Re: kids these days

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On 3/10/2024 3:06 am, Cursitor Doom wrote:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2024 16:45:37 +0100, Clive Arthur
<clive@nowaytoday.co.uk> wrote:
 

On 30/09/2024 19:11, john larkin wrote:
<snip>

 
If they get the DC part about right, I ask them for any other
comments. All sorts of things could be mentioned.
 
With the base looking at 5K, it's unlikley to oscillate. It would be a
miracle if any kid even mentioned emitter follower oscillation. Or
noise, or tempcos, or anything else.
 

 
Along with a colleague, I interviewed someone for a repair technician's
job a few years back.  Among the questions was a simple common emitter
single transistor stage which we asked him to explain.
 
He blew us away.  He knew *far* more detail than either of us.  Turned
out he was a shit-hot analog designer looking for a less stressful job
as he wound down to retirement.  He turned out to be brilliant at his
new job, and mentored a lot of younger people.  He left when the company
was bought by a large US corporation with the concomitant mind-numbing
treacle-wading bullshit. [Me too!]
 
[Among the other questions were to make an Xor using two-input Nands,
show a methodology for calculating a square root where that function
isn't available, and tell us at what temperature solder melts.]

 
You were lucky, then. Designers typically don't make good repair
technicians and vice-versa. The two types think in fundamentally
different ways.

 
One has to wonder why Cursitor Doom thinks that he knows. He isn't
either. Repair technicians typically have to work out why a device isn't
working, which is a process of forming hypotheses and testing them.
 
Designers tend to come up with hypotheses faster than repair
technicians, so they don't test them as thoroughly, but they do tend to
fix things faster.
 
At Cambridge Instruments the design engineers frequently got called in
when some expensive production machine wasn't meeting its performance
tests, and we frequently did well. We cost twice as much per hour as the
technicians, but a million dollar machine sitting on the production line
didn't make any money at all until we could ship it out.
 
Our chief engineer got shipped to America once to a machine that wasn't
passing it's acceptance tests, and solve the problem instantly by
recognising the ancient hydraulic lift that took him up to machine under
test.
 
It had an associated magnetic field due to the big lump of iron involved
and our machine was sensitive enough to the local magnetic field that
the lift going up and down messed it up.
 

Yes, a repair technician has the great advantage knowing that the item at
one point did work. Much more interesting/challenging is dealing with
production line rejects - apart from the usual pcb hairlines, diodes wrong
way, PNP for NPN etc my proudest moment was sleuthing a resistor network
that was mislabelled at source, instead of having one common they were
isolated, never used that vendor again and instigated goods inwards
electrical test.


--
piglet