Many moons ago, before I was in technology, I worked as a sheet metal workers apprentice. I remember on more than one occasion, watching the shop foreman talk to the company owner or a customer with a look on his face that anyone who has ever spent two seconds chatting with the least competent corporate VP can identify with.

It's a look that says, "I understand the words that you're saying but you clearly don't know what the hell you're talking about." There are people in virtually every industry that somehow manage to fail upwards. Maybe if you call yourself the "idea guy" enough, other people start to believe you.

Yeah, blue collar feels the pain as well.

That's the same motivation that sent me to set up my own machine shop, so kudos there.

It's kind of funny in a way. Most big shops require IT to some degree because CNC machines in the last 20 years or so require networking to pull programs from the NAS. I'm not ignorant by any means in that regard and twice I've walked into the IT guy's office, noticed him trying to be clever using SSH to hang out on IRC while I walked up and pulled the plug on the switch to reset things. Both times, he freaked out but I just pointed to his EFNET chats.

Sounds like they conceptually understand that engineering time is expensive, but have absolutely no idea about the process they are managing. Kinda like they are paying for the expensive experiments so the people doing them have to have a back log so they are always overworked.

I wish I was in for prototyping. As is, I've specialized in non-metallic production parts (lots of power generation and medical). The few times that I can actually put my "engineer" hat on and make a prototype are few and far between, but I love it when that happens.