OT: What it's like to be an engineer....

Saw that the day before I had a ridiculous "discussion" with one of our salesmen and his customer in which the salesman was agreeing to everything the customer said they wanted, even though well over half of it was not only completely pointless, but was (is) likely to INCREASE the chance of failure. All during the meeting I kept thinking about "transparent red lines with green ink, all perpendicular". Kept me from going insane...
 
What is so sad is that these people exist and are 9 times out of ten calling the shots.

definition of an expert :- an ex is a has been and a spurt is a drip under pressure.

Steve
 
I have never been afraid to say BS.

Yep...
I've sat in on that meeting more than once. ;)
You should just say it won't work and walk away.

A long time ago I had a job interview at Northrup in LA. The interview was for a project that was going to interpret voice commands from fighter pilots into commands for the jet and fire weapons.

I told the project manager that it wouldn't work. Obviously I didn't get the job and didn't want THAT job. That was about 28 years ago. 28 years later they might be able to do it. What does "Oh #$%!" translate into? Eject?!!! oops!

Now for the obvious part. Could you imagine playing pong by voice command? I use the example pong because that is about all we had back then for video games.

I have to tell people that what they want to do is impossible or practically impossible quite often.
 
Originally posted by Peter Nachtwey:

Could you imagine playing pong by voice command?

The only way I could think you could make this anywhere near fast enough is to base it on tone and volume. In a window above a specific tone is up, in a window below a specific tone is down. Volume sets speed.

Keith
 
Hey Peter,
By the way where is the link to that vision controlled pong playing machine of yours? Would like to see it, I head about it more than once at the Boot Camp.
 
Shucks, guys, why is that meeting any problem? Let's see! Two red lines, two green lines, three transparent, all perpendicular. It's easy to make two red lines and one green one all perpendicular to each other. Then just draw the last green one anywhere. As to the transparent ones, who cares where they are anyway.

The key is to add an attorney to the meeting. Just say yes to everything and let them prove your solution isn't what they wanted! Or, to put it another way, why burden yourself with making it work when you can burden your opponent (that would be customer in most cases) with proving that it won't work!

Please don't take me serious here. Probably best to laugh or snicker and move on!
It's just a streak of bitterness on my part!
 
By the way where is the link to that vision controlled pong playing machine of yours? Would like to see it, I head about it more than once at the Boot Camp.
I don't understand. I don't have a vision controlled pong system. What I said is could you imagine playing the 1980s game pong using voice commands.

If you mean, show a like to vision table tennis robots then here is one but I had nothing to do with it.
http://youtu.be/OnHe1kHYJyY
Note, the match was staged. Timo Boll could easily beat that robot. The robot can't read spin. Timo could just spin the ball so much the robot can't keep the ball on the table. Timo Boll could serve short where the robot couldn't reach.

BTW, my hobby is table tennis. It is good exercise.

I have a table tennis robot that will shoot balls for practice. It is programmable but it doesn't have a vision system. It has a net that I hit balls back into so the balls can be recycled.
 
"Can't we just..."

I don't even want to get started on how Engineers/Technicians/Designers die for the sins of sales people!
 
Actually, this is a good topic. Sales people get a commission or percentage of the price of the project. If they got commissions on the profits they would think twice before promising the impossible.

I've seen so many projects fall victim to horrendous re-work and re-design costs to meet the promises made to clients. On a few occasions requests have been ok'd without consulting the technical side with the attitude that it'll be fine, and a solution will somehow appear without added time or resources.

I was on site last year and one of the Engineering Managers of our clients told me "Your company needs to say no sometimes. This should have been 2 machines. It's too much for one machine to do, and we should have been fine with that."

If only...
 

Similar Topics

Hello all, I am looking for advice as I set myself for this new career path. I need advice on a couple of things. What sort of tooling will I...
Replies
9
Views
599
found one control engineer job, its job requirement: "control engineer responsibilities: Responsible for planning and supporting all phases of...
Replies
17
Views
2,172
Dear All, [Fire Water Automation Project] Please share the price Estimates for the Rockwell Automation Software's:- >>PLC Configuration...
Replies
2
Views
600
What do you guys think of this representation for on/off contacts? C003 is on, then others are off. I have never seen the logic represented in...
Replies
5
Views
1,776
Hello Everyone, What are the Necessary Skills and Softwares that an industrial automation engineer need to learn well and master ? Thanks in...
Replies
20
Views
4,901
Back
Top Bottom