Page 6 of 6 FirstFirst ... 23456
Results 76 to 86 of 86

Thread: Hand tool speed i

  1. #76
    Join Date
    Aug 2010
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    5,582
    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Koepke View Post
    My strangest encounter with management was when my position was a final test technician. The assemblers were being trained on a new line of equipment and there was need for someone to work as an assembler on the old lines. Having been an assembler on previous jobs they decided to pick me to do the assembly. All of a sudden the test techs were getting through the preliminary testing much quicker. It turns out my assemblies were put together closer to the tolerances than what the assemblers would do. The techs were checking the paperwork and picking my assemblies to test when available because it was less work to get them set up for the burn in phase. The manager came to me and told me she couldn't have me doing better work than the regular assemblers. It kind of shocked me at the time.

    Years later on another job when my job was to rebuild ticket transports for ticket vendors the group manager at the time was glad that the installers were looking for my tags on the rebuilds because they new they would work first time every time. Before that the shop steward had the attitude of, "heck, if it doesn't work just go get another one." Most of the time that would mean packing it back up and getting on a train to another location where they were stored. My complaints didn't help a whole lot. Just a difference of opinion, my idea of job security is doing a good job right. His idea was having no problem with doing the same job over because it was messed up the first time.

    When kidding with friends about my old job and what is missed the most, my reply is, "the naps."

    Sometimes having a union is good, other times it is just a way to keep the misfits employed.

    jtk
    I suspect the reason they picked a tech for the job you described is precisely because they needed better results in the first place. This is not all that uncommon of a method used by managemnent to set things right. The question is, how long did that go on, and did they utilize you to train the real assemblers?

  2. #77
    Join Date
    Dec 2015
    Location
    Dublin, CA
    Posts
    4,119
    Quote Originally Posted by Pat Barry View Post
    Now that is a story with an unanticipated ending. I can't imagine it that way just yet. Glad it worked out for the better though.
    It was from "America's Best Company to Work For" in 1993 to the one from 2013-2017 (at least). The caliber of people was WAY higher at the latter by the time I moved.

    I'll take "peers who understand and act on what I'm talking about" over positional power any day, all else being equal.
    Last edited by Patrick Chase; 05-06-2018 at 8:44 PM.

  3. #78
    Join Date
    Dec 2015
    Location
    Dublin, CA
    Posts
    4,119
    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Koepke View Post
    Sometimes having a union is good, other times it is just a way to keep the misfits employed.
    Drifting waayy OT, but... To my knowledge nobody has yet figured out a societal organization that generally keeps both robber baron bosses and lazy employees at bay. Almost anything you can think of to address the latter opens the door to abuses by the former, and vice versa. Right now the zeitgeist is more on the side of "enabling robber barons" than in the past, though I'm sure the wheel of reincarnation will turn again.
    Last edited by Patrick Chase; 05-06-2018 at 9:41 PM.

  4. #79
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Location
    Longview WA
    Posts
    27,347
    Blog Entries
    1
    Quote Originally Posted by Pat Barry View Post
    I suspect the reason they picked a tech for the job you described is precisely because they needed better results in the first place. This is not all that uncommon of a method used by managemnent to set things right. The question is, how long did that go on, and did they utilize you to train the real assemblers?
    It isn't likely they were looking for better results, they wanted to have units to ship. My time assembling at that employer was short. No, they didn't have me train the regular assemblers.

    On my last job rebuilding ticket transports one of the supervisors had me produce a manual for rebuilding them.

    One of my favorite images from the manual is adjusting a motor control component:

    Encoder Image.png

    Some of the other techs had trouble holding their hands in that position.

    jtk
    "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

  5. #80
    Join Date
    Feb 2014
    Location
    Lake Gaston, Henrico, NC
    Posts
    8,973
    Looks like it helps to have two left hands.

  6. #81
    No doubt it was probably "harder" for the managers to force the test techs to stop preferentially selecting units they knew would pass.... As you are well aware - it's poor practice to "Randomly sample" only product that is easy to test and you know will pass.....

    What they should have done after you had proven you could easily "make them all this way" is to set you up as a trainer/procedure writer to make sure the process on how to "make them right" was documented.... But the second important stop is with Engineering - to ensure the parts specs and BOM were all correct... There have been some spectacular failures and gigantic warranty costs over what was simply sloppy Engineering record keeping.... Aka - 40% internal reject rates on motors because of stuff like pre-cutting the wire for electric motor windings 2" too short because that's what the BOM called out...

    Unfortunately for managers..... Planning around "perfect" employees is a way to ensure utter disaster... You have to plan around the "Average" employee that gets hired by your organization.... And that means you have to make sure you have plenty of cushion built in to all your systems to deal with reality of what the cat drags in....

    And so it goes....

