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Why do companies try to take patents out on standard schematics?
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Bassman59:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on November 08, 2021, 05:54:52 pm ---
--- Quote from: fourfathom on November 08, 2021, 04:41:57 pm ---I shudder at the idea of having my products constantly under "design review" whenever a random fresh engineer walked in the door.  We put together skilled engineering teams who designed complicated products.  The projects had formal and informal reviews all throughout the design and prototype process, and feature feedback from the field after release.  It would be a full-time job for a new-hire to review even a fraction of the designs in our products, not to mention the time required for the responsible design team to explain it all to the new-hire.  And then the new-hires wouldn't have time to work on the project we needed them on.

And what about the firmware, software, and the ASICs?  These designs are probably more error-prone than the board and schematic-level design.

--- End quote ---
I don't think anyone is talking about getting every engineer in the company, including graduates, to review every design. I just don't see the point in only allowing a small group of engineers to access the drawings/source code. Fair enough if it has a security classification such as restricted, or secret, but it's otherwise pointless. I see new engineers being able to access existing designs, as a good thing. If they do spot potential bugs and have suggestions about how something can be improved, then all the better.

--- End quote ---

Making the designs available to the new hires is always a good idea. Most things in any company are not completely-new products, so it is worth seeing what was done before. Then the new person can look at the previous work and even ask the engineers who designed it to explain why things are done the way they are done.

Why would a company not want to take advantage of this?
Cerebus:
Reviewing other people's, hopefully accomplished, designs is one of the best ways of educating yourself. Doing so with the expectation that one, as a fresh hire, is likely to find and fix faults with existing designs (as has been suggested as a benefit by some [OK, by one person]) is at best unrealistic, at worst driven by a huge overestimate of the skills one is bringing to the table.
fourfathom:

--- Quote from: Bassman59 on November 09, 2021, 08:16:16 pm ---Making the designs available to the new hires is always a good idea. Most things in any company are not completely-new products, so it is worth seeing what was done before. Then the new person can look at the previous work and even ask the engineers who designed it to explain why things are done the way they are done.

Why would a company not want to take advantage of this?
--- End quote ---

I agree with this, and as a green engineer I certainly learned much by doing just that. 

In my experience, we didn't hide the design materials from anyone in the company.  I was just uncomfortable with the thought of new-hires spending too much time on ad-hoc design review (and insisting that a stable design be "improved") and not enough time on doing what we hired them to do.
AaronD:

--- Quote from: fourfathom on November 09, 2021, 08:38:07 pm ---
--- Quote from: Bassman59 on November 09, 2021, 08:16:16 pm ---Making the designs available to the new hires is always a good idea. Most things in any company are not completely-new products, so it is worth seeing what was done before. Then the new person can look at the previous work and even ask the engineers who designed it to explain why things are done the way they are done.

Why would a company not want to take advantage of this?
--- End quote ---

I agree with this, and as a green engineer I certainly learned much by doing just that. 

In my experience, we didn't hide the design materials from anyone in the company.  I was just uncomfortable with the thought of new-hires spending too much time on ad-hoc design review (and insisting that a stable design be "improved") and not enough time on doing what we hired them to do.

--- End quote ---

Maybe I was too aggressive, but I had a more experienced engineer take offense at my attempts to try and get him to explain why he did something the way that he did.  I knew he must have had a good reason, so I wanted him to bridge the gap between my inexperienced solution and his.  ("Why not do it like 'this'?" with the emphasis on "why" instead of "do it", which I guess is how most people interpret that?)  Did he think I was trying to make him change a working design to do it my way instead???  That was never my intent.
fourfathom:

--- Quote from: AaronD on November 09, 2021, 09:12:14 pm ---Maybe I was too aggressive, but I had a more experienced engineer take offense at my attempts to try and get him to explain why he did something the way that he did.
--- End quote ---

In spite of my concerns here, I actually enjoyed explaining a design to a new hire.  And on occasion they would make an observation that did lead to an improvement.  But attitude is important, and in this thread I got the impression that some self-proclaimed hotshot engineer was planning to show the old guys how it's really done these days.  That is a recipe for a huge waste of time and misspent energy.

So ask smart questions, make reasonable suggestions, and don't be a jerk.  I heartily endorse that policy.  With that attitude I will open up the design files and gladly spend time with you.  But don't forget, we've still got a job to do.
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