Good story, Glen ...the days when American industry actually 'made things'
Must have been a fun place to work 73, Ted K7TRK -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Glen Zook Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 3:49 PM To: Thomas Doyle; [email protected] Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: Lessons I learned the hard way A number of companies, in which upper management have been engineers, suffer from the fact that most engineers are not completely satisfied when products are released. When I went to work for the Collins Radio Company, right out of college at the "new" corporate headquarters in Richardson, Texas, Art Collins had a very bad habit of coming up with minor production changes to equipment being manufactured and insisting that these changes be made before the equipment shipped to the customer. Then, before all those changes had been made, he would come up with still other changes. This caused no equipment being shipped and, therefore, no income to the company. To get around Art's changes, every division had an "Art project" to keep him occupied and away from equipment that was really intended to ship to customers. The "Art project" items were never intended to ship. But, by keeping him away from the real production, equipment was being shipped and there was income to the company. Glen, K9STH Website: http://k9sth.com On Monday, May 12, 2014 11:57 AM, Thomas Doyle <[email protected]> wrote: When I was a young engineer working for Motorola Communication Division in Chicago I recall a meeting where the engineers met with upper level management on the release to production of a UHF mobile radio. Each engineer had some additional tests they wanted to perform before it was released to production and out of our hands. After listening to our concerns for a fairly long time he said - "If it was up to you engineers we would never release anything to production and we would have nothing to sell and we would not have any money to pay you with". Never forgot that. Any engineer worthy of his salt is never 100% sure about anything that is going into an environment they can not control. The problem comes in when there is suddenly more time to do additional testing and the time is used to try out fun exciting new things rather than the much less interesting and often boring testing and refining the existing product. I do hope the hard working FOX crew takes advantage of the time they have been given to make sure everything is right with the good work they have done rather than trying out some new fun interesting things that could wind up flying without adequate testing. We need something that works not necessarily the latest trendy technology gadget. I have seen this happen with unpleasant results in other non-AMSAT projects. In any event thanks to the Fox crew for their hard work. W9KE Tom Doyle _______________________________________________ Sent via [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb _______________________________________________ Sent via [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb _______________________________________________ Sent via [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