    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Koepke View Post
    My strangest encounter with management was when my position was a final test technician. The assemblers were being trained on a new line of equipment and there was need for someone to work as an assembler on the old lines. Having been an assembler on previous jobs they decided to pick me to do the assembly. All of a sudden the test techs were getting through the preliminary testing much quicker. It turns out my assemblies were put together closer to the tolerances than what the assemblers would do. The techs were checking the paperwork and picking my assemblies to test when available because it was less work to get them set up for the burn in phase. The manager came to me and told me she couldn't have me doing better work than the regular assemblers. It kind of shocked me at the time.

    Years later on another job when my job was to rebuild ticket transports for ticket vendors the group manager at the time was glad that the installers were looking for my tags on the rebuilds because they knew they would work first time every time. Before that the shop steward had the attitude of, "heck, if it doesn't work just go get another one." Most of the time that would mean packing it back up and getting on a train to another location where they were stored. My complaints didn't help a whole lot. Just a difference of opinion, my idea of job security is doing a good job right. His idea was having no problem with doing the same job over because it was messed up the first time.

    When kidding with friends about my old job and what is missed the most, my reply is, "the naps."

    Sometimes having a union is good, other times it is just a way to keep the misfits employed.

    jtk

  7. #82
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Location
    Longview WA
    Posts
    27,347
    Blog Entries
    1
    What they should have done after you had proven you could easily "make them all this way" is to set you up as a trainer/procedure writer to make sure the process on how to "make them right" was documented.... But the second important stop is with Engineering - to ensure the parts specs and BOM were all correct... There have been some spectacular failures and gigantic warranty costs over what was simply sloppy Engineering record keeping....
    They were not set up that way. The project engineer was against any idea submitted by the peons. (he wasn't the only engineer in my acquaintance who felt non-engineers were not capable of coming up with better ways of doing things. Every unit had to go through preliminary test, burn in and a final test before it was ready for shipping.

    Back to the engineer, after another company bought us, my application as a field service technician for another division was accepted. Not long after that information came to me the engineer was "let go" because of working with vendors, "for a fee," to approve out of spec parts.

    On a new line of equipment a motor driver was in an "undetermined state" when the unit was powered on. Sometimes it would come up in a mode that would drag down the power supply and prevent the unit from turning on. With a quick power of power on cycle everything would come up fine. When this was mentioned to a higher up, they assured me it wasn't a problem and don't worry. About a week later one of the customer service people came to me and asked about how to get around the problem. He had a customer that got a unit that wouldn't power on. In another week they had a work around to put in the system to prevent the problem.

    The company was just all around bad news. There was an omen of this on the day of my job interview, my mother passed away. The company that bought us out wasn't too bad, but they were also stuck in their ways with no incentive to change. One example was they made what passed for copiers before the days of Xerox. When the Xerox process was first being developed they had an opportunity to purchase the rights. Management felt it wasn't as viable a process as the chemical coated paper copying system they manufactured.

    jtk
    "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

  8. #83
    Join Date
    Dec 2015
    Location
    Dublin, CA
    Posts
    4,119
    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Koepke View Post
    They were not set up that way. The project engineer was against any idea submitted by the peons. (he wasn't the only engineer in my acquaintance who felt non-engineers were not capable of coming up with better ways of doing things. Every unit had to go through preliminary test, burn in and a final test before it was ready for shipping.
    In my experience engineers who take that approach tend to pay for it in the long term, at least in any organization with reasonable performance-based incentives. It's akin to a newly commissioned Lieutenant who won't accept ideas from their veteran NCOs.

    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Koepke View Post
    Back to the engineer, after another company bought us, my application as a field service technician for another division was accepted. Not long after that information came to me the engineer was "let go" because of working with vendors, "for a fee," to approve out of spec parts.
    I would like to be able to say that that sort of thing doesn't happen, but it does and with alarming regularity.

    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Koepke View Post
    The company was just all around bad news. There was an omen of this on the day of my job interview, my mother passed away. The company that bought us out wasn't too bad, but they were also stuck in their ways with no incentive to change. One example was they made what passed for copiers before the days of Xerox. When the Xerox process was first being developed they had an opportunity to purchase the rights. Management felt it wasn't as viable a process as the chemical coated paper copying system they manufactured.
    Photostat/Itek?

  9. #84
    Join Date
    Aug 2012
    Location
    Missouri
    Posts
    2,151
    This is fun. Someone threw this thread in the stew pot and just look at what came out. Went from hand tools to engineers in a heartbeat.
    Jim

  10. #85
    Somebody threw the thread into the stew pot and just look at what came out...
    Well.... We did make it all the way till Page 5 till somebody let the kids run all over the place with their nerf guns....

  11. #86
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Location
    Longview WA
    Posts
    27,347
    Blog Entries
    1
    Photostat/Itek?
    Diazo.

    A blue printing process for those who do not know about diazo.

    jtk
    "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •