Where are all of the master tradesman? 18

[curiousmechanical]

Hello Everyone,

Background:

I have been working as a mechanical design engineer at a small (<100 employees) OEM for a little over four years now. During this time, I have observed a disappointing trend and would like to hear other engineers’ thoughts on the matter.

Description:

While in college, I imagined a working life analogous to that of any apprentice. I pictured a world filled with experienced tradesman - engineers who have mastered their skills after many years of experience. I was truly looking forward to working alongside such people and I was eager to learn all that I could.

Upon entering the workforce, I eventually learned that few engineers have actually mastered their trades. In fact, more shockingly, many seem to lack even the most basic fundamental knowledge and skills. I find this very disappointing. In addition, I have also noticed a trend of sloppy and poor workmanship.

Intermediate Questions:

Why have so few engineers mastered their trades? Why don’t people care about quality? Why don’t people seem to take pride in what they do?

Theories:

I have noticed that quality is a falsely claimed priority. Companies like to say that they “take pride in producing a quality product,” but I have trouble believing them. Not when engineers are told “I don’t care [that the design is incomplete or of poor quality] just release the drawings.” Deadlines and managers pressure engineers to get work done as fast as possible. Quantity seems to be valued in the real world, not quality. Aside from self-respect, there is no incentive (or time) for an engineer to master his or her trade.

Closing Questions:

Is this lack of master tradesman common in engineering? Are there any environments where the quality workmanship of a master tradesman is valued over the high volume/sub par output of the average engineer?

Thank you for reading my rant! I look forward to reading your feedback!

 

[ctopher]

I think most are retired. From my experience, most of today's managers don't believe in on the job training for current engineers to learn from the old timers.
People have also become lazier, at least here in the US.
There are also a lot of engineers that don't have the knack or experience, only the college degree(s), to design or build products.

Chris
SolidWorks 09, CATIA V5
ctopher's home
SolidWorks Legion

 

[zdas04]

The last of the "old guys" retired 5-10 years ago. Now the new "senior engineers" have 3-5 years experience. Therefore, the new "old guys" never worked around anyone who had served what you're calling an apprenticeship and don't have a clue what they don't know.

I had a consulting job with the company that I retired from (6 years ago) a few months back and everyone was looking to a kid with 2.5 years experience as the lead hand. Basically every word out of his mouth was wrong, but they were all proclaimed as though they were written in stone. His proclamations absolutely lacked any kind of operational sense at all and he required my PSV project to include some totally non-credible scenarios. When I told him that he might want to reconsider, I was told that if I wouldn't do it his way then he would find someone who would. So I added a column in the final table that was the "recommended" PSV using his technique in addition to my actual recommendations. It went to his boss and they're following my recommendations and he's told me that I have just finished the last job I would ever do for that operation.

This guy is typical of the generation who followed the Engineers who got hired in 1975-1985. Jobs were very scarce from 1985 to 2003 and there is a real shortage of Engineering Graduates (at least in Oil & Gas) from that period. Consequently when my generation is all gone the people who were hired in 2003 to now get real responsibility before they are ready, and are pretty sure that they have been endowed with the sun-source of all knowledge. I see a lot of bad Engineers in my practice--most of whom might have been very good or excellent if they had been spanked as new-Engineers instead of getting authority before they were prepared to listen ("hire teenagers while they still know everything").

David

 

[IRstuff]

I don't think that the same paradigms exist today. Being a "Master" imply YEARS of doing the SAME THING, to the point of becoming the master expert. People and companies don't do that anymore. That's the reason why hundred-yr-old companies like Montgomery Ward went out of business; they were doing the same thing for a hundred years and made no progression to the next stage of marketing and sales. Overspecialization will obsolete you faster than the lifetime of a fruit fly.

While there might be some utility in becoming the goto-guy for cast iron, to be only conversant in cast iron is a kiss of death; any change in the marketplace and you're history. The market is now about agility and adaptation to current conditions. This invariably results in engineers that are never at the end of the learning curve.

That's pretty much been the case for the last 20 yrs. Defense developments look totally different than they did even 5 yrs ago. What was perfectly fine for nearly 20 yrs is now obsolete; different materials, different sensors, different control strategies, different SWAP, etc., all conspire to force the engineer to be constantly learning new things, but, only to the degree necessary to get the next product out.

You will need to find a new mindset; the reality you are looking for hasn't really existed in more than 20 yrs. Personally, I think that's great. Isn't it better to be learning new things, rather than doing the same thing, over and over again?

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[rowingengineer]

This is dependent on the discipline of engineering, Structural engineering has not changed as radically as other disciplines in the not to distant past. Thus you still have the same knowledge base. Training of junior engineer’s is still considered nessarcy plus we still have some old hats hanging around passing on much needed advice and direction.

However, this all depends on your firm; I have noticed the old hats hanging around manly work for the smaller companies. Generally, the larger companies have a few very good experts but not a lot of mid-level "get the basic job done" engineers. I think is because they moved out and started on there own.

When in doubt, just take the next small step.

