Anyway the process as such did not work as documented.
You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere.
Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete the work.
Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.
Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.
It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.
As yes, plenty of fixes for things are not written down anywhere.
Have others come in and follow the directions.
Every time i am dealing in new hires, i realise how much we just take for granted
He asked how long the job would take, and we answered about a week for all the common stuff. And his answer was, "That is a week you will not be making the company any money.".
We tried to explain the long term savings, but he was not interested.
Many scientific studies cannot be replicated either due to errors or ambiguous steps.
You only have what you test. If you want working documentation, you have to do a blind test. That can be pretty dang expensive, and most people don't think that way. Running production is heavily motivated to just keep running, and not worry too much about all of the potential problems - there are just too many potential problems.
The technician refused to document the procedure because he was afraid of becoming replaceable. He was afraid of becoming replaceable because he was afraid of losing his job. He was afraid of losing his job because he would lose his sole source of income.
Let's just give people free money already.
Management gets exactly the behaviours from employees that it rewards and incentivises.
The air force is currently going on an in-housing and "agile all the things" binge because they're sick of 30yr of getting screwed by contractors.
My money is on Northrop giving them a sky high but not without precedent price and someone saying "screw it, this is the perfect thing to learn how to do"
It’s a bit terrifying when you realize that the people at the top don’t know what they are doing either. Much of the world runs on guesswork and inertia. This is also true of most companies.
In my early 20's this 'discovery' shocked me
Not saying this is how it actually ends up, but they certainly are prepared to use a lot of leverage tools that are not available to more free countries.
People are just people. Organizational psychology is universal. Bit rot is inevitable.
No, but we'll totally sponsor/fund research into things like mind control and astral projection. Funding something totally useful like reverse engineering skills is totally anathema. Just really sad commentary
I don't get your point. The government does invest in reverse engineering, and much more than they invest into mind control and astral projection. It's nonsense to say that investing in useful skills is "totally anathema".
What GP was saying was not that they don't invest in reverse engineering, but they wouldn't try to backdoor it or secret the experience into the industry with some project like this. They wouldn't try to "trick" the industry into developing the experience by putting out smaller contracts like this. They do invest in it, but directly. That one program office has put out a contract for reverse engineering of one system does not mean that the general capability is ignored, within the government or the industry.
And, possibly, before the 1960s.
Small departments in poor cities occasionally wind up highly competent because they wind up staffed with a high enough ratio of workers to get things done and everybody above them has bigger problems than micro managing so they have the freedom to get things done. And it runs for awhile then comes under scrutiny and gets made back into junk because politics.
The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still need to be able to make the tooling, which is at least half of this project.
That said, if some contractor does come through with this and does a good job (on time, on budget, parts work, etc...) they could likely find plenty of other programs with similar needs. In some cases the original contractor does still exist, but they're asking way too much money to reconstitute an old production line so a scrappy startup like this could prove themselves valuable.