working with an engineer

Why does an engineer take a 1 hour job and turn in into a 3 hour job?

 

Trying different things?

Is there a punchline in there?

 

That’s how they’re engineered

 

Things can take a while



Don't ask me how I know

 

Because he’s not a state engineer.

If he was a state engineer it would be a six hour job.

 

<--- Engineer...

You sound impatient.

 

It was a simple job, throw bearing in oven, wait until it heats up. Measure shaft with out side mic. Transfer measurement to inside mic.
When inside mic. fits easily in bearing, take out of oven and place on shaft. That's how my supervisor showed me how to do it but he's out the rest of the week.

The engineer is measuring the shaft and then the bearing, saying he needs so much clearance, and then measuring everything again, then going to his office to check emails.
When he comes back he measures everything again. He measures something in mm and then says we need "thousandths" of clearance. Keep it simple, one or the other.

He wanted me to make a gasket for a plate. I had one made in less than ten minutes (not using his method). Let's not talk about the shim that I made and he kept confusing diameter and radius.
Keep it simple, the bigger hole is this size and the smaller hole is this size.

 

This doesn't sound like an engineer tbh

 

I’m an engineer. I’ve worked with good engineers, and bad engineers. I’ve worked with good techs, and bad techs.

Not much sense in generalizing, neither would have jobs without the other.

Plus, there’s two sides to every story! Why should we believe you do everything right!?

 

Wow! Your Engineers are that quick?!

 

I too am the enemy in disguise.
(USU College of Eng, 1975)
I did plans and calculations and wrote code for 45 years Until I retired in 2016.

I joke about the state engineers too much. BUT In my time I have worked with a lot of engineers who in their whole life have never really got dirty and built anything. A model airplane, or a birdhouse, or a dog house, . . . Nothing. No real hands-on life experience.

I didn’t understand this for a long time until our company hired a young guy who did drafting and programming.
Our backgrounds were so very different.

Dad was a technical guy but he was born poor, on the edge of Appalachia, and he taught me to fix my own bikes and cars and build simple stuff as a boy. I thought nothing of pulling transmissions in a junkyard during the summer while I was going to school. I built Volkswagen engines one summer and one I welded stainless plumbing in a cake factory.

The young fella we hired had growing up poor as well. Worse than me, his dad was an ordinary laborer who dug ditches and hauled trash for a living. He probably suffered a lot to send his boy to college, because he did not want to see his son grow up with dirt under his fingernails.

He was discombobulated when I came in to work one morning bragging about changing the axle in my Cadillac & going to the junkyard to pull my own parts. The guy had no clue why I would stoop to do that kind of work when I made my living as an engineer. And the fact that I actually enjoyed this work made him nuts.

Anyhow he was pretty good with computers, but he was a total flop as a designer, because he couldn’t figure out how to make things go together in a particular order so you could actually build something as simple as a tin building covered in fake stone.

He never learn to do that stuff as a kid because his father didn’t want him to grow up to be a “worker.”
—————————————————
My associates from the office are checking out the choir room of the new Central high school here in Fresno.

The engineers are easy to spot. Construction workers have stickers all over their stinky old hardhat. Engineers have clean white hardhats.

 

It’s the shoes that really give you away

 

LOL . . . yes it happens, but we were a pretty casual bunch. Suede Nikes, oiled Clark's, white sneakers . . .

The guys all normally kept hard hats & boots in the car.
I often rode a motorcycle to work, in boots, and I kept office shoes in my office. Just the opposite.

One curtainwall consultant showed up with a lovely small briefcase to the Anaheim Western Digital Tower meetings, and the only thing inside it was a cloth and shoe polish. He wasn't going to lunch with dusty brogans.

 

Are they an Industrial Engineer? Knew one of those and he was like this.

 

Like Utah State?

 

I think industrial engineer.
The company works on large gearboxes that are used in cement plants, flour mills, plastic extrusion and ski lifts.

 

Yeah that's what I thought. There's a reason IEs have a reputation.