Blatantly stolen fro JoNova’s.
Fortunately I mostly worked in aerospace and this sort of thing was kept to a minimum. But I did work with some college trained commercial engineers once who were convinced that rubber springs had no hysteresis. And another college guy who thought that drawing power in pulses caused no additional losses compared to DC. So I guess in fact I have been to that meeting.
And please go to JoNova’s for more war stories.
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7 responses to “Rational Engineering”
I had a marketing manager hand me a spec for a audio amplifier that categorically had to be DC coupled and categorically have an output transformer.
My response was that I’d really like to help but it’s physically impossible. (note: this was for a PA system, he also wanted frequency response from DC to 200kHz and .01% distortion)
Anyway his response was “you effing engineers are just lazy” My idiot manager sat there nodding his head.
MMM,
Very funny.
To toss in a few more retarded manager anecdotes:
Manager A never heard of dimensional analysis.
Manager B who I interviewed with was very proud of what he thought was a low noise amplifier he designed. He had picked a low voltage noise op amp. Problem was it was working from a 50 k source and he ignored the rather large current noise from his op amp. I tried to explain noise matching impedance and that a slightly higher voltage noise part with much lower current noise would yield a total noise figure about 10 dB lower. I think he thought I was making it up. It’s in app notes from all the major linear manufacturers. (btw, National’s is best). Anyway, a large part of the reason I turned down that job. I don’t think he knew what 1/f noise is either.
Speaking of dB, manager C totally screwed up a decibel calculation that went into a proposed standard that he was writing. He had to retract the whole thing and start over. This was after I had explained to him exactly how to do decibels.
As if that’s at all difficult, anyway.
For a punch line, I saw a paper published by an engineer at Rustrak that claimed every ESD simulator on the market had half the current output the manufacturers claimed. First hint something was a little off was that he continuously spelled “attenuator” as “antennuator” But the turd in the punch bowel was when I realized his whole premise was based on not understanding that a 50 ohm source (resistive) working into a 50 ohm load loses 6 dB, where he got the claimed 2:1 error from. So much for peer review.
Which is why I generally prefer the company of engineers. But as you point out a rather significant number of engineers are not competent. Ah. Well.
Yeah, fellow engineers, physicists and jazz musicians.
I have a theory why so many engineering managers are such ignorant fuckwipes.
I read a report that claimed it takes an IQ above 130 to be a good manager. There just aren’t that many. iirc that’s about 1 part in 1000. Next problem is that it’s not much more difficult to manage a large company than a small one, but the large companies can pay much higher salaries. So, the kinds of small companies I’ve spent my career at wind up with the dregs. Add to that the kind of engineer likely to be promoted to manager in a small company is a low-life, brown-nosing jerk.
OTH, the large companies won’t talk to me, I don’t have the right credentials, and I will not kiss ass.
I left one out. I had to try to work with an engineer who apparently wasn’t too familiar with Ohm’s law, and absolutely had no idea what a ratiometric measurement is. He kept telling me the absolutely wonderful system A/D converter he picked could self calibrate itself to .05% accuracy. Never mind it was only 10 bits. What I pointed out to him was that, according to the data sheet, the internal reference it was self-calibrating to was only +-6% accurate. Therefore the converter could only be accurate to +-6%. I got lectured on how stupid and ignorant I was. Oh, he also could not understand that along with power ratings resistors have voltage ratings that supersede the power rating.
To top it off when he suddenly quit a few months later he took my favorite oscilloscope with him. I raised that Tek 475 from a baby.
Hey, is the hysteresis in rubber springs related to the Nyquist noise in damped springs?
The rubber spring was a membrane in a differential pressure sensor. The boys I was working for couldn’t figure out why the membrane position was path dependent. I proposed putting some “noise” in the mechanical system (actually a 1KHz osc coupled to the diaphragm magnetically) to overcome the hysteresis. It did add significant cost relative to the overall cost – but it solved the problem.
After a while I just went on to solving some other problems they had. They just couldn’t get it. I had no degree. They were better “educated” than I was.
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“Nyquist noise in damped springs” – never heard that one before. But it made me do some looking.
http://www.kaajakari.net/~ville/research/tutorials/mech_noise_tutorial.pdf
Good thing too as I’m planning an accelerometer board.
Laughed my head of at that video.
After moving overseas I shifted from engineering to technical documentation and training – making use of my English skills.
Unfortunately that often lumps me with the marketeers… My “favorite” was the female marketing director who wanted to sell integrated CAD/CNC systems using a Puss-in-Boots character as mascot…. because “cats are portrayed as clever in world mythology”.