This Angry (wannabe) Engineer in me thinks it’s time!
In most cases you should not be designing something for which you have no practical field experience with. I spent most of my life literally building or working stuff designed by others. I have lots of examples to share. I’ll start with yesterday’s: My dehumidifier for my office.
If you have never had to clean a dehumidifier, you have NO BUSINESS designing parts for one. First off, cleaning the waste water tank. Could you make it harder? Certainly! Add lots of nooks and crannies. And how about EASY access to the coils to clean them which is needed more often than anyone does.
This is just one of too many cases of poor design or designs that almost got it right, like my game pad that needs down pressure to activate my “opposable thumb’s” key switch shown in upper left of this pic.
This is actually a discussion I have had with many lead engineers. One thing we’ve all noticed is that many of today’s junior engineers have little, if any, practical experience on the equipment they’re designing. Many times they aren’t taking into account the constraints that happen after the fact due to maintenance, which is what I feel like most engineers today ignore. The thought process seems to be either it will never break, or they won’t be the one having to solve how to bend over backwards in a 120-degree space while balancing on their head and reciting the alphabet backwards just to accomplish what could have been done in a far more manageable way.
Personally, I think every engineer should be paired with a lead technician or maintenance team for at least a year before they’re allowed to start designing equipment. Not because they aren’t smart, but because there’s no substitute for seeing what actually happens once that equipment leaves the drawing board. After you’ve spent a year trying to replace a simple component that takes four hours to reach because someone designed it with zero thought toward maintenance, you start thinking, “Why on earth would I design something like this?” I think that kind of experience would make engineers think a lot more about the people who actually have to maintain and repair the equipment after it’s built.
My last car was a Skoda Octavia. You’d think with all those brilliant European Engineers they would have had it nailed down.
What’s one of the few thing an average driver has to do in terms of regular maintenance?
Top up the water for the windscreen washers.
The crazy thing, well I thought anyway - they put the hinge for the support rod right in front of the fill cap. There was no way I could use a bottle to fill it up whilst the support rod was up / fixed. It totally perplexed me how they would design it like that.
Engineer paired with the lead tech. Great idea. Should absolutely be a thing. Intern with a field service tech for a year before you get your credentials.
You can have the schooling to do design work but what truly makes a “designer”?
I worked my repair biz on RVs for 9 years. What people don’t know is they build them from the inside out. Often they screw the furnace to the floor then build the cabinets over and around it. Why? Faster.
The could cut an outside door kit access to service it but that would cost them $100 with a door “kit”? Do you think they would do it? No more often than yes.
Occasionally you have to cut cabinets to get the furnace out. Even on >$300K rigs.
If it was my company and I took one of my rigs out to camp with my family and the furnace died, and the local RV tech I hire to fix it says “I have no choice but to cut your cabinet to get it out to fix it”… (Been there done that more than once ). I’m packing up going home and guess what happens when I return to the factory on Monday? The design team/engineers will be all on the factory floor and given 45 minutes to fix it! No furnace should take more than that to diagnose and fix.
I have literally had to do things like remove ovens and cut cabinets to get to furnaces in RVs. And it occasionally it gets worse than that,
The crap I have seen in 45+ years working.
I actually thought about starting a design review company. Send me your product before you release it. If it passes angry old man test you have a winner! A guy could make money just reviewing instructions and manuals for foreign companies before they are released in the US. I won’t name any “China”… oops.
). I’m packing up going home and guess what happens when I return to the factory on Monday? The design team/engineers will be all on the factory floor and given 45 minutes to fix it! No furnace should take more than that to diagnose and fix.