Sorry for theft of this thread.
Warsim:
I'm convinced every high tech company (at least in the USA, maybe world) has drank the 'koolaid' (for those wondering, this is reference to the jonestown massacre) of dogbert consultation. No managers need to have IP knowledge of any thing for the engineers they manage. So you end up with managers changing jobs every few years as this was good for their career. And it was encouraged.
My last group head (direct report for me), came from the auto industry in factory operations (circuit assembly). He didn't have a clue about avionics safety.
My sad point is, I left at a low in my career, and do not have any proud thoughts that I made the product better. The company changed into something that did not allow this. And getting new talent that can do this won't happen as the company is not managed in a way to keep people for a life career. They froze the pension in 2004. And at that time, killed it for all new hires. And they advertised they could buy any talent they needed. Ya right, e.g. design a fail operational auto-pilot that you can show by analysis, has a probability of less then 10e-9 fails/hour (regulatory requirement) of a common mode design error that will cause a catastrophic event. You don't get that talent from the consumer electronics, auto industry, appliance design industries (or newbees out of school). You will only get that from a company that has designed that equipment in the past (has years of IP doing this, by evolution of many smart engineers).
Good luck finding a competent place of work.
For the connector issue, I could not get anyone to listen during the proto type build stage. Then we delivered for flight testing. The Cusomers complained, but this fell on deaf ears. There were so many software bugs that were high on the list of things needed for flight test. I tried getting the new ME interested in doing something to modify the LRMs (line replaceable modules) and cabinet lead in structure, but too new of a kid to understand that it was going to be a long term field issue. Inertia of the many fielded systems, and the lack of desire to fix. I even tried getting her interested in a special lever (a paint can opener device). I left 15 months ago, I don't think there is a certified customer yet with a large count of airframes. First customer was just starting deliveries of a biz jet, which typically don't get high hours of flight time like a commuter or air transport customer.
I believe that I was good at designing human factored interfaces. Easy to assembly and maintain, easy to test, easy to install and remove. But you have to have a say, and that takes smart managers that know you, and have a long relationship with you, and that is what changed.