[sdiy] a little knowledge is a dangerous thing !

[Tom Wiltshire]

On 25 Apr 2012, at 14:44, Scott Gravenhorst wrote:

> Amen.  But as Harry pointed out, there are people who fix things with rote techniques, able to fix
> 95% where the other 5% completely evades them.  I've worked with them as lead, very frustrating to
> get them to read a schematic.  I finally gave up and made a flowchart.  It didn't help fix more of
> them, but it did reduce the time to fix their 95%.  The bottom flow state was "Give it to Scott"...
> "proper" Resistance charts can help as an overview scan, but from there it remains to be
> understood _why_ a resistance is wrong.  

In defence of this technique (which was used where I used to work too) it enables companies to get a lot done for the minimum budget. Our repairs department consisted of several "technicians" who knew very little but could hold a soldering iron by the right end and one "engineer" who could actually fix stuff. Since the commonest problem was battery failure, and the second commonest problem was optoisolator failure (caused by lightning most likely) the technicians could rapidly deal with the 95%, leaving the engineer enough time to actually be able to debug the remaining 5%. Employing more engineers would have made the whole department significantly more expensive without really improving throughput of work. The truth is most repairs don't need clever debugging techniques and consequently don't need engineers.

T.