ABSOLUTELY!!! Let the engineer listen to the gripes from the assembly
workers in the break room

Heh, heh, true story: Years back, I worked in a boat store, sold a
particular brand of trailer that has a TERRIBLE tilt mechanism, had to
rework every one that we sold. I promised that if I ever got the chance
I'd tell the designer a thing or two (or 10!) A couple years later I was
interviewing for an mfg engineering job. We got to talking, guess who
had designed the offending part? I bit my tongue for at least 5 minutes.
I finally figured out how to politely say the design was c**p, he
allowed as how it was, asked how I would have changed it. I got the job.

Ecnerwal wrote:
In article ,
Nick Mueller wrote:

Wes wrote:

I'm a firm believer that engineers should spend some time as apprentices
making the things they aspire to design.
I know that some companies punish stupid or hard to assemble constructions
an engineer did by sending him to the assembly line and letting him do the
work for at least one day.

A smart company (try and find one of those) would do it as S.O.P.,
regardless of design "good" or design "bad" - the opportunity to see
what went right and what wrong, and what thing the designer thought
would help that's irrelevant, and what thing the designer thought would
be easy that's hard - all these are important.