The Most Damning thing in Engineering IMO!

[Richard Goodrich]

To me the most damning thing in engineering is when something works for the wrong reasons!   It leads you - especially the "new players" to wrong conclusions!

And it is HELL to explain to management!    Who think because it worked once it must be good practice.   Like to hear Dave comment on how he has managed or FAILED like to me to handle this truth!

[EEVblog]

Yep, I've had that happen on quite a few occasions.
More often though it is when something doesn't work (like an intermittent fault) and you find a entirely plausible culprit, fix it and then you don't see the problem again. So you think you've cracked it, and then management get a bit PO'd when the problem rears it's head again because it was something else (or another part of the problem) and Murphy is just screwing with you...

Dave.

[vk6zgo]

Or when someone else finds a "plausible culprit",& is feted for the wonderful job they did,while you are still saying:
"But,I don't think that is it!"
You then become regarded as a "Naysayer",& frowned upon by Management.
Your colleague goes on to greater things,& when the problem arises again & the so-called "fix" doesn't work.you get the  blame!
Management don't have a long enough attention span to reason through the sequence of events,so you still end up being regarded as the "incompetent whiner!"

[EEVblog]

Or when someone else finds a "plausible culprit",& is feted for the wonderful job they did,while you are still saying:
"But,I don't think that is it!"
You then become regarded as a "Naysayer",& frowned upon by Management.
Your colleague goes on to greater things,& when the problem arises again & the so-called "fix" doesn't work.you get the  blame!
Management don't have a long enough attention span to reason through the sequence of events,so you still end up being regarded as the "incompetent whiner!"

Whiner was my middle name! 

Dave.

[SeanB]

Dave Whiner Jones, it just does not ring true...........

All to easy to go down the wrong path and enter a world of pain.

[T4P]

Like the "Flying Pig" Award of Dave Jones 

[mtkaalund]

Or when someone else finds a "plausible culprit",& is feted for the wonderful job they did,while you are still saying:
"But,I don't think that is it!"
You then become regarded as a "Naysayer",& frowned upon by Management.
Your colleague goes on to greater things,& when the problem arises again & the so-called "fix" doesn't work.you get the  blame!
Management don't have a long enough attention span to reason through the sequence of events,so you still end up being regarded as the "incompetent whiner!"

He he, I had an experience as my first job, where I had to do the hardware to sniffing X10 components, and there was a problem the software engineer had, the timing was off, and he had sad to management that the problem lied in the hardware. So I looked in to the problem, and it was because of they taken the timing of a 60 Hz signal instead of an 50 Hz signal, even tough I had measurements that confirmed this, the management told me to fixed it in hardware.

After two weeks I was branded as an naysayer and they finally fixed this problem in software, then it worked of course. But this was really an bad experience for me, and I learned that you need to get management on your side, before you can convince them of where the problem is.