Poor documentation in some plants.
Interpreting ideal and theoretical models and trying to predict the real world processes. A lot of times, they don't match.
I've been doing this 40 years. I'm done climbing the ladder. I just want a smooth, technically challenging ride to retirement.
Since I dealt with software the last 35 of my nearly 50 year career, my biggest issue was customers who demanded that we add dozens of new functions to a program and then complain afterwards that we made it more complicated. My second biggest complaint was that once we sold the software to a customer, many of whom had demanded that we add features and make changes for them in order to get their business, that the first time a new release came out after they had been using the software for awhile, they would complain that we made changes and they now have to relearn to use it. Of course, some of those changes were the result of us adding features and making changes for some other big customer before we got their business.
As for my wishes, since I've been retired for four years now, my biggest wish to remain healthy and to hope that the people paying my pensions and managing my IRA's don't screw-up so that we can continue to enjoy our retirement.
A silly but necessary wish for me is a more ergonomic/productive office setup. I'm still not sure what that is. I had 3 monitors at one office and it was super helpful. But there was so much screen overload because there was not enough space on the desk to actually do manual calcs and drawing review. Worked at a place where there were 2 monitors, but then a really narrow desk. Now I have 1 monitor and have a bit more desk space, but the inability to have two screens working in tandem is lost. Trying to constantly find the balance of desktop and "desktop" space to do productive work.
I continue to be absolutely amazed that for the first 20 years of my career . I managed without a single monitor in the room. I wonder how many screens third world organizations deem necessary??
Biggest wish: Clients that sprung out of the ground with an understanding of the value of good engineering, and government bodies not run by people who pedantically take everything written down in a manual as an unassailable, unquestionable fact that must never be altered.
From a technical side, client documentation/records are almost always an issue as mentioned previously.
From an office perspective, it can be frustrating how the project management is seen as the reason for successful projects while engineering is the reason for bad projects. I'm not saying it can't go both ways, but whenever a project goes well the consensus from the higher ups is always "good job project management" which irks me.
Oh - and I wish clients would recognize when they chose a bad contractor instead of simply blaming the design.
Engineers are invariably viewed by management, which includes the higher ups, as an unruly crowd of cats that needs to be herded by project management. That'll never be changed, because they have fundamental differences in outlook and priorities.
But, ultimate responsibility cuts both ways; if project management gets the blame for a failure, they should get the credit for success. If engineers want credit for success, they should likewise shoulder the blame for failures.
There's no "i" in team, etc., but a "good" project manager gives credit where it's due.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
Well, there is an ongoing crisis in engineering in my country that started 5 to 6 years ago and we have yet to recover. Basically, there are no jobs and the jobs that are available usually pay way less than what they payed 10 years ago. Most engineers here are uber drivers or switched to the financial market.
What is scary is that most of the old engineers that knew how to do stuff are retired and there isn't any big projects going on. If this lack of projects remain, we will have a knowledge gap that I don't think will have any solution.
My biggest with is that the de-facto monopoly of Petrobras ends here and we can get projects for refineries, oil rigs and etc again. And, of course, getting a proper salary
