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Engineers vs Physicists
(mander.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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I work in manufacturing. The engineers at my plant think everything works like it does on their computer screens. I had one of them tell me the mix needs exactly 248.73kg of a product and they were shocked when I told them we just add five 50kg bags and don't actually weigh out 248.73kg.
I can tell you they're not Electronics Engineers.
Electronics Engineers are like "we have to design this so that it can handle a power source whose voltage can be between +5% and -20% of what it says on the box" or "assume the resistance of your resistors, the capacitance of your capacitors and the inductance of your inductors can be randomly off by up to 10% plus it changes with temperature".
I switched from Physics to EE at Uni and it went from "these formulas represent the world" to "here is the empirically measured curve of gain vs temperature (were the difference between extremes is over 1000%) of a common transistor you'll have to use".
Maybe it's the area within Engineering or maybe Engineers get taught differently over there, but at least half of my degree was about dealing with how the real world deviates from the "purity" of Mathematical Formulas.
Lol tell me about it, only half the time there's no datasheet and you have to kill them until you work out how the little fuckers work
Thats just the difference between a good engineer and a bad engineer. A good engineer designs things around how others are going to use them, and the design with tolerance. They would have known you use 50kg bags, and realized that's what you're going to do.
In my field, we know people are gonna put things together with a hammer if it's too tight, so if it's intentionally a tight fit, we make it so there's no room to swing a hammer
Ask them if they know what SUPAC is and when they say no just shake your head and mumble "fuckin engineers" and never explain it to them.
Scale up post approval changes allow you that 10% variance in non active ingredients.
I just pointed out that our scales are only accurate to 0.5kg. How did he think we were measuring out 0.73kg when our scales don't have that amount of accuracy? If anything I thought an engineer would know about significant digits!
The funny thing is, the very first thing engineers learn in almost any class is significant figures and to make sure an answer makes sense in a real life scenario. Obviously not everyone is the same in terms of how they apply things, but engineers are definitely taught not to do stuff like that
The engineers need a "factory day". They spend a day trying to do the work they specify and it all gets tossed at the end of the day. They learn the scale is off, shit comes in 50 kg bags, and temperatures vary.
The factory guys could have an office day to learn about the paperwork and money.
Send both groups to do something fun after.
When I was a coop (intern), and I'd run out of work assigned to me, I'd head down to the floor or a lab and just talked to people. In 6 months, I knew more about the process than people who had been there years
Engineers that make things make sense in real life scenarios cost too much
As a contract process engineer with quality background/certs, I 100% agree. I charge stupid money.
I used to run large batch bulks where the load cells were only 0.5kgs and we had "aquired" a product that was in good old English standard measurements and when they converted it, they didn't even attempt to round/floor/ceiling/common sense.
I put in purchase orders for enough equipment to get it done the way they wanted. We adjusted the batch scale accordingly.
The amount left over/wasted across the five bags is probably approximately 1.27kg so it all works out
Oh design engineers will make something absolutely functional... In theory, but the people on the manufacturing floor are scratching their head looking at a print for a perfectly hollow sphere with no blends, hole, seams, or affixes made from a single piece of steel going WTF guys? (This is an exaggeration ofc)
rotomolded steel sphere you say...
Well I did say steel so centrifugal casting may be more appropriate since rotomolded is typically a resin. However it still leaves machining to be done.
Though all this was mainly meant to be in a CNC machine shop setting where neither of those are options, hence the exaggerated impossibility of creating it