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Man fined for criticizing govt using science, without a license
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james_s:

--- Quote from: splin on April 30, 2017, 10:19:58 pm ---A friend of mine is a Professor of electrical and electronic engineering at a major University; when consulting on power systems at Boeing he wasn't allowed to touch the controls on a scope and had to ask a technician (probably titled Avionics Engineer) to change a setting.  :palm:

More of a shop-floor union issue than anything to do with safety of course.

--- End quote ---


It's things like that which give me a sour opinion about unions. I mean I like the concept of a union, I know they do a lot of worthwhile things, but I can't take all the ridiculous and arbitrary red tape. I'm not going to stand around waiting because the guy who's job it is to perform some menial task is busy doing something else and I'm sure not going to wait for some idiot to adjust the settings on a scope for me. They should focus on the important stuff and not act like obsessive over-controlling parents. 
WA1ICI:
    "More of a shop-floor union issue than anything to do with safety of course."

A friend of mine from college reported a similar thing when he worked as an intern at Raytheon one summer in Massachusetts.  This was in the late 1970s.  He was always getting union grievances for doing things like rolling a scope from one side of the room to the other.  This is very stifling to design productivity.  One reason Silicon Valley is so dynamic is the lack of unions in most high-tech companies.  I'm not against unions in principle, but they are most needed in manufacturing, mining, and other dangerous jobs - not in holding a scope probe. 

However, there are major defense companies in Silicon Valley, the biggest being Lockheed.  I don't know if it was unionized, but it had the reputation of being extremely slow and stifling.  It's nickname around the valley was "The Lazy L".

- John Atwood

AndyC_772:
I had a similar experience in my first job. I was a student engineer at a well known medium-sized electronics company.

One job I had involved making a change to a PCB. It needed a couple of pins lifting, and a trace needed to be cut.

I wasn't allowed to actually make the track cut, though. That was the job of one particular operator in the manufacturing dept. A student engineer wasn't allowed to do this, because modifying PCBs was her job.

So, I handed over the board, pointed out the trace that needed cutting, and she set about it with a scalpel.

A minute later she handed the board back to me, and I checked it. The trace was exposed, but hadn't been cut all the way through, so I handed the board back.

She squinted at the board, scratched at it for a while longer, and handed it back to me. The trace still wasn't cut all the way through. (This wasn't a big, fat power track or anything - just an ordinary logic signal, probably 7 or 8 thou).

After the third time, the trace was still intact, but there was a deep gouge next to it, right down to the ground plane. Then it dawned on me.

She didn't know what was the track, and what was the gap between tracks. She'd been scratching furiously at the space between the track I wanted breaking, and the one adjacent to it. Any actual damage to the track itself had been accidental.  :palm:

I died a little inside that day.
CatalinaWOW:
Most of the places I worked were unionized.  I don't really know why, because the union did little for the guys in them (except for the drunks, druggies and lazy bums).  Even to the point of calling a strike once and then after a few weeks of no wages settling for a lower offer than they walked on.  I really don't know how they continued to collect dues after that.

As far as the silly rules about moving scopes and the like, I found that in general if you weren't an ass about it they didn't mind if you did small amounts of that stuff.  So leave the heavy, nasty jobs for them and do what it takes to be efficient.  I certainly didn't mind leaving it to a union guy to pick the potting off of a board.
james_s:
Like I said, I like the idea of unions, but I just can't stand all the petty red tape that seems to come with them. I'd rather be overworked and underpaid than get fired because I just can't stand to abide by a bunch of ridiculous rules and red tape. I like being versatile and flexible, I can't stand having my hands tied and not being allowed to do something that I'm fully capable of doing.
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