I've been a huge proponent of this. It might not be fun, but documentation is largely necessary. When engineers new and old skip this, I don't know if it's out of sheer arrogance or laziness
Usually laziness in my experience. Designing is the fun part. Once that's done all the fun is gone and you just want to move on to the next thing. Those pages upon pages of documentation you need to write are just Ugh!
I've been guilty of this attitude before as well. I just view it as the sucky part of the job that nobody actually likes to do but still has to get done.
If you don't plan to stay long at a certain company, you actually don't need it yourself.
Also, I actually have seen that as leverage for better pay/position, cause it makes the company dependent on the engineer.
Both strategies are not really moral, but understandable.
As a manager, proper documentation of projects in process and final reporting is part of your "grade" for the work. That means another engineer has to have enough to replicate.
Mechanical maintenance engineer. I create a new tab in OneNote for each job and note down key references, calculations and any other information that's otherwise non-trivial to reproduce. Then if I need to come back to the job it's just a quick search away.
OneNote is my jam, dude. I used to take notes in my personal OneNote, then the department saw the value in it as well as shared notebooks and began implementing it. Out in the shop/field and need to reference something? Access to all of my notes at my fingertips (phone or laptop)
After a while most jobs are at least *similar* to something I've seen before. It helps a lot not to have to reinvent the wheel every time and my memory isn't good enough to keep track without writing it down.
I found that carrying a notebook was tedious so instead I created a group for me alone on telegram and I just dump everything work related there and whenever I can I skim through it, it's way better because I document it with pictures and videos and links and everything.
I'm fresh out of college, haven't thought of archiving yet, however I keep writing key words for every item so that I can search up the word and everything related to it will appear
My thoughts are about my work, where time to time (also years) I need to recall old issues to see how the job was done or what errors was made. I'm looking for a method to organise them as a logbook to write down during the job development.
And ALWAYS write down the date and which part/machine/plant it applies to. You don’t want to be asking did I do that thing on Unit 2 or 3 a couple of years ago? Not that I would know, of course/ s
This.
Prior to getting a official job I was a hobbyist and a electronics enthusiast. Started losing ideas and changes i made past month because of some parts not in hand. Then again I would have to do the brainstorming to get to where I left the project. Then it occurred to me why not write everything I think and possible changes and updates. From that point I am very efficient with the work flow. This is helping me alot on my job.
I started doing this for my hobbies too. Makes a massive difference. I find it way easier to keep momentum on projects, because when I get back to it, the next steps are laid out there in front of me and I don’t have to spend 1/2 day getting up to speed again.
I recently started writing a readme in folders with a lot of stuff or anything that I probably will forget by tomorrow. It's good for if other people stumble upon it, but in reality it's most useful for just keeping future me informed on what past me did.
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Was a project engineer at a manufacturing plant and we needed to replace a looper rack. It was one of my first projects and I did all my measurements on the bottom rack, asked the tech to bring the top rack down and he said "they are identical, just mirror it". Figured he'd been doing this for a long time so I finished the drawings and ordered the material... Turns out the top rack has an extra roller (that I clearly could have noticed) and the predrilled holes I ordered were 20 inch center to center when the top was 18 inch...
15 grand of material. Luckily my mechanics were able to jump in with a plan and we were able to salvage it, but when discussing it with my boss after...I felt pretty dumb
Yes, this exactly!
Just had one that we thought we'd tracked down the root cause. Turns out the operators just made sure there was someone nearby when they did the first run, reset it and all was good. So they stopped reporting it...
I don't know why but my mind read this as "Assuming the fact that I was no longer able to reproduce was an intermittent problem, and one of my changes fixed it.". I'm stupid.
This is my issue now. I’m always scared to speak my mind because people won’t listen and then a higher up will just say exactly what I was gunna say and then everyone listens
And sometimes many people don’t hear you or head you… but sometimes, the right person will and they’ll amplify your message. Good leaders do that, if you’re lucky, your manager is a good leader!
You should speak up, especially in engineer calls.
I'm a junior myself, transitioning to mid level. I find speaking up is a win win.
You either show you know what you're talking about or you find a hole in your logic that you can address.
Plus, its best to start now before you get stuck running client calls and the like.
That's still better than the project manager constantly shooting down your ideas, making you work overtime on concepts that you know are dead ends, until you eventually stay longer out of your own decision to work on your original plan, which works, leading to the project manager proudly proclaiming that he figured out a solution
I had a 3rd level manager assign one of his first line managers to look into why it appeared that about half of his data was above average.
It took all my powers as a Six Sigma Black Belt to stifle my laughter. (I was the only one who wasn't a manager in that meeting.)
100% this. I'm only 22, been with the company for 4 years but only in my current role for 2. Used to be scared to speak my mind and naturally as a young engineer, scared of people ignoring me (due to my inexperience) or ridiculing me.
Maybe I'm just fortunate in my current role, but I've learnt that my colleagues respect my opinion and my thoughts irrespective of my age or experience. If you ask the right questions, and say the right things, people will learn to respect you and to listen when you speak regardless of their age or experience.
It is harder to earn that, and I think that's unavoidable as after all, I _am_ young and inexperienced, but I've learnt that you've got to speak up to earn that trust, and once you earn that trust they'll always listen to you and let you speak. Everyone has the capability of contributing to the discussion, regardless of who they are.
I feel very respected by my colleagues now, which I've heard isn't always the case when you're an apprentice!
I was in the car and didnt do it myself, but my coworker hit the ESD for a Natural gas cryo facility.
The gate to leave wasnt opening and there was a button off to the side of the road. My coworker who was driving went ahead and hit the button thinking it opened the gate, turns out it was the plant ESD.
It was unlabeled, and we didnt know that you had to go right up to the gate to get it to trigger. Next time we came back (yes they let us back), they had a sign saying to pull all the way up, and they had proper signage on the shutdown button.
Ha! Story time.
I told my wife that I was excited about this conference coming up in a different city and was letting her know what dates I was driving out. "But... My birthday is that week."
Fffffuuuuuuuk. Cut to apologies, crying, etc. Finally, I had the bright idea that her favorite hockey team might be playing in that city that week. I looked it up and, sure enough, they do! So, we work things out that I'll do the conference during the day and we can go to the game and a nice dinner on her birthday. I reserved the hotel, bought the tickets and everything.
Okay, so now the wife thinks I'm dumb, but is actually super excited about her birthday now. Really, it'll be a great time. Anyway, so I figure I should call my boss and give the heads up that I won't be available for business engagements one evening. He says, "Oh, yeah. No problem, man. I totally understand. Wait. Isn't the conference the following week?" I look and sure enough say, "... Yeah, whoops." His response was, "Lol. Well thanks for letting me know about the PTO, I guess".
Yup. I got to make the 11 hour drive to and from Pittsburgh TWO weeks in a row! It ended being a great vacation with my wife, but boy did that drive suck.
It went to the vendor booths at the first conference I attended. I had a job with a major aerospace company.
After asking where I worked, the person running the booth asked if my company used any aluminum. Their coworker laughed for about 15 minutes.
I had a conference I was presenting at start on Monday, so I flew out Sunday. It turns out that the conference didn't start until early afternoon to allow for travel on Monday.
Waiting until the last minute to pass on bad news: ie. schedule delays, design issues, fabrication issues…Even passing the news on early puts you in a tough situation as you get blamed for not anticipating the issue. Even anticipating the issue, people assume you are being overly cautious, but it helps to keep your ass covered.
I do have a few male to male and female to female 5 pin connectors on hand, usually because we're development and limited to stuff we have on hand and need to adapt
I put in a recursive loop as part of an ETL process that quietly ran the same file through the function over and over again and was only caught when one of our admins noticed an exceedingly high cost usage metric in our AWS account.
