[sdiy] a little knowledge is a dangerous thing !

[Scott Gravenhorst]

Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net> wrote:
>
>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. 

True all, but that's a corporate structure concerned with profit
margin.  I experienced that myself since I was the guy at the bottom of
that flowchart.  It did leave me time to work on the PDP 11/70 CPU and
disk drive problems rather than mundane terminal repairs (at a
newspaper).  So I take your point.  And even with these technicians, I
made sure to teach them all about how dangerous a CRT and capacitors
can be and how to protect yourself from this.  

Noting also that the video was filled with statements and procedures
that are just wrong, teaching these people better/proper rote
techniques goes for miles.  My main problem with rote techniques is
that they are often learned by a sometimes erroneous cause effect
connection (because the individual is poorly educated or not at all). 
"Well, every other time I fixed it it was C14 that was bad."  I think
that a better system would be for the engineer to document these things
for the technicians because they can still waste time chasing their tails.

So corporate structure aside, if I were to guess, this type of video is
most often watched not to train corporate technicians, but rather by
DIYers and that is where being dangerous can be deadly and poorly
informed can be frustrating to the point of "why bother?".

I still think that learning more about electronics serves all systems
best.  I always did my best to help those techs that were interested
enough to ask questions.

-- ScottG
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-- Scott Gravenhorst
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