Weekend Journal — Vendor Relationships
This weekend I had a buddy in town who I’ve known since childhood. It was great getting to hang out with him. But in one of the great ironies of the universe, it came to pass that my best friend is also what sometimes ends up being a perfect foe for an engineer: a purchasing agent. In reality, we work for different companies and work in drastically different industries. So while there could be tension, it usually only comes up as a function of our discussions about what engineers should do and how purchasing agents should act. But on today’s topic, our contention came to a head: My purchasing friend says that I should not maintain relationships with vendors (platonic, of course). I should not allow them to buy me lunch occasionally. I should not accept sample kits from them. I should not talk to them other than in official capacities for work. I’ve written…
Doublespeak and Placing Blame
I’ve been on some extensive travel lately and as Chris Gammell related travelling for engineering is no easy task. Making sure you have all your necessary test equipment and access to all the resources you might need involves a lot of planning. But sometimes things just don’t work out in your favor. I’ve talked about testing to failure before. However, plenty of times when you are not anticipating failure it happens anyways: Murphy strikes again. The problem is in dealing with your failure. Very often it’s unclear whether you caused a component to fail or whether you had a bad component to begin with. Miss MSE just talked about how engineers need to be good storytellers. Unfortunately there’s very often no good story to tell. If it was your equipment that caused the failure (but you can’t figure out how) that sort of implies you’re due for future failure. Or…
Weekend Journal — CSI: Component Stupidity Investigator
I often say that troubleshooting is the main skill I possess. My day job requires interfacing with manufacturing and trying to help them solve problems from time to time (among other things). And recently while working on an issue, I’ve come upon one of the most difficult problems to solve: component level problems. The hard part about component level problems is narrowing down and eliminating all of the other potential problems in a circuit board. There’s always temptation to look at a problematic part of a circuit and immediately declare, “These parts are no good. Get me the vendor on the phone so I can yell at them!“. However, that would have you chasing ghost problems and wouldn’t make you any friends at the part manufacturer or distributor. No one likes their product being accused of being shoddy, nor do they like chasing problems you have fabricated because you were…