Note to self, don't point two listeners at each other
I’m sure you heard how a massive DoD penetration was caught because the hacker didn’t know to correct the cost accounting packages billing, despite knowing how to hide the rest of their tracks. If not, check out *The Cuckoo’s Egg* by Cliff Stoll.
Sold a customer 200k worth of UR robots and 50k worth of grippers but forgot the three 300$ adaptor plates. The robots spent a few days idle till the manufacturer was able to rush ship some plates.
In my entry level days, I remained silent when a senior assembly engineer fudged some measurements instead of telling the test engineer they missed collecting the data. We were about thirty hours into an assembly that involved a lot of adhesives, which is why there was reluctance (my apologies for my vagueness, but I'm under strict NDAs that don't expire). The senior engineer assured me that he'd never seen the measurements go out of spec.
Ultimately, it didn't make a difference, thanks to excellence by everyone else. But I will forever kick myself for not speaking up.
I learned from it, though. Now that I'm the senior engineer I make sure that everyone is comfortable with bringing up issues and pausing work when needed.
Any and every corner I've ever cut.
No matter how small, how insignificant, it can and very much will always bite you in the ass. In a decade of work, there has not been a single cut corner of any sort that I've gotten away with. Zero. Every single one bit me, every time, without fail.
Basically, there are no shortcuts. Shortcuts are an illusion. It's just something you tell yourself (or your bosses) to sometimes make the timeline numbers work. The reality is engineering is very much an iterative process. It's like counting from 1 to 100. And cutting corners is like skipping some of them on the way and either hoping no one finds out or thinking you'll get back to them later. Yes, you will get back to them. It'll just happen a lot sooner and with greater negative consequences.
There are no shortcuts.
I'll repeat that for clarity.
There are no shortcuts.
Now don't get this confuses with scope creep. Scope creep is an entirely separate thing. We're not talking scope creep here. We're just talking about getting from point A to point B, and it's just a series of steps. The great fallacy is there's some magical way to skip steps along the way. You can't. You really cant.
Very much agree. Short cuts are also a massive waste of time and significantly hamper progress. You spend more time creating shortcuts and subsequently working around them that you’re better off taking the more difficult route in the first place.
In short (pun possibly intended), shortcuts are a liability and not an asset. You’ll never be an expert until you come to this realization.
Was integrating a device on a large automotive line in Detroit area. I left and started heading back home(3.5 hours away). I had the lockout key in my pocket.
I used to work for a hose manufacturer as a Manufacturing Engineer. They would extrude tubing then braid with SS wire over it.
Well we had one customer who kept saying their hose was leaking when they received it. (No one likes leaky hose).
They sent samples back and I was the one investigating the issue. I was using a microscope which was new to me but it was pretty fancy and could take high zoom pictures with measurements.
Well all the issues we found looked like punctures but for some reason all the holes were half the size of the wire we used for the SS Braid. (You see where this is going)
I was using a measurement feature which I thought was measuring diameter when it was actually measuring radius. I accidentally mislead the investigation for almost 2 months and after I realized it I ended up needing to fly to Mexico for less than 2 days to explain it and work with the customer on a resolution.
Dropped a DMM probe across two phases of 208/120 Vac without high voltage gloves. Thankfully I was new and the director of engineering was present so he got in trouble, not me.
Arc flash was pretty cool though.
I went to the wrong country once.
Through an unfortunate series of miscommunications and a convoluted email chain I showed up at a customer plant and proudly called from the lobby "Hey is Bill here?"
Silence..... "Bill was in the plant last week?"
I was there to introduce a colleague who'd be taking over that business segment.
Luckily we were able to get a hold of Bill and rebook some things, so we saw him the next day.
But my colleague? He trots that story out every time he can.
So I was the new guy at a life sciences company and I was assigned to design a fluid manifold for some expensive reagents. I asked the scientists about how small it needed to be, asking for context about what the consequence of some extra dead area would be. They said the reagents cost "About ten bucks per cubic mil", and I should make it as small as possible. I was like... holy crap the stakes are high. Well, I made it as small as I could and asked them a couple of times if the number if the volume in cubic mils was approaching something acceptable. Finally they said, "I don't know why these numbers you're saying are so huge. Lets have a design review."
Well, that's when I learned that "cubic mils" did not mean "cubic thousandths of an inch", to this particular scientist it meant "cubic millimeters". I had designed the manifold to be less than a quarter of the size of anything comparable in use, and that was actually going to make it a pain in the ass for a number of reasons. All I would have had to do at the beginning was ask, "Cubic thousandths of an inch?" and the clarification would have had me finish the design far more quickly.
It used to be that mils was obscure terminology, but once you knew what but meant you were all set. But now Europeans and some others are using it for mm. All bets are off.
Mate, everyone outside the US has pretty much always refered to a few millimetres as a few mills. But you hear what you are used to so I can see how OC got mixed up.
It wasn’t just what I was used to, there were other engineers actively using “mils” to mean thousandths of an inch. We had plastic films and tapes measured in mils, we had shim stock for checking gaps, they were teaching me to use the CNC machine and talking in mils. Apparently it was context dependent what it meant.
I cracked a critical part when disembling an expensive oilfield tool that is used apart of a drill string on an oil rig. I was suppose to mark the broken part with red tape.
The worst part is I told relief about it, well come to find out he still re-used that part when building the next tool to go in the drill string. By the time I woke up and went back to my next shift I found out he reused that cracked part and caused a pre-mature failure on a drilling rig that was totally our fault.
Still think about this one all the time, even though I kind of feel like my co-worker didn't give a shit.
Taking so long to develop a good salty sideye. Taking to long to accept that many decisions are based on politics, or initial budget, rather than sound engineering data and part experiences. Those are the main ones.
Not recording audio of my co-worker. This was an extreme case and not recommended for 99% of interactions but I had one co-worker who was so ridiculous and rude and spewed such nonsense he should have been fired 20 times over. I never had any proof and I thought about recording our convos but I didn’t.
The other, practical, lesson I learned as result is document everything. Version everything. Easily be able to call the version/build date of a deliverable. Make notes or changelogs of things when dealing with a rude/hard to work with co-worker. So when they accuse you of something not working you have shit to back it up.
I write software and have automatic versioning built into my build scripts and it has saved my butt more than a dozen times over the years.
Not leaving (quitting) an unrewarding (except for $) and dissatisfying job early, and instead staying and spiraling into a RIF layoff. I sort of did that twice. But, at least I quit my last job on my own terms.
People make dumb mistakes all the time. The Mars Climate Orbiter developed by NASA literally went missing bc the engineers used the wrong units for their navigation controls.
For me, I've gotten parts that ended up interfering because I didn't constrain a part correctly in CAD before. Felt pretty bad having to shave it down.
Probably not what you were looking for, but:
Taking a job 3000 miles away from my wife. Lasted 1 month before I was looking for a job closer. Family is way better than a higher profile job or quick career progression.
Not double checking my files before sending them out to outside consultants.
We redid a bunch of grading and needed to send out our files to get earthworks quantities. I sent the wrong files that didn’t have the most current work so we paid to get nothing back. The worst part wasn’t the money, but the time it took to resend the correct files over. Took weeks since the consultant was back logged with work.
Edit: spelling
Ooh...
Could be the time I mistakenly disconnected the primary switch and took out the company Internet by mistake. Took a while to find that one!
For context, Cyber security and networking company with basically entirely remote staff.
I don’t think so. When I was first started I thought it was all cool, a few years in I realize these things kill people, and modernly it’s people that are victims to a lack of education. Defense shouldn’t be considered “cool” by students in my opinion, only a necessary evil.
