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Resistance Of Reviews
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tszaboo:
PCB design reviews are a cheap and effective way of improving quality. That's easy. Everyone with half a brain understands this. When someone doesnt offer his design up for review, it is always for political reasons. The company recently hired an engineer, mediocre old fart with narcissistic personality disorder. Basically you cannot tell him that he is wrong about something. He will go as far as launch personal complaints against you with upper management. The answer for anything is: "It is this way, because I have 30 years of experience". Sure, all I hear is that he is old, and wrong at the same time. He also managed to offer review of my work, after with I had to spend days debunking why all points of the review was wrong. So there you go, neither of us should review each others work, because he will just write bullshit reviewing my work. And if I review his, then just dismiss everything because of his mental illness.

The industry -I'm working in now- requires review. It has to be reviewed by a second engineer at the company, and a Notified body, to make sure it is safe. No exceptions. And I mean it is a very deep review, with calculations, simulations, tests and so on, that could take months to do. Good luck getting around this.
Siwastaja:

--- Quote from: exe on March 10, 2020, 09:39:39 am ---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".

--- End quote ---

This isn't bad at all. When you have to "teach" them, you need to explain your choices carefully, going through your work. Their beginner questions make you think about the basis of your choices, and you need to actually demonstrate the viability.

It's the complete opposite when some "experienced" takes the role of a questioner based on their own opinions. You know they are wrong, and hence won't question your choices. Neither side learns.

The best would be to have some less experienced, willing-to-learn person who you work with explaining your choices, and then have some consultation from a really experienced guru (not a wannabe-professional) who has seen everything to know how not to fixate on small details of opinion. The availability of such gurus is low, however.

Reviews where you end up to heated argument about "if(condition)" vs. "if (condition)" every time are not only worthless, they destroy your ability to work, and finally, the company. I'm sure many of us have seen such processes; I'm not surprised if people develop a resistance of reviews due to this. Then they start fearing reviews. One really bad experience may be enough.

My issue has been the opposite: I'd like to have more actual reviews, but somehow no one has time to do it; there always is time to discuss non-technical and marketing, though. Then, out of the blue, there is some sudden premeditated attack about some completely made-up and stupid pseudo-technical point, by people who haven't even looked at the design. Something along the lines of "WHY DON'T YOU USE BLOCKCHAIN HERE?", in a context of analog amplifier, for example. (Made-up example because I still need to be very careful not to say anything actual, but this isn't too far from what I have really heard.)
Rerouter:
As the only skilled PCB designer at my work I usually have to go knocking on doors trying to get help reviewing things,

the self review after completing a project tends to take about 30% of the layout time if things are complex, e.g. is this part the right one for the job, is there any weird (1). notes that mean things don't work as designed, are those drill holes actually positioned correctly, etc.

Where as every other person I deal with says "looks good, just order it"

I've gotten lucky so many times where what was wrong is usually 2 components are a bit to snug for easy assembly, or a screw hole was 0.5mm off, and could be fixed with a file, I am good at self review, but it would be really nice to have someone else to bounce these checks off.
Nominal Animal:
(What exe and Siwastaja wrote above, is exactly the reason I volunteer to help Uni science students with their Linux laptop issues, and why I loved to answer some questions at StackOverflow and at StackExchange -- I didn't do the short-form copy-paste answers, but more like "here's how you solve this sort of problem" wall-of-texts there too.  I'd love to volunteer to that sort of stuff more in real life, but the blocker is that I don't use Windows, and there aren't many Linux users who need help, other than tutorials that already exist.)

(Also, I warmly thank anyone helping us beginners in the Beginner forum here, reviewing our first design schematics and boards.  You better believe we appreciate the reviews!)


--- Quote from: Rerouter on March 15, 2020, 01:16:37 pm ---Where as every other person I deal with says "looks good, just order it"
--- End quote ---
Yup.  When you know you are only human and make errors (and would appreciate help in catching them before they bite) but don't get any real feedback from others, it hurts more than name-calling in my opinion.

This is one of the cases where hard criticism works really, really well.  I mean, the precise kind: "this is absolute garbage and you should already know from X that this works much better".  Be hard, but specific; never vaguely nasty ("nah, you should learn board design first").

This works, because the hardness shows you are not pulling punches, and are spending the time and effort to poke at the design to check if it needs fixing.  Pointing out an occasional good solution or encouragement is a good "spice" on top, just to show you are not an antagonist; that the criticism is given in order to help the asker to produce better work output.
TimNJ:
At the end of the day, if something goes wrong in the field and you didn't let anyone else touch it, well, then the fault lands squarely on you. At the absolute very least, allowing people to review your work spreads the responsibility and liability across a group. Maybe that's a bit selfish, but it's true. And, on the opposite end, reviews will almost always improve the quality of the end product.
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