On 1/3/2013 10:58 AM, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"jon_banquer" wrote in message
...
On Jan 3, 9:58 am, "Jim Wilkins" wrote:
... The college boys stopped
fighting them and made me the shop liaison, partly because if they
made too much trouble I could do the job at home or bid it out to
experimental shops I'd worked with in the past.

-For the twenty years I've been machining there has always been a wall
-between engineering and machining. I don't see any improvement coming
-in this area anytime soon.

I started at an auto industry custom machinery builder after the Army
and asked if I could try working up to engineer, so they ran me
through the sheet metal, machine shop, drafting and assembly
departments before apprenticing me to an EE. Then a recession killed
them so I've more or less repeated the process at several interesting
but risky startups. The result is that I can take a proposal and
budget and come back a few months later with a finished prototype
ready for production.

In my experience most of the non-technical employees in a high-tech
company are defensive and insecure about their jobs and need to be
handled carefully. The funny one was the way computer support reacted
to lab techs who knew considerably more about electronics and
computers but were too busy to mess with them. The IT guys couldn't
have been more wary of us if we had Doberman fangs.

Fangs like these? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF4H0WfuiM8 - about
3:53 into it.


--
Any more lip out of you and I'll haul off and let you have it...if you
know what's good for you, you won't monkey around with Fred C. Dobbs.