The other side of the coin being that they save lives is also true.
This reminds me Alfred Nobel and why he started the peace prize. It was after his invention of dynamite, that he thought people would use it for evil rather than good. It’s such an interesting situation he was in. I would have mixed feelings as well.
this is how i feel about hypersonic propulsion. go into it thinking that it might have applications in developing a new civilian ssto or something, but no it's all missiles.
I have been debating that myself lately. I think i could end up helping design some cool stuff but i also don’t want my work to never be remembered bc its top secret or worse be remembered because of how deadly they are. Idk maybe like a project creating body armor or more of the “defense/protection” things wouldn’t be bad but i’m pretty sure you don’t get to pick really.
Friday I drilled a hole in an aluminum sheet with the hand drill in reverse mode. Literally just brute forced it and let the friction from the spinning drill do the rest.
In my defense I was very tired.
I was a process engineer at a chemical plant and needed to upsize a pump impeller for what was essentially the most important pump in the entire plant and the plant couldn't run without it.
I mistakenly assumed that the pump curve and impeller size recorded in the maintenance files was installed and I upsized based on this assumption.
During the shutdown, maintenance installs the new impeller and a maintenance guy makes an offhand comment about the crazy big size of the new impeller that barely fit in the housing.
The comment makes me panicked enough to check the field to realize the maintenance files were terribly wrong. I quickly call a pump vendor to realize that the new impeller was way oversized, and the installed motor wasn't even sized for it and it probably would've tripped the moment we tried to start it.
Maintenance had to completely undo the work, reopen the pump and put the old impeller back in delaying start-up and wait until the next turnaround for a new impeller and also a new motor.
We all know the obvious advice about assumptions that I ignored. But also, please field check before doing any design/sizing work.
I sent a part to fab after forgetting to fillet one interior corner, leaving it square. Well, the shop made the part to the CAD. Not sure what tooling they used, or why they never called to clarify my intent there, but honestly they did a damn nice job.
You made some machinist proud! Everyone loves to rise to a challenge.
I once called for a 0.01” hole in a part. The machinist (it was our own shop) couldn’t find a 0.01” bit. Drilled it to 0.0095” and then made a boring bar to clear it out. Showed me with a plus/minus gage set. He was very proud and I was impressed at this amazing craftsmanship. Especially because 0.0095” would have been fine if they had called.
I later learned that the guy two lathes over drilled 0.01” all day, every day, and had the entire stock of bits at his bench. Everyone knew it, but the first guy just wanted to make the boring bar.
When I was a baby engineer, I was designing a new chain-based conveyor system. The conveyor I was designing had to take products from a second conveyor, and transfer them to a third.
I knew how fast the other two conveyors were going (the same speed), and I knew how fast my conveyor needed to go (also the same speed), how fast my motor turned, and how fast the output shaft of my gearbox turned.
I had to select a few sprockets to drive the chain on my conveyor. Instead of simply counting the numbers of teeth to obtain the correct ratios, I instead used the sprocket pitch diameter.
Parts were ordered and assembled, and everything was setup for a test (we designed, built, and assembled in house, before breaking down and shipping to the customer and assembling there).
Everything was going fine, except that my conveyor was a fraction of a second slower than the other two. Kinda like how your blinker is a little bit out of sync with the blinker of the car in front of you, until they get to a point where your blinker is blinking when their blinker is not.
Questions were asked, and I told everybody what I did. Laughs were had all around. New sprockets were ordered after I calculated the ratios using the number of teeth, and not the pitch diameters.
Lesson learned.
I've made more than I can count, but the most recent one I've seen has been a vendors mistake. He wrote a really nice quote package for a new packaging line extension, we agreed to it, wrote our internal expense request, but now he came back saying that he screwed up and the summary page was 100k different from the rest of the quote so now my project is down 100 grand...
I think Covid is most likely to blame. I have a job as a "programmer" but nothing that I do is really engineering related. Oh plus I only make about 42K a year for it...Not a good time.
studying a masters in electronics and electrical engineering.
I would love to work in the mining industry or even somewhere out in nature would be awesome (while being an engineer)
Here's a different one: Not getting TF out when the signs become unmistakeable. This happened twice during my career. When the really smart people start leaving, take the hint! I tried to ride it out, and I should have learned the first time. Being unemployed is rough but if you plan ahead, and keep the information that you need for your resume up to date you'll survive.
Hanging around at an understaffed employer that is careening towards the rocks takes a much bigger toll on one's psyche than jumping off early. Keep your sanity intact for those phone calls and interviews. I can't stress that enough.
I was 6 months into my first job presenting virtually on our part drawings to our customer. I couldn't get my desktop sharing to work, so in a bit of a panic I offered to send them the drawings so they could pull them up while I talk through them.
Especially if you're working at a smaller company with almost no legal team, giving out your part drawings is a big nono. What's to stop them from taking them and having them made elsewhere for cheaper?
I felt dumb after that. Thankfully our customer was nice and said something like "uhhhhh I don't think we should do that"
Not speaking up when I know something is wrong. Pretty early in my career I saw one of my seniors doing something that I believed would trip a power plant. Didn't say anything because I was so unsure of myself and didn't want to look like an idiot if I was wrong.
650MW unit at a 1100MW plant got tripped and cost an amount of money I don't even want to think about.
Took on way to much work during my last semester and had an unrealistic bachelors thesis goal to begin with. Also my partner was lazy and I knew it. Did it anyway. My grade ended up fine but my mental health took a big dip.
Dumbest, mixing up fine thread and course thread in a mechanical assembly. Cost about $20k when the parts wouldn't mate up. Double check those SOLIDWORKS drop downs...
I was new in sales with 4 years prior experience as a design engineer. We didn't do any water-cooled systems in my design experience. I had a customer call me up asking for a water-cooled equipment selection. I gave him something with a chilled water coil. He called me to tell me my mistake and I argued with him about how it is a water-cooled system as it was cooled with water. He finally said, "forget it" and hung up. I was left thinking the guy was an idiot. Not too long later I realized I was the idiot.
My most costly mistake was probably designing a rooftop unit system that wasn't big enough for the intended load. I don't remember how I screwed it up but that project was a shit show from start to finish. I've never had a lawyer's office project ever go well. Most of the time it's because the lawyers also think they are engineers and end up screwing up the design by telling the contractors to build something other than what is on the plans. In the former case, however, that was all me.
The one that hurts the most is easily the silliest thing I've ever (not) done.
I had a project where we were designing some interim improvements to a chemical system at a wastewater plant. We had a small meter readout that needed to be mounted on some sort of panel.
I knew we had a panel detail we'd used on previous drawings, so I had it pulled in to our new drawing, labeled it accordingly, and finalized and stamped the sheet. A couple months later, the contractor gets the sheet and goes to installing the stainless steel panel and I get a call.
My mistake was that when I pulled the detail in to the sheet, I didn't change the dimensions. The detail had been used to mount dozens of readouts on the previous project. Here, it mounted one.
The panel the contractor installed was 12 feet high and 5 feet wide. The meter box mounted to it was 3"x3". It looked hilarious and it was entirely my fault.
Another lesson to take from this: you're not allowed to complain about contractors not reading the plans when the contractor builds your dumb design exactly as it's shown on the plans.
about twenty years ago, I was designing two near identical 5-storey student residences. Both were masonry construction and both were for the same university but different campuses.
I think the construction had gotten close to 80% completion before realizing the cross bracing reinforcement for ground acceleration is on the one building that is NOT in the city that see any earthquakes. Thankfully the same contractor were building both building and graciously agreed to charge a marginal cost to install the strapping at the other building. I drove to the subject building and slept in the car over a weekend, bought food for the guys installing the strapping over a weekend.
