General > General Technical Chat
A philosophical question - Is lateral thinking a valued trait in engineering?
<< < (12/14) > >>
Berni:
That sort of design work compartmentalization with lacking communication between departments is how a lot of idiotic designs come into existence.

The department in question just does whatever they are told and throws it over the wall to the next. They don't have a big picture view of what this thing is supposed to be so they just implement whatever the team before told them to implement. If it's something stupid they will design it in. The team after them might not know why some of these features ware in the design so they just work around them towards what they think this should do.... etc

By the end of it the product has some design features about it that seam completely backwards. Like a product clearly has hardware capability to do X but instead the software uses that hardware to do Y in some kludgy hacky way, even tho the hardware to do Y would have been simpler than hardware to do X
Cerebus:

--- Quote from: e100 on March 02, 2022, 10:06:14 am ---The first time I heard engineers talking about refactoring code I had no idea what they were talking about. It was only later that realized that it was just a fancy buzzword that could of been dreamt up on the Starship Enterprise.

--- End quote ---

It's pretty obvious that the origin of the term 'refactoring' comes not from some random desire to just make up fancy sounding words but from the mathematical term 'factoring' meaning "take out the parts that are in common in a lot of places and put them in just one place".
Circlotron:
At one stage I worked for ten years in a SMPS design lab as a technical assistant so I had no direct input to designs. There was this situation with putting 3mm screws though a heat sink extrusion into a device block and they only allowed for the screw to engage into that aluminium block three turns! I pointed out that that would strip the thread in the aluminium very easily, especially if it had to be dismantled and reassembled. I was shouted down with words to the effect that the production department should learn how to torque screws properly... Eventually the service dept complained long and hard enough for them to change it.

Another time I found that their new 3kW 54vdc resonant mode psu would overheat the hexfilar wound dual 70mm diameter toroids if the load was approx 3 amps because the resonant frequency and toroid losses reached a max. Problem did not occur at higher loads. No one would listen so I set one up on my bench and let it run until it was fairly smoking then went and got the boss. That finally got some results.
CatalinaWOW:
If the OP is still reading the prior post points out that listening is another valuable engineering skill, right up there with lateral thinking.  The more education and/or experience you have the more difficult this seems to be.  I know, because I have found myself guilty on more than one occasion.
RJSV:
   mc172 thanks:
   Beg to differ, just a little.
It's alright: This here (blog site) has, I don't know...picture(s) of a cat (or cats),
I posted an interesting BUG picture; No One objected.
We humans now, subject matter is 'all over the place'.
(I'd rather play / teach my GUITAR).

   So, here I am, keeping re-inventing, the wheel...while others become 'Card Playing' experts. I simply LOVE novelty, whether by my mind, or others.
I even DID re-invent, a wheel:

    Enter the 'Just in Time' SPOKE...it's a system to, in transit, disconnect each spoke in turn for missing any collision, with support columns that,
Poke through the wheel spokes...

   So, respectfully, I want to INVENT... It's not a quick easy path, I've been lucky (life and limb, literally)!

Thanks, there !
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod