Crossposted from https://beehaw.org/post/24258253
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Wilson” who once worked as the boss of a welding shop attached to an engineering consultancy.
Wilson set the scene by telling us this story came from the early 1980s, when AutoCAD was replacing drawing boards.
“We had a new structural engineer who those of us in the shop quickly identified as an idiot with a degree,” Wilson wrote.
One day, said idiot decided that the computers used to run AutoCAD needed to be cleaned and that the welding shop was the place to do the job.
What a goddamn motherfucker with a bought degree from a diploma mill. The kind you want to hit with a keyboard.
Equally dumb are the owners who hired him straight off the street and have no fucking idea either what better to do with what they bought: thousands of greenbacks in computer hardware and AutoCAD.
The company let the idiotic engineer go a couple of months later for deleting AutoCAD from his computer to make room on its hard drive for a game.
So destroying five PCs, and losing a lot of project files, is a-okay 👍. But deleting AutoCAD for a video game is where the line gets drawn? 🤦♂️ 😂
Besides being expensive, AutoCAD in the 80s needed a lot of floppies to install it, and hard drives at the time were very large but have small space, like about 20mb.
Which PC had a 2mb hard drive? Smallest 286 PCs I can remember already had 20MB, and a floppy disk would hold 720kb or 1.44MB.
A new guy broke equipment because he tried to help with something he was not trained on. Maybe we can fix him.
Guy who’s been here for months tossed out a critical tool in order to goof off more effectively. Sounds like he doesn’t want to work here at all.
The corporate mantra is “look like you’re doing work, even if that display is negatively impacting productivity” with the corrallary “Never look like you’re not doing work even when by not working you’re increasing productivity”
Last Wilson heard, he was employed by a large US-based aircraft company.
I’m guessing it starts with a “B” and ends in “oeing”
Big Canoeing strikes again
Cmon. It could be the other large manufacturer, Boein G.
Engineers do a lot of dumb stuff ask anyone who works in the trades
I’m a crane technician and I hate engineers
They probably hate you as well. Nothing like being told how to do your job by a technician who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
So the people doing the actual work day after day week after week who just have less privilege and access to higher education don’t know anything. You’re ignorant AF. That Has not been my experience
Frankly, “doing the actual work” is much less important than you’d imagine. I have yet to hear someone start with “I’ve been doing this job for…” and not end with something stupid.
Plenty of tredies know a lot, and I’ve met a bunch of tradesmen who did try uni but quit. But also, plenty of them have a need to tear down engineers because they feel threatened, and plenty more think an engineer is an idiot because he wants things done differently than “the right way” which is, of course, “how I’ve always done it”.
So the people doing the actual work day
This is the problem. Every technician thinks engineers don’t do any work, or the right work. It’s just a different job. That’s it.
I dont need to dip my hands in grease to be working my ass off just like you.
And if you wanted a degree, you could get one I took put student loans to get my degree, and im still paying on them (not even the point). The privilege you’re talking about is just you being jealous you didnt decide to go to school and get a desk job that pays you well.
Well, guess what, they both suck. We’ve been duped by capitalists into thinking we all need to break our backs for their benefit while they sit on a beach somewhere getting richer.
If you think engineers are the problem, then you’re missing the point.
I only commented in the first place bcz I’ve been getting these kinds of comments from technicians my whole career, and frankly, it’s annoying to hear everywhere I go.
Being an engineer just means you have a degree. It’s almost like everyone is different, and its just a piece of paper…
Yeah, but… were they clean?
Fire cleans all!
“It’s at 90 PSI and is 80 percent air, 15 percent water, and 5 percent oil,” Wilson said. “When he hit the boxes with this mess, he blew memory chips and any other loose bits completely out of the motherboards.”
I’ll have to try that to get gunk out of my laptop keyboard.