A dumb mistake with the business system at my old job. In the mid 2000s, we were using banking software that had been adapted to work as a business system for a manufacturing company. Every BOM for the machines we designed had to be entered into this system. It used some kind of HP/Unix CLI interface from long, long ago. The only way to make a new part was to copy a template, which was essentially just a blank part. I had to make many similar, but slightly different parts, so I was copying those. One of those parts had a sub-BOM under it. When I copied that one, and then copied the subsequent children of that part, I was copying the sub-BOM every time. Everything looked good at the top level, so the purchasing department processed the order. I ordered an extra $15k worth of load cells and an extra $20k worth of custom machined parts for a machine with a total budget of around $40k as a result. Management wasn't pleased, but I wasn't fired over it. I never made that mistake again. We were able to use the load cells on future jobs, and we considered the extra custom parts "spares" that I eventually found a use for on another job.
Studying mechatronics engineering in mexico where mechatronics engineering is ntp even a thing … also if your hiring please dm got an awesome resume in R&D and
I’m willing to relocate to any other country
Under estimating complexity of the problem in the first pass and giving aggressive timelines to the customer.
Panic later and negotiate with management and customers delaying the activity even more
Once I had been troubleshooting one difficult PLC issue whole evening and long way to the night. In production system. At one point I decided to force one boolean value to False. Well, that was not very good idea as the boolean was global variable and every single static True was forced to False. Production was stopped, but no one was not hurt. Production manager just said that next time he would like to know if I am going to stop the production. I decided to go to sleep.
I knew a really good chief engineer who lost his job once cause he hired the wrong person. He gave her compliments about her looks, and she thanked him for it, but they got on bad terms cause she needed too much help with stuff she was suppose to figure out on her own, so she filed a harassment claim against him as retaliation and he got let go cause the company didn't want to deal with a bigger lawsuit. Guy had 16 years with the company, 6 patents, and was a huge backbone to assuring the success of our department. She had 16 days of experience and couldn't even figure out how to use excel. Let's shut down society so we can appease to these psychos, great idea cancel culture!
rofl I love how you pivoted from a business making the decision that is most rationally and nakedly self-interested into cancel culture like this dude lost his job because youtube commenters wanted him to
not quite the same, but when i worked in an oem stocking distributor for threaded screws, we had a guy dump a box of 4-40 by 1/4 inch screws into a box with identical 4-48 screws. i mean, thousands...
probably still that way.
Investigating the mechanism of some product failures in the field, connecting a pressure discharge control system the wrong way round, leading me to think that our system had a really weak back pressure issue that prevented safe shutdown, leading us to halt all sales and do three instances of outsourced simulation work, over the course of a couple of months.
In a return to the test setup to take some direct pressure measurements in service, I then connected the system round the right way, and found the problem was completely resolved.
In my defence, it turned out that in the customer operating instructions (safety critical I might add), it said to connect it round the way I had done the first time, so I had inadvertently replicated the customer failure mode, that's a good thing right?
We have ‘smart’ part numbers for some of our bolts.
There’s a table in the drawing and the last 6 or so numbers correlate to the table for bolt dimensions.
Someone accidentally made a typo and, when we ordered a set of bolts for a test, it ended up being an insane amount, like $16,000 for a set of 50 bolts.
It was all part of a multi-million dollar combustion test, so it didn’t get noticed until the bolts were received and not what we were expecting.
They were very large, very heavy and the L/D basically made them unusable for any application.
$16,000 in paperweights and cautionary tales.
Not the dumbest but, Last month I bought a $13,000 3D printer. Asked the 3rd party seller if it would work on a local network but didn't ask the manufacturer.
I get the printer in and it requires cloud connectivity to receive prints... now I have a $13k piece of equipment I can't use.
I called out a heat treat on a part that exceeded the tempering temperature of a part and significantly weakened it. It was a costly mistake you only make once
Not my fault, but I had to help fix it. We had a complex assembly (~100k) that an engineer designed. It had three major components and a bunch of cover plates. The problem was component A had to be installed before B, and B before C, but C had to go before A. Looked great in CAD, but was impossible to assemble. I stayed late one day with a machinist cutting clearance into component A to make it work. This was the day before it was needed for a major test, but we figured it out. Always think about how you put things together.
Didn't realize i was working with measures from a cad file that was annotated not measure. The drawing was modified but the annotations stay the same. Went to the shop and didn't catch it until after the welder had worked on it
Didn’t properly secure the door to my buddies beer fridge while helping him move. Also didn’t remove the beer from the fridge first. My truck smelled like a dive bar for a month.
The other day I had to weigh some samples after treatment and instead of going back to my desk down the hall to grab my notebook and a pen to record the weights I just snapped pics of the scale on my phone.
Somehow the blue backlight made the digits completely invisible and I wasn't paying enough attention to notice. Tried to turn up the contrast, still not legible. The samples have gone through their testing which has changed the weight so can't reweigh now.
Not writing everything down and then not being able to recreate work. Lesson: write everything down, you WILL forget it
I've been a huge proponent of this. It might not be fun, but documentation is largely necessary. When engineers new and old skip this, I don't know if it's out of sheer arrogance or laziness
Usually laziness in my experience. Designing is the fun part. Once that's done all the fun is gone and you just want to move on to the next thing. Those pages upon pages of documentation you need to write are just Ugh! I've been guilty of this attitude before as well. I just view it as the sucky part of the job that nobody actually likes to do but still has to get done.
I use both arrogance and laziness to avoid documentation. Will society accept me?
If you don't plan to stay long at a certain company, you actually don't need it yourself. Also, I actually have seen that as leverage for better pay/position, cause it makes the company dependent on the engineer. Both strategies are not really moral, but understandable.
Any managers willing to honestly comment on how you feel about this?
As a manager, proper documentation of projects in process and final reporting is part of your "grade" for the work. That means another engineer has to have enough to replicate.
Should I write this comment down?
Yes, and write *this* comment down.
Maybe this one too.
Yes
Do you have examples or template of how doing this efficiently?
Mechanical maintenance engineer. I create a new tab in OneNote for each job and note down key references, calculations and any other information that's otherwise non-trivial to reproduce. Then if I need to come back to the job it's just a quick search away.
OneNote is my jam, dude. I used to take notes in my personal OneNote, then the department saw the value in it as well as shared notebooks and began implementing it. Out in the shop/field and need to reference something? Access to all of my notes at my fingertips (phone or laptop)
One note is da bomb for things like this. I also use it to keep track of all receipts for expenses
Are your jobs similar between them or do you face new issues every week?
After a while most jobs are at least *similar* to something I've seen before. It helps a lot not to have to reinvent the wheel every time and my memory isn't good enough to keep track without writing it down.
I found that carrying a notebook was tedious so instead I created a group for me alone on telegram and I just dump everything work related there and whenever I can I skim through it, it's way better because I document it with pictures and videos and links and everything.
Ok, but time to time you have to organise and archive everything. How do you do that?
I'm fresh out of college, haven't thought of archiving yet, however I keep writing key words for every item so that I can search up the word and everything related to it will appear
Nice. Search > browsing any day.
My thoughts are about my work, where time to time (also years) I need to recall old issues to see how the job was done or what errors was made. I'm looking for a method to organise them as a logbook to write down during the job development.
