Good story, Glen
...the days when American industry actually 'made things'
Must have been a fun place to work
73, Ted
K7TRK
-Original Message-
From: amsat-bb-boun...@amsat.org [mailto:amsat-bb-boun...@amsat.org] On
Behalf Of Glen Zook
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 3:49 PM
To: Thomas Doyle; AMSAT-BB@amsat.org
Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: Lessons I learned the hard way
A number of companies, in which upper management have been engineers, suffer
from the fact that most engineers are not completely satisfied when products
are released.
When I went to work for the Collins Radio Company, right out of college at
the new corporate headquarters in Richardson, Texas, Art Collins had a
very bad habit of coming up with minor production changes to equipment being
manufactured and insisting that these changes be made before the equipment
shipped to the customer. Then, before all those changes had been made, he
would come up with still other changes. This caused no equipment being
shipped and, therefore, no income to the company.
To get around Art's changes, every division had an Art project to keep him
occupied and away from equipment that was really intended to ship to
customers. The Art project items were never intended to ship. But, by
keeping him away from the real production, equipment was being shipped and
there was income to the company.
Glen, K9STH
Website: http://k9sth.com
On Monday, May 12, 2014 11:57 AM, Thomas Doyle tomdoyle1...@gmail.com
wrote:
When I was a young engineer working for Motorola Communication Division in
Chicago I recall a meeting where the engineers met with upper level
management on the release to production of a UHF mobile radio. Each engineer
had some additional tests they wanted to perform before it was released to
production and out of our hands. After listening to our concerns for a
fairly long time he said - If it was up to you engineers we would never
release anything to production and we would have nothing to sell and we
would not have any money to pay you with. Never forgot that.
Any engineer worthy of his salt is never 100% sure about anything that is
going into an environment they can not control. The problem comes in when
there is suddenly more time to do additional testing and the time is used to
try out fun exciting new things rather than the much less interesting and
often boring testing and refining the existing product. I do hope the hard
working FOX crew takes advantage of the time they have been given to make
sure everything is right with the good work they have done rather than
trying out some new fun interesting things that could wind up flying without
adequate testing. We need something that works not necessarily the latest
trendy technology gadget. I have seen this happen with unpleasant results in
other non-AMSAT projects. In any event thanks to the Fox crew for their hard
work.
W9KE Tom Doyle
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