Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Sims
"Many everyday problems can be now solved with more concentrated technology that requires fewer actual degreed engineers. There are engineering firms that now have technicians taking the places of what PE's used to do(PE's still sign and stamp the plans after review)."
The problem is too many of these companies now have no degreed engineers. If the work gets much beyond getting the "drawings out of the drawers" and copying past work they produce technical disasters. Numerous times we've had to bail out vendors who's management thought they could do engineering with technicians - if the theoretical and analytical knowledge is lacking, the efforts degrade into "monkey see, monkey do." When we ask where the engineering staff is, we find they were allowed to retire without being replaced or were laid off! The so called concentrated technology merely permits sooner and more in-depth disasters. If PE's are signing off on engineering work done by non-engineers without throughly reviewing it (which means essentially doing it over in these cases) they and their employers are assuming significant legal and professional risk.
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Jim,
You can say that again.
As a Chemical Engineer (formerly in the Semiconductor business), I have seen
"Vendorneering" as a dangerous thing.
If it works, you are married to them forever since you do not really know what they did in that black box, and if it fails, you are left hung out to dry since they have already left Dodge.
Several of my former employers have tried this approach, and ultimately, we had to bring it back in house and engineering (me) and our technicians had to sort out the mess. In a worst case example, our management bought into a hot idea sold by a slick sales guy. They built and installed the equipment only to find it did not work. When you examined the actual data, the process was totally unworkable. Unfortunately they had already committed to this technology and we had to rebuild an entire new system in 30 days to allow us to run our factory. Mucho pain and very little gain.
It is a shame our career does not have the Glamour.