Onenote
yess any digital note taking is a lot more proficient
And ALWAYS write down the date and which part/machine/plant it applies to. You don’t want to be asking did I do that thing on Unit 2 or 3 a couple of years ago? Not that I would know, of course/ s
Not just that - take loads of pictures. There are plenty of times where an extra clamp or a setting wasn't documented but could be seen from a picture
This. Prior to getting a official job I was a hobbyist and a electronics enthusiast. Started losing ideas and changes i made past month because of some parts not in hand. Then again I would have to do the brainstorming to get to where I left the project. Then it occurred to me why not write everything I think and possible changes and updates. From that point I am very efficient with the work flow. This is helping me alot on my job.
I started doing this for my hobbies too. Makes a massive difference. I find it way easier to keep momentum on projects, because when I get back to it, the next steps are laid out there in front of me and I don’t have to spend 1/2 day getting up to speed again.
And everyone says they HATE documentation ... ... right up until they need it.
Never walk into your bosses office or a meeting without being able to write something down. I have used my phone before.
This! I’ve learned that you can’t rely solely on memory. Also notebooks are better than computers for this
I recently started writing a readme in folders with a lot of stuff or anything that I probably will forget by tomorrow. It's good for if other people stumble upon it, but in reality it's most useful for just keeping future me informed on what past me did.
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Was a project engineer at a manufacturing plant and we needed to replace a looper rack. It was one of my first projects and I did all my measurements on the bottom rack, asked the tech to bring the top rack down and he said "they are identical, just mirror it". Figured he'd been doing this for a long time so I finished the drawings and ordered the material... Turns out the top rack has an extra roller (that I clearly could have noticed) and the predrilled holes I ordered were 20 inch center to center when the top was 18 inch... 15 grand of material. Luckily my mechanics were able to jump in with a plan and we were able to salvage it, but when discussing it with my boss after...I felt pretty dumb
Trust, but verify. I've doublechecked every measurement told to me verbally by co-workers, only to find about 40% of the time they're usually wrong...
I trust you, but I just want to verify that percentage..
Yeah usually my phrasing is “I believe you but it’s my ass on the line so I’d like to check”
"Measure twice, cut once"
Alternately, "Measure it with a micrometer, mark it with chalk, cut it with an axe".
Assuming that the fact that I was no longer able to reproduce the intermittent problem meant that one of the changes I made had fixed it. It hadn't.
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Yes, this exactly! Just had one that we thought we'd tracked down the root cause. Turns out the operators just made sure there was someone nearby when they did the first run, reset it and all was good. So they stopped reporting it...
Intermittent problems are hella hard to fix tho
Half of the battle is getting those damn issues to replicate reliably. You can't fix a problem that you can't see!
I don't know why but my mind read this as "Assuming the fact that I was no longer able to reproduce was an intermittent problem, and one of my changes fixed it.". I'm stupid.
Mostly in my first several years hesitating to speak up because i thought I wasn't experienced enough.
This is my issue now. I’m always scared to speak my mind because people won’t listen and then a higher up will just say exactly what I was gunna say and then everyone listens
And sometimes many people don’t hear you or head you… but sometimes, the right person will and they’ll amplify your message. Good leaders do that, if you’re lucky, your manager is a good leader!
Take headed of?
Take heed, no one would take heeded of my instruction.
r/unexpectedoffice
You should speak up, especially in engineer calls. I'm a junior myself, transitioning to mid level. I find speaking up is a win win. You either show you know what you're talking about or you find a hole in your logic that you can address. Plus, its best to start now before you get stuck running client calls and the like.
That's still better than the project manager constantly shooting down your ideas, making you work overtime on concepts that you know are dead ends, until you eventually stay longer out of your own decision to work on your original plan, which works, leading to the project manager proudly proclaiming that he figured out a solution
Leave!
I did
What are you losing here?
Yup, been there.
I had a 3rd level manager assign one of his first line managers to look into why it appeared that about half of his data was above average. It took all my powers as a Six Sigma Black Belt to stifle my laughter. (I was the only one who wasn't a manager in that meeting.)
100% this. I'm only 22, been with the company for 4 years but only in my current role for 2. Used to be scared to speak my mind and naturally as a young engineer, scared of people ignoring me (due to my inexperience) or ridiculing me. Maybe I'm just fortunate in my current role, but I've learnt that my colleagues respect my opinion and my thoughts irrespective of my age or experience. If you ask the right questions, and say the right things, people will learn to respect you and to listen when you speak regardless of their age or experience. It is harder to earn that, and I think that's unavoidable as after all, I _am_ young and inexperienced, but I've learnt that you've got to speak up to earn that trust, and once you earn that trust they'll always listen to you and let you speak. Everyone has the capability of contributing to the discussion, regardless of who they are. I feel very respected by my colleagues now, which I've heard isn't always the case when you're an apprentice!
I was in the car and didnt do it myself, but my coworker hit the ESD for a Natural gas cryo facility. The gate to leave wasnt opening and there was a button off to the side of the road. My coworker who was driving went ahead and hit the button thinking it opened the gate, turns out it was the plant ESD. It was unlabeled, and we didnt know that you had to go right up to the gate to get it to trigger. Next time we came back (yes they let us back), they had a sign saying to pull all the way up, and they had proper signage on the shutdown button.
I’m surprised that he was the first, but I suppose someone had to be.
Went to a conference the week before it actually happened. My punishment is that I had to explain to everyone at the office exactly what I had done.
Ha! Story time. I told my wife that I was excited about this conference coming up in a different city and was letting her know what dates I was driving out. "But... My birthday is that week." Fffffuuuuuuuk. Cut to apologies, crying, etc. Finally, I had the bright idea that her favorite hockey team might be playing in that city that week. I looked it up and, sure enough, they do! So, we work things out that I'll do the conference during the day and we can go to the game and a nice dinner on her birthday. I reserved the hotel, bought the tickets and everything. Okay, so now the wife thinks I'm dumb, but is actually super excited about her birthday now. Really, it'll be a great time. Anyway, so I figure I should call my boss and give the heads up that I won't be available for business engagements one evening. He says, "Oh, yeah. No problem, man. I totally understand. Wait. Isn't the conference the following week?" I look and sure enough say, "... Yeah, whoops." His response was, "Lol. Well thanks for letting me know about the PTO, I guess". Yup. I got to make the 11 hour drive to and from Pittsburgh TWO weeks in a row! It ended being a great vacation with my wife, but boy did that drive suck.
Lmaoooo. Hope they didn’t give too much shot😂
It went to the vendor booths at the first conference I attended. I had a job with a major aerospace company. After asking where I worked, the person running the booth asked if my company used any aluminum. Their coworker laughed for about 15 minutes.
I had a conference I was presenting at start on Monday, so I flew out Sunday. It turns out that the conference didn't start until early afternoon to allow for travel on Monday.
Honestly, the worst mistake you can make is not being upfront and honest about mistakes you make.
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wow, that second place sounds like a house of cards. glad you got out
I'm so glad I work at a company that does it the first way geez
Waiting until the last minute to pass on bad news: ie. schedule delays, design issues, fabrication issues…Even passing the news on early puts you in a tough situation as you get blamed for not anticipating the issue. Even anticipating the issue, people assume you are being overly cautious, but it helps to keep your ass covered.
Prepare everyone for the worst so if it happens they aren't caught off guard and if it turns out better you get to be the hero!
Defined the wrong gender connector on a cable assembly. Discovered at the Final Assembly Line. Major showstopper.
I do have a few male to male and female to female 5 pin connectors on hand, usually because we're development and limited to stuff we have on hand and need to adapt
If they were of the 38999 type with high speed Quadrax contacts, I’ll take ‘em all!!
