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Resistance Of Reviews

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vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: twospoons on March 09, 2020, 09:51:51 pm ---Design reviews really need to be enforced. They should be regarded as a critical part of the process.
Avoiding reviews can be the result of time pressure, or hubris, or simple lack of understanding the true cost of a mistake.
I guess nobody likes having their work questioned, but there's a certain maturity (nothing to do with age!) required to realise that no-one is perfect, especially one's self.

A company I currently contract to has been bitten in the past by a poor product design resulting in a high field failure rate - so they decided to do something about it. Not only has the review process been formalized, but the product goes through several stages of verification - by a team of engineers separate to the design team. The validation team is as big as the design team, and we test everything. Issues get reported back, to be fixed in the next iteration.  Nothing gets out the door until it passes validation.

Another company I worked for in the past had system involving chocolate fish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_fish).  In the review you could earn a chocolate fish for each design flaw spotted, and the designer had to supply the goodies. Incentive to make sure your work was perfect before review, and to really look hard at the other guys work.

--- End quote ---

With that regime, in the second to last  job I had before retirement, I would have been overwhelmed with chocolate fish.

As a person with many years spent working on equipment designed by competent EEs, the standard of design in tnis particular place was "sick-making".

Unfortunately, the "Senior" officers of the company had much of their self esteem invested in the way things were, liked a dumb, compliant workforce, & did not like being told by an "old fart" that they were doing things which were poorly thought out, & in many cases, unnecessary.

As a result, I became effectively, "an enemy of the State" as far as the bosses were concerned.
They even sacked me once, but were too useless to find a replacement, so asked me to stay on.

It was a lousy job, but OFs can't always pick and choose, so I "gritted my teeth" & stayed, until I couldn't stand it any more.

Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: vk6zgo on March 10, 2020, 02:05:43 am ---It was a lousy job, but OFs can't always pick and choose, so I "gritted my teeth" & stayed, until I couldn't stand it any more.
--- End quote ---
You described exactly the situation that made me break myself (burnout, depression) -- except I was the young whippersnapper (22-30 years old) with the actual knowledge (both real-world and theoretical -- I just happened to be in the right place at the right time for that), and the results to prove it; but not the real-world experience to deal with social games playing administrata and fake-it-till-they-make-it cow-orkers.  Not knowing any better, I thought I was doing stuff wrong, and what they did was perfectly normal and okay.

At one time the boss of my department told me straight to my face that they simply couldn't trust me at all, because they had a son my age, who was completely useless.  Apparently, I too must have been useless, because otherwise they would have had to question themselves as a parent and a teacher...

exe:
I rarely enjoy code reviews (I'm a SWE) because it's most of the time a fight of opinions. Because of this, I prefer to write less code and not do more work than absolutely needed. The paradox is, less experienced engineers often play much better in the team (comparing seasoned and opinionated professionals).

So, I'm skeptical about reviews unless goals and structure of reviews are well defined. That is, the feedback should be constructive, and it shouldn't be about personal opinions.
There is a lot of information on "how to do review right", but it doesn't help. People read such articles, think they got it, then they call their opinion as a "constructive feedback" with huge confirmation bias. So, no communication there, and a lot of stress and wasted time.

So, I prefer to work with less experienced people who are eager to learn and haven't grown big ego yet :). Of course it's not really about experience, it's about "soft skills".

Sometimes I see teams that somehow "click" to each other. Those people work well together. I wonder what's their secret.

PS Not sure how it works in electronics, I'm not a EE.

vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 10, 2020, 09:14:57 am ---
--- Quote from: vk6zgo on March 10, 2020, 02:05:43 am ---It was a lousy job, but OFs can't always pick and choose, so I "gritted my teeth" & stayed, until I couldn't stand it any more.
--- End quote ---
You described exactly the situation that made me break myself (burnout, depression) -- except I was the young whippersnapper (22-30 years old) with the actual knowledge (both real-world and theoretical -- I just happened to be in the right place at the right time for that), and the results to prove it; but not the real-world experience to deal with social games playing administrata and fake-it-till-they-make-it cow-orkers.  Not knowing any better, I thought I was doing stuff wrong, and what they did was perfectly normal and okay.

At one time the boss of my department told me straight to my face that they simply couldn't trust me at all, because they had a son my age, who was completely useless.  Apparently, I too must have been useless, because otherwise they would have had to question themselves as a parent and a teacher...

--- End quote ---

I was going to say that ageism seems to be applied from the middle out to the extremes of age, but on second thoughts, assumng they are unconsciously discriminating is giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Let's face it. they were just morons!

After a while, just as in your case, I began to question my worth--- you need a lot of confidence not to be influenced by constant disregard of your knowledge.

I could rant all day, but here are a couple of the dumb things they did.

The systems we were making translated OEM control signals into something the computer could use.
The prototype used plain old pots to do this, but all except one of the real controls used PWM.
Instead of converting these signals direct, they used the legacy design from the prototype, & fed the PWM
to  RC integrating networks.

The resulting analog signal was then passed through an Op Amp, where its amplitude & dc component could be adjusted to place it into the middle of the transfer function of an ADC.

To do this, we looked at the ultimate readout on a monitor, whilst "tweaking" the appropriate pots.
It was nightmarish, chasing the thing all over the place, while peering at a PC monitor halfway across the room.

I suggested we set one up correctly that way, look at the level & centreing with an Oscilloscope, record that, then set the adjustments up that way.
It may not have been "spot on" but would have minimised adjustments done with the final display.
This was  greeted with disdain.

OK, they didn't like that, so I thought I'd "lower my sights", & suggested they provide a small monitor on a
"wander lead", so we at least could do the adjustments their way without craning our necks to see what was happening on a screen across the room.

No joy on that one, either!

Another delight was a switch on which we had to painstakingly assemble a network of diodes, which was very difficult & time consuming.

No other switches, even though they used the same interface, had these diodes.
It seems that in the prototype, the "gifted amateurs" who designed it had anticipated a problem that the diodes were meant to fix.

When the problem didn't eventuate, they left them off all the other switches, but on the production units, they were slavishly reproduced on that particular switch.

I had a "win" on that one----I "buttonholed" one of the "real" EEs as he went past, & pointed it out to him.
The diodes were scrapped, but that was a "black mark" against me!

I better stop now, before I get too worked up, but there were many other things.
It seems that if there was a way to stuff something up, they would find it!

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: i_am_fubar on March 09, 2020, 03:40:16 pm ---I don't grasp the desire to not be challenged. It's essential to continual improvement.

--- End quote ---

Sure, but some people are either too confident or too insecure to handle that well.

That said, and as some have already pointed out, it's a two-way street. Some engineers are also notoriously annoying when they are participating in design reviews: overly lecturing, nitpicking, negative, dogmatic, etc. (that's something we can notice on forums too, including this one ;D )

This can ruin a team's mood, and eventually a team's work, and if you have any of those in your own team, it could explain why some colleagues don't like design reviews.

Barring that, IME hardware design reviews usually last a lot less time, are more to the point, and a lot more productive than typical software code reviews.




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