 

[ScottyUK]

IRstuff,

Your opinion isn't wrong, but it is wrong in some industries. The power industry, in common with O&G I suspect, is a mature industry with established ways of doing things which have been developed over many years through a combination of ongoing research and learning from costly mistakes. Most of the big changes have come from mistakes. To casually throw away that experience and concentrate on new ways of doing things will lead to the mistakes of previous decades being repeated. Nowhere is this more apparent than the proposed new generation of nuclear new build in the UK. All the senior guys from the previous build program are retired or dead, and even the office juniors will be approaching retirement: so much expertise lost.

I agree with almost every word David posted: suddenly I am one of the 'old guys' by virtue of there being a generation-long failure to recruit in my industry. I'm not ready to be one of the old guys: they learned their skills in a very different environment of a nationalised industry, where the experts spent a career mastering their field, and where research was carried out in-house. Most of them have forgotten more about power generation than I know. That resource is all but gone now, and as an industry we've limped along living on the work done 30 years ago and supported by one-man-band consultants who learned their skills in the old industry. There are still just about enough of them to keep us going but in ten years we will be in trouble.


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If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!

 

[csd72]

I think this is a symptom of management being more (monetarily) appreciated than technical experts. Those that finally master their art are usually put in managerial positions where they use only a small portion of it.

I prefer to work for engineers as managers but I think it is wrong that you are almost seen as a failure if you have been an engineer for 20 years and are still designing things.

 

[insideman]

Maste




Master? I am here. I outlived all the others.












r

 

[controlsdude]

The reason for most of this chaos is big companies getting rid of engineering staffs and then contracting it out. Basically they cut their own throats, because some bean counter made a calculation stating that it is cheaper to outsource engineering. I seen it a lot during the late 80's thru the 90's.

Then when they realize the cost latter they change their mind and your seeing the result.

 

[csd72]

Yes there is a business profitability matrix that divides revenue by permanent staff - contract staff are a way of fiddling the books on this matrix.

The more I learn about business management theory the more I think of it as a form of psuedo science!

 

[moltenmetal]

I've been at this quite a while and haven't mastered anything. There's always learning to do- and un-learning as well. But I hear where you're coming from!

There once was a process of junior people being brought in as fresh grads, developed and mentored, and given a tour in a bunch of different departments so they could truly understand the full implications of their work. That process is more or less dead. It died with the down-sizing, out-sourcing, contract employee mindset that accompanied the bean counters' rise to power.

When engineers were truly scarce because our universities couldn't educate enough of them to meet industry's needs, engineers were valuable in a business sense- even the fresh grads. They were worth investing the time and effort to train them, mentor them etc. With only 1/3 of Canadian engineering grads going on to work as engineers, nobody can persuade me that there aren't enough engineers around. The over-supplied labour market got the employers convinced that they could hire on contract what they needed, then lay off people when lean times came, and still have a viable business model. I think you're observing one of the many unintended consequences of these business decisions.

 

[zdas04]

Pseudo Science? I don't think so. I think it is a Pseudo Management con game with meaningles equations.

The years I worked for a big company I saw each new generation of PhD moron's from Stanford, Chicago, Harvard, and other big name Business Schools come up with a "new" management theory that had all the appearance of science (complex Partial Differential Equations and all) with 40 pages of assumptions to get to a closed-form solution to equations that purportedly describe human behaviour. Every single one of these hair brained ideas that our management adopted was later discredited (but the PhD idiots kept their credentials).

Remember when the guy from University of Chicago claimed that business should focus on "Core Competencies" and contract out everything else? This led to the idea that light-construction was not a Core Competency of the Oil & Gas business and every major Oil company sold their roustabout trucks. 25 years later we're learning that the light construction was the industry's training ground for lease operators and production foremen and the generation of pumpers who didn't go through 6-months to 2-years on a roustabout truck didn't know how anything was put together and were unable to trouble-shoot a problem.

Same with Drilling, same with Facilities Engineering, same with everything except Production Engineering and Reservoir Engineering. This "core competency" fiasco caused the industry to fire 95% of Administrative Analysts and stop doing little things like contract surveillance, regulatory reporting, and (to a large extent) materials management--the outcome has been the loss of billions in revenue because no one is watching to see that contract terms are met or that materials are properly used.

This "latest management theory" approach to business management is much like technical trading on Wall Street or its close cousin "systems" for beating the odds in Las Vegas. These fools will simply not realize that the last roll of the dice has no bearing on the next roll of the dice.

It is not "Pseudo" or any other type of Science, it is a Ponzi scheme that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of had he thought of it first.

David

 

[csd72]

A star for you David, no technical company should be run by people who have no understanding of how things work. This is why I havent worked much for big businesses.

 

[vc66]

Star for you, David. Simply because you described my situation to a tee. We're all about "Core Competancies", at my company right now... and it's killing us.

V

 

[oldfieldguy]

Every time I talk about this I sound like a denizen of Jurassic Park.

Time was when the normal progression of things was to promote managers from the shop floors and the engineering offices. These guys might not have made the optimum management staff, but they knew about the work and what it took to get it out the door.