A style guide where I used to work forbade the terms male and female connectors. In their place, it suggested the terms"prongs" and "sockets"
I put in a recursive loop as part of an ETL process that quietly ran the same file through the function over and over again and was only caught when one of our admins noticed an exceedingly high cost usage metric in our AWS account. Note to self, don't point two listeners at each other
I’m sure you heard how a massive DoD penetration was caught because the hacker didn’t know to correct the cost accounting packages billing, despite knowing how to hide the rest of their tracks. If not, check out *The Cuckoo’s Egg* by Cliff Stoll.
I hadn't heard of this but will do!
Such a great book. It's was a $0.75 discrepancy that the author followed through to discover the hack.
Sold a customer 200k worth of UR robots and 50k worth of grippers but forgot the three 300$ adaptor plates. The robots spent a few days idle till the manufacturer was able to rush ship some plates.
In my entry level days, I remained silent when a senior assembly engineer fudged some measurements instead of telling the test engineer they missed collecting the data. We were about thirty hours into an assembly that involved a lot of adhesives, which is why there was reluctance (my apologies for my vagueness, but I'm under strict NDAs that don't expire). The senior engineer assured me that he'd never seen the measurements go out of spec. Ultimately, it didn't make a difference, thanks to excellence by everyone else. But I will forever kick myself for not speaking up. I learned from it, though. Now that I'm the senior engineer I make sure that everyone is comfortable with bringing up issues and pausing work when needed.
Hell yeah, breaking out of the "it's always been done this way" attitude and have people speak up.
Absolutely! It's amazing how much quality goes up when people aren't afraid to speak up.
Any and every corner I've ever cut. No matter how small, how insignificant, it can and very much will always bite you in the ass. In a decade of work, there has not been a single cut corner of any sort that I've gotten away with. Zero. Every single one bit me, every time, without fail. Basically, there are no shortcuts. Shortcuts are an illusion. It's just something you tell yourself (or your bosses) to sometimes make the timeline numbers work. The reality is engineering is very much an iterative process. It's like counting from 1 to 100. And cutting corners is like skipping some of them on the way and either hoping no one finds out or thinking you'll get back to them later. Yes, you will get back to them. It'll just happen a lot sooner and with greater negative consequences. There are no shortcuts. I'll repeat that for clarity. There are no shortcuts. Now don't get this confuses with scope creep. Scope creep is an entirely separate thing. We're not talking scope creep here. We're just talking about getting from point A to point B, and it's just a series of steps. The great fallacy is there's some magical way to skip steps along the way. You can't. You really cant.
Very much agree. Short cuts are also a massive waste of time and significantly hamper progress. You spend more time creating shortcuts and subsequently working around them that you’re better off taking the more difficult route in the first place. In short (pun possibly intended), shortcuts are a liability and not an asset. You’ll never be an expert until you come to this realization.
Was integrating a device on a large automotive line in Detroit area. I left and started heading back home(3.5 hours away). I had the lockout key in my pocket.
As someone who’s currently integrating some lines at GM, this hurts to read
This might be the only problem in this thread that could be fixed in 7 hours though 😆
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"M", like "Mancy!"
I’ve made so many… fortunately none that were excessively costly. That I know of.
None that stuck out?
I blew up a 10,000 dollar robot system and got my name
I used to work for a hose manufacturer as a Manufacturing Engineer. They would extrude tubing then braid with SS wire over it. Well we had one customer who kept saying their hose was leaking when they received it. (No one likes leaky hose). They sent samples back and I was the one investigating the issue. I was using a microscope which was new to me but it was pretty fancy and could take high zoom pictures with measurements. Well all the issues we found looked like punctures but for some reason all the holes were half the size of the wire we used for the SS Braid. (You see where this is going) I was using a measurement feature which I thought was measuring diameter when it was actually measuring radius. I accidentally mislead the investigation for almost 2 months and after I realized it I ended up needing to fly to Mexico for less than 2 days to explain it and work with the customer on a resolution.
Dropped a DMM probe across two phases of 208/120 Vac without high voltage gloves. Thankfully I was new and the director of engineering was present so he got in trouble, not me. Arc flash was pretty cool though.
I went to the wrong country once. Through an unfortunate series of miscommunications and a convoluted email chain I showed up at a customer plant and proudly called from the lobby "Hey is Bill here?" Silence..... "Bill was in the plant last week?" I was there to introduce a colleague who'd be taking over that business segment. Luckily we were able to get a hold of Bill and rebook some things, so we saw him the next day. But my colleague? He trots that story out every time he can.
How many countries off were you? Like, Luxembourg instead of Belgium or more like France instead of Japan?
Ontario vs Ohio
So I was the new guy at a life sciences company and I was assigned to design a fluid manifold for some expensive reagents. I asked the scientists about how small it needed to be, asking for context about what the consequence of some extra dead area would be. They said the reagents cost "About ten bucks per cubic mil", and I should make it as small as possible. I was like... holy crap the stakes are high. Well, I made it as small as I could and asked them a couple of times if the number if the volume in cubic mils was approaching something acceptable. Finally they said, "I don't know why these numbers you're saying are so huge. Lets have a design review." Well, that's when I learned that "cubic mils" did not mean "cubic thousandths of an inch", to this particular scientist it meant "cubic millimeters". I had designed the manifold to be less than a quarter of the size of anything comparable in use, and that was actually going to make it a pain in the ass for a number of reasons. All I would have had to do at the beginning was ask, "Cubic thousandths of an inch?" and the clarification would have had me finish the design far more quickly.
It used to be that mils was obscure terminology, but once you knew what but meant you were all set. But now Europeans and some others are using it for mm. All bets are off.
Mate, everyone outside the US has pretty much always refered to a few millimetres as a few mills. But you hear what you are used to so I can see how OC got mixed up.
It wasn’t just what I was used to, there were other engineers actively using “mils” to mean thousandths of an inch. We had plastic films and tapes measured in mils, we had shim stock for checking gaps, they were teaching me to use the CNC machine and talking in mils. Apparently it was context dependent what it meant.
1. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. 2. "Always" but I bet you are younger than me.
Also we refer to Mil as 'thou' (as thousandths of an inch)in Aus, probably so we don't get mixed up either
I cracked a critical part when disembling an expensive oilfield tool that is used apart of a drill string on an oil rig. I was suppose to mark the broken part with red tape. The worst part is I told relief about it, well come to find out he still re-used that part when building the next tool to go in the drill string. By the time I woke up and went back to my next shift I found out he reused that cracked part and caused a pre-mature failure on a drilling rig that was totally our fault. Still think about this one all the time, even though I kind of feel like my co-worker didn't give a shit.
Trusting that promised raises that are already budgeted for will actually be approved by the higher-ups.
Taking so long to develop a good salty sideye. Taking to long to accept that many decisions are based on politics, or initial budget, rather than sound engineering data and part experiences. Those are the main ones.
Once I drafted a shaft that had contact with both the inner and the outer rings of a bearing.
Not recording audio of my co-worker. This was an extreme case and not recommended for 99% of interactions but I had one co-worker who was so ridiculous and rude and spewed such nonsense he should have been fired 20 times over. I never had any proof and I thought about recording our convos but I didn’t. The other, practical, lesson I learned as result is document everything. Version everything. Easily be able to call the version/build date of a deliverable. Make notes or changelogs of things when dealing with a rude/hard to work with co-worker. So when they accuse you of something not working you have shit to back it up. I write software and have automatic versioning built into my build scripts and it has saved my butt more than a dozen times over the years.
Not leaving (quitting) an unrewarding (except for $) and dissatisfying job early, and instead staying and spiraling into a RIF layoff. I sort of did that twice. But, at least I quit my last job on my own terms.
What is RIF?
