In article , Chris Cox says...

Huh. What kind of place did you work in? The places I worked (Gear
shop, mold shop) were exactly the other way. Once a program had run
once without crashing, it ran unattended except for part changes, tool
offsets, or whatever. Wasn't uncommon to have one person on two or
three machines.

There were a *lot* of part changes, and the parts
were pretty oversized for teh machines. Part ripouts
from the chucks were not uncommon and could trash a
machine in moments. [1] So the rule was that operators
had to stand by watching at all times. The cycle
times were quite short as well. These were not
bar feeder operations.

[1] typical part: ten inch diameter, 14 inch long
chunk of nylon, being turned at 3000 rpm.

Jim

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