and then school later. Taking an 18 year old who's never turned a wrench in their life and turning them into something of a subject matter expert in approximately 4 years.
But that's still 4 years to train that person with no prior experience. And experience is what keeps things running. The aviation industry as a whole is just hemorrhaging people. Experienced people are retiring every day and there's not enough new people coming in.
Back in the day my father used to do piece work machining for Eton and McDonnell Douglas. He's in 74 now. The median age of most of the guys I work with? 55. I'm on the maintainer side of things so I don't know about the manufacturing side. But what I do know is that even having an engineer on site doesn't always trump having experienced people to teach the job, supervise it, and fill in the disconnect between engineers and maintenance or builders.
So while I wholeheartedly agree that it is possibly and even expected that instructions should be made so that a novice can follow them, that's not the whole picture.
And there is a disconnect. Working from engineering drawings can be a nightmare. Some engineers have never walked the space they are making the drawings for. They don't know the problems that can crop up when they want someone to install wiring through a solid bulkhead or a wet sealed area like a lavatory. They ignore the fact that this wiring can't interfere with the hydraulic lines running from this bulkhead to this frame. These are problems I've run into and only experience has told me that hey, this isn't right, we shouldn't do that.
Yeah I don't disagree with what you're saying, we don't put fresh grads on jobs without adequate supervision on the design side either. On both sides of the "fence" you need the experience to produce a good product; the two jobs are different and should be complimentary.
The schemes I have worked on that have been the most successful have had the designer and contractor working together closely from an early stage to produce something that works well, drawing on the past experience of both to anticipate potential issues and design them out.
Personally it took me about 6 years before I felt I was good at design. Experience really does count.
I'm blue collar and deal with that sort of thing. In the last ten years it's actually gotten worse. It's like we're giving them tooling that's more "they can make it work" than something with an obvious interface. Things I think are pretty basic (give mechanics star knobs, not bolts) are just fucking ignored. Tooling should get out of the way of your job as much as possible, not require even more tools to manage it.
This isn't just putting shit together, though. Most assembly tasks aren't tight tolerance, but they always involve multiple specs that each person is supposed to at least know about. I haven't been through production training, but the production people I interact with scare me sometimes, and it's not their fault if the importance of quality isn't adequately explained.
But I made it clear I wasn't blaming them in the first post, so I'm not even sure where that came from.