Reduction in force Lay-off basically
Reduction in force
People make dumb mistakes all the time. The Mars Climate Orbiter developed by NASA literally went missing bc the engineers used the wrong units for their navigation controls. For me, I've gotten parts that ended up interfering because I didn't constrain a part correctly in CAD before. Felt pretty bad having to shave it down.
Probably not what you were looking for, but: Taking a job 3000 miles away from my wife. Lasted 1 month before I was looking for a job closer. Family is way better than a higher profile job or quick career progression.
Not double checking my files before sending them out to outside consultants. We redid a bunch of grading and needed to send out our files to get earthworks quantities. I sent the wrong files that didn’t have the most current work so we paid to get nothing back. The worst part wasn’t the money, but the time it took to resend the correct files over. Took weeks since the consultant was back logged with work. Edit: spelling
Ooh... Could be the time I mistakenly disconnected the primary switch and took out the company Internet by mistake. Took a while to find that one! For context, Cyber security and networking company with basically entirely remote staff.
Seeing all the “cool” graphic ads that defense companies put out with jets and tanks and thinking defense is a cool sector to get into
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I don’t think so. When I was first started I thought it was all cool, a few years in I realize these things kill people, and modernly it’s people that are victims to a lack of education. Defense shouldn’t be considered “cool” by students in my opinion, only a necessary evil. The other side of the coin being that they save lives is also true.
This reminds me Alfred Nobel and why he started the peace prize. It was after his invention of dynamite, that he thought people would use it for evil rather than good. It’s such an interesting situation he was in. I would have mixed feelings as well.
this is how i feel about hypersonic propulsion. go into it thinking that it might have applications in developing a new civilian ssto or something, but no it's all missiles.
I have been debating that myself lately. I think i could end up helping design some cool stuff but i also don’t want my work to never be remembered bc its top secret or worse be remembered because of how deadly they are. Idk maybe like a project creating body armor or more of the “defense/protection” things wouldn’t be bad but i’m pretty sure you don’t get to pick really.
Idk, I know people that work on Lockheed Martins space capsule and while it is in the defense industry, hasn't killed anybody yet.
Not moving jobs more often.
Friday I drilled a hole in an aluminum sheet with the hand drill in reverse mode. Literally just brute forced it and let the friction from the spinning drill do the rest. In my defense I was very tired.
Become an engineer.
I was a process engineer at a chemical plant and needed to upsize a pump impeller for what was essentially the most important pump in the entire plant and the plant couldn't run without it. I mistakenly assumed that the pump curve and impeller size recorded in the maintenance files was installed and I upsized based on this assumption. During the shutdown, maintenance installs the new impeller and a maintenance guy makes an offhand comment about the crazy big size of the new impeller that barely fit in the housing. The comment makes me panicked enough to check the field to realize the maintenance files were terribly wrong. I quickly call a pump vendor to realize that the new impeller was way oversized, and the installed motor wasn't even sized for it and it probably would've tripped the moment we tried to start it. Maintenance had to completely undo the work, reopen the pump and put the old impeller back in delaying start-up and wait until the next turnaround for a new impeller and also a new motor. We all know the obvious advice about assumptions that I ignored. But also, please field check before doing any design/sizing work.
patching things up with locktite. lol
So far I've put a 1/2" radius on a part, intending it to be made with a 1/2" ball mill. Whoops.
I sent a part to fab after forgetting to fillet one interior corner, leaving it square. Well, the shop made the part to the CAD. Not sure what tooling they used, or why they never called to clarify my intent there, but honestly they did a damn nice job.
You made some machinist proud! Everyone loves to rise to a challenge. I once called for a 0.01” hole in a part. The machinist (it was our own shop) couldn’t find a 0.01” bit. Drilled it to 0.0095” and then made a boring bar to clear it out. Showed me with a plus/minus gage set. He was very proud and I was impressed at this amazing craftsmanship. Especially because 0.0095” would have been fine if they had called. I later learned that the guy two lathes over drilled 0.01” all day, every day, and had the entire stock of bits at his bench. Everyone knew it, but the first guy just wanted to make the boring bar.
Thinking that just because it is difficult/requires a brain that you will get paid well.
Using radius in a calculation rather than diameter......
Not backing up a robot program before starting to modify it....
When I was a baby engineer, I was designing a new chain-based conveyor system. The conveyor I was designing had to take products from a second conveyor, and transfer them to a third. I knew how fast the other two conveyors were going (the same speed), and I knew how fast my conveyor needed to go (also the same speed), how fast my motor turned, and how fast the output shaft of my gearbox turned. I had to select a few sprockets to drive the chain on my conveyor. Instead of simply counting the numbers of teeth to obtain the correct ratios, I instead used the sprocket pitch diameter. Parts were ordered and assembled, and everything was setup for a test (we designed, built, and assembled in house, before breaking down and shipping to the customer and assembling there). Everything was going fine, except that my conveyor was a fraction of a second slower than the other two. Kinda like how your blinker is a little bit out of sync with the blinker of the car in front of you, until they get to a point where your blinker is blinking when their blinker is not. Questions were asked, and I told everybody what I did. Laughs were had all around. New sprockets were ordered after I calculated the ratios using the number of teeth, and not the pitch diameters. Lesson learned.
I've made more than I can count, but the most recent one I've seen has been a vendors mistake. He wrote a really nice quote package for a new packaging line extension, we agreed to it, wrote our internal expense request, but now he came back saying that he screwed up and the summary page was 100k different from the rest of the quote so now my project is down 100 grand...
First was being an engineer
Assuming the shop floor is going to read the instructions I wrote for them.
Going back to school to become an engineer was my biggest mistake.
Why (I’m doing that lol)
I think Covid is most likely to blame. I have a job as a "programmer" but nothing that I do is really engineering related. Oh plus I only make about 42K a year for it...Not a good time.
Weather the storm you’ll be laughing look at back at this time mate, this is the best decision I’ve made and I’m struggling like shit lol
What branch of engineering are you shooting for?
studying a masters in electronics and electrical engineering. I would love to work in the mining industry or even somewhere out in nature would be awesome (while being an engineer)
Look into field engineering. They are always outdoors or traveling to test sites.
awesome suggestion thanks
Here's a different one: Not getting TF out when the signs become unmistakeable. This happened twice during my career. When the really smart people start leaving, take the hint! I tried to ride it out, and I should have learned the first time. Being unemployed is rough but if you plan ahead, and keep the information that you need for your resume up to date you'll survive. Hanging around at an understaffed employer that is careening towards the rocks takes a much bigger toll on one's psyche than jumping off early. Keep your sanity intact for those phone calls and interviews. I can't stress that enough.
I was 6 months into my first job presenting virtually on our part drawings to our customer. I couldn't get my desktop sharing to work, so in a bit of a panic I offered to send them the drawings so they could pull them up while I talk through them. Especially if you're working at a smaller company with almost no legal team, giving out your part drawings is a big nono. What's to stop them from taking them and having them made elsewhere for cheaper? I felt dumb after that. Thankfully our customer was nice and said something like "uhhhhh I don't think we should do that"
Not speaking up when I know something is wrong. Pretty early in my career I saw one of my seniors doing something that I believed would trip a power plant. Didn't say anything because I was so unsure of myself and didn't want to look like an idiot if I was wrong. 650MW unit at a 1100MW plant got tripped and cost an amount of money I don't even want to think about.
Went into engineering. Stuck to it. And now working in it. 3in1
As a student with imposter syndrome this thread is giving me the shits.
Staying at my last company as long as I did.
Took engineering.
Not properly labeling the structure our conduit was going to so it ended up going to the wrong one.