Somewhere in the last couple of decades somebody decided that managers needed a "management" degree and that a "manager" could magically make good things happen in an engineering and design house just the same as a teddy bear factory or an oil refinery.

Knowledge of people and processes and technology was immaterial to the "management" process, and if "managers" were that portable, then so were engineers and technicians. Experience was no longer of consequence, credentials were.

I don't think we're better off for it all.

old field guy

 

[zdas04]

I worked for the company that bought the Tennoco Production Company properties in the San Juan Basin. Tennoco is the case study for not knowing what business you are in that all the the PhD's cite as an argument for core competencies. A couple of years before they sold out, they bought a tractor company because "a good manager can manage anything". So you have all these Oil & Gas yahoo's climbing all over the tractor company, trying to make it look like an Oil & Gas production company and milking their cash cow (the San Juan Basin gas field) to keep the horribly managed tractor company afloat. That fiasco in about 1989 is the example that the stinking management consultants twist to get companies to focus on "core competencies".

I agree that an Oil & Gas company has no business running a tractor factory, but on the other hand if you are willing to contract out the design and execution of drilling, log-suite selection and interpretation, completion, and stimulation of oil & gas wells then what business ARE you in? I always said the the end game for BP was to downsize from 150,000 employees to a CEO, 300 lawyers, 5 pilots for the corporate jets, and 500 administrative assistants/secretaries.

When I started (back before the dinosaurs were done becoming oil), a Production Engineer was expected to pick the location of a well, work with company drillers to design the drilling activity, specify the log suite, interpret the log, pick the completion interval, and design the stimulation. Some time in the 90's they started calling the service companies (Schlumberger, Halliburton, etc) to get the logging, completion, and stimulation procedures done for them. At that time the service companies had a world of experience and had individuals that could accomplish these tasks with a high level of expertise. Sometime in the last 10 years all of THOSE grey hairs retired and the new guys still provide the service, but they use a Xerox machine instead of Engineering Judgement. My driller friends laugh about the service company procedures that have you running a log to 14,000 ft in a 3,000 ft well. The company engineers have drifted into Project Management roles and can't be bothered to review the procedures before they sign them.

The process just keeps getting dumber and dumber.

David

 

[ubercad]

Cost toward training is number that can be easily measured. Losses and costs due to lower productivity due to a lack of training is not so easily measured.

I worked as a mechanical designer/CAD operator (contract of course, 3.5 years) and the supervisor we had, had no experience with the CAD software we were using or the actual job we did.

At another job, the "Director" of engineering (there were no managers or supervisors underneath him) had only been in his position for less than a year (prior to that he was a project engineer and technical support for sales)

It's hard to become an expert of anything these days when there are so many layoffs and outsourcing that forces you to have to consider "starting over" in a new company with a different product and new or different responsibilities. The incentives to stay at a company and develop an expertise are becoming fewer and fewer.

The bottom line is what counts these days in ANY bussines, hospitals included.

The glass is operating at 50% capacity.

 

[IRstuff]

It's not a question of casualness, or impetuosity, or whim. In aerospace/defense, aluminum, or something similar, has been the mainstay of structure design for decades. That was all well and good when the platforms carrying this stuff were USS Missouri and the like. Now, we're looking at a 40 lb UAV carrying a 5 lb payload, that has certain functional requirements.

This now calls for aluminum beryllium alloys, or engineered polymers. So, all of a sudden, every vendor that we've dealt with for decades are no longer applicable, and a completely new set of vendors need to be worked out, as well as the design groundrules. With engineered polymers, the range of performance needs to be matched with the material mix, how much glass-fill, or should it be carbon-fill, or something else entirely. Moisture retention, UV resistance, and may other factors were never a problem with aluminum, but are a major problem with polymers. So, all of our "experts" in aluminum structures are now noobies in polymer-based design. And, obviously, we don't outsource outside of the country.

Boeing is going through something similar with its latest planes, that, likewise, have converted major portions of the structure from aluminum, or titanium, to composites. Everyone is suddenly a noobie there, as well.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[ScottyUK]

Like I said before, there are different problems in different industries. Your experts have been overtaken by the advance of technology; in power our experts have been overtaken by Old Man Time. The technology of the big bits of plant hasn't changed much since the 1960s, but the people who were experts have all gone. The skills of yesteryear, the ones which our universities and colleges and companies don't teach anymore, would serve the modern power industry very well today, far far better than some degree found on the side of a cereal box or an MBA purchased online.

One of my favourite interview questions of recent times is 'Explain the basics of how a car engine works'. The number of supposedly well-educated engineers who can't tell me is startling. One even asked if I realised he was an electrical engineer! They have lots of paper bearing their name and some impressive-sounding qualifications but they are no use to me if they don't have any feel for how things work.


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If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!

 

[oldfieldguy]

What I find particularly entertaining is seeing one of our old grey-heads retire, then show up a few weeks later as a contractor providing the knowledge he took with him when he left because the company wouldn't foot the bill to put a junior guy working with him to learn some of what he knew...

old field guy