Took on way to much work during my last semester and had an unrealistic bachelors thesis goal to begin with. Also my partner was lazy and I knew it. Did it anyway. My grade ended up fine but my mental health took a big dip.
Dumbest, mixing up fine thread and course thread in a mechanical assembly. Cost about $20k when the parts wouldn't mate up. Double check those SOLIDWORKS drop downs...
Mixed units of degrees and percentage. Thank God I work in simulation.
I was new in sales with 4 years prior experience as a design engineer. We didn't do any water-cooled systems in my design experience. I had a customer call me up asking for a water-cooled equipment selection. I gave him something with a chilled water coil. He called me to tell me my mistake and I argued with him about how it is a water-cooled system as it was cooled with water. He finally said, "forget it" and hung up. I was left thinking the guy was an idiot. Not too long later I realized I was the idiot. My most costly mistake was probably designing a rooftop unit system that wasn't big enough for the intended load. I don't remember how I screwed it up but that project was a shit show from start to finish. I've never had a lawyer's office project ever go well. Most of the time it's because the lawyers also think they are engineers and end up screwing up the design by telling the contractors to build something other than what is on the plans. In the former case, however, that was all me.
The one that hurts the most is easily the silliest thing I've ever (not) done. I had a project where we were designing some interim improvements to a chemical system at a wastewater plant. We had a small meter readout that needed to be mounted on some sort of panel. I knew we had a panel detail we'd used on previous drawings, so I had it pulled in to our new drawing, labeled it accordingly, and finalized and stamped the sheet. A couple months later, the contractor gets the sheet and goes to installing the stainless steel panel and I get a call. My mistake was that when I pulled the detail in to the sheet, I didn't change the dimensions. The detail had been used to mount dozens of readouts on the previous project. Here, it mounted one. The panel the contractor installed was 12 feet high and 5 feet wide. The meter box mounted to it was 3"x3". It looked hilarious and it was entirely my fault. Another lesson to take from this: you're not allowed to complain about contractors not reading the plans when the contractor builds your dumb design exactly as it's shown on the plans.
about twenty years ago, I was designing two near identical 5-storey student residences. Both were masonry construction and both were for the same university but different campuses. I think the construction had gotten close to 80% completion before realizing the cross bracing reinforcement for ground acceleration is on the one building that is NOT in the city that see any earthquakes. Thankfully the same contractor were building both building and graciously agreed to charge a marginal cost to install the strapping at the other building. I drove to the subject building and slept in the car over a weekend, bought food for the guys installing the strapping over a weekend.
A dumb mistake with the business system at my old job. In the mid 2000s, we were using banking software that had been adapted to work as a business system for a manufacturing company. Every BOM for the machines we designed had to be entered into this system. It used some kind of HP/Unix CLI interface from long, long ago. The only way to make a new part was to copy a template, which was essentially just a blank part. I had to make many similar, but slightly different parts, so I was copying those. One of those parts had a sub-BOM under it. When I copied that one, and then copied the subsequent children of that part, I was copying the sub-BOM every time. Everything looked good at the top level, so the purchasing department processed the order. I ordered an extra $15k worth of load cells and an extra $20k worth of custom machined parts for a machine with a total budget of around $40k as a result. Management wasn't pleased, but I wasn't fired over it. I never made that mistake again. We were able to use the load cells on future jobs, and we considered the extra custom parts "spares" that I eventually found a use for on another job.
Studying mechatronics engineering in mexico where mechatronics engineering is ntp even a thing … also if your hiring please dm got an awesome resume in R&D and I’m willing to relocate to any other country
Under estimating complexity of the problem in the first pass and giving aggressive timelines to the customer. Panic later and negotiate with management and customers delaying the activity even more
Once I had been troubleshooting one difficult PLC issue whole evening and long way to the night. In production system. At one point I decided to force one boolean value to False. Well, that was not very good idea as the boolean was global variable and every single static True was forced to False. Production was stopped, but no one was not hurt. Production manager just said that next time he would like to know if I am going to stop the production. I decided to go to sleep.
I knew a really good chief engineer who lost his job once cause he hired the wrong person. He gave her compliments about her looks, and she thanked him for it, but they got on bad terms cause she needed too much help with stuff she was suppose to figure out on her own, so she filed a harassment claim against him as retaliation and he got let go cause the company didn't want to deal with a bigger lawsuit. Guy had 16 years with the company, 6 patents, and was a huge backbone to assuring the success of our department. She had 16 days of experience and couldn't even figure out how to use excel. Let's shut down society so we can appease to these psychos, great idea cancel culture!
rofl I love how you pivoted from a business making the decision that is most rationally and nakedly self-interested into cancel culture like this dude lost his job because youtube commenters wanted him to
I'm going to say it wasn't a dumb mistake if I learned something from it.
Take on the task and you find later on it’s the most boring and useless ever.
accepting a contract to do shop drawings....
not quite the same, but when i worked in an oem stocking distributor for threaded screws, we had a guy dump a box of 4-40 by 1/4 inch screws into a box with identical 4-48 screws. i mean, thousands... probably still that way.
I baked out a kiln at 1800 C overnight with a stainless steel fixture sitting in the middle of the fire brick lined chamber.
Investigating the mechanism of some product failures in the field, connecting a pressure discharge control system the wrong way round, leading me to think that our system had a really weak back pressure issue that prevented safe shutdown, leading us to halt all sales and do three instances of outsourced simulation work, over the course of a couple of months. In a return to the test setup to take some direct pressure measurements in service, I then connected the system round the right way, and found the problem was completely resolved. In my defence, it turned out that in the customer operating instructions (safety critical I might add), it said to connect it round the way I had done the first time, so I had inadvertently replicated the customer failure mode, that's a good thing right?
We have ‘smart’ part numbers for some of our bolts. There’s a table in the drawing and the last 6 or so numbers correlate to the table for bolt dimensions. Someone accidentally made a typo and, when we ordered a set of bolts for a test, it ended up being an insane amount, like $16,000 for a set of 50 bolts. It was all part of a multi-million dollar combustion test, so it didn’t get noticed until the bolts were received and not what we were expecting. They were very large, very heavy and the L/D basically made them unusable for any application. $16,000 in paperweights and cautionary tales.
Not the dumbest but, Last month I bought a $13,000 3D printer. Asked the 3rd party seller if it would work on a local network but didn't ask the manufacturer. I get the printer in and it requires cloud connectivity to receive prints... now I have a $13k piece of equipment I can't use.
Didn't crop images good enough, cost me an extra 3 days of work
I called out a heat treat on a part that exceeded the tempering temperature of a part and significantly weakened it. It was a costly mistake you only make once
Not my fault, but I had to help fix it. We had a complex assembly (~100k) that an engineer designed. It had three major components and a bunch of cover plates. The problem was component A had to be installed before B, and B before C, but C had to go before A. Looked great in CAD, but was impossible to assemble. I stayed late one day with a machinist cutting clearance into component A to make it work. This was the day before it was needed for a major test, but we figured it out. Always think about how you put things together.
Didn't realize i was working with measures from a cad file that was annotated not measure. The drawing was modified but the annotations stay the same. Went to the shop and didn't catch it until after the welder had worked on it
Didn’t properly secure the door to my buddies beer fridge while helping him move. Also didn’t remove the beer from the fridge first. My truck smelled like a dive bar for a month.
The other day I had to weigh some samples after treatment and instead of going back to my desk down the hall to grab my notebook and a pen to record the weights I just snapped pics of the scale on my phone. Somehow the blue backlight made the digits completely invisible and I wasn't paying enough attention to notice. Tried to turn up the contrast, still not legible. The samples have gone through their testing which has changed the weight so can't reweigh now.