Hyperbole is the best thing in the world.
This includes, by the way, when people use phrases like “battle worn”, when the closest thing they’ve seen to battle is a shooting the 37th hole in the same paper target from 7yds…that’s me, I’m talking about me.
These are presented without order of priority. Some are vastly more important than others, you decide which ones.
If it’s two pieces, can you make it one?
If it’s one piece, can you make it two?
Are people supposed to touch [the product] with their fingers (or face or butt)? If yes, does it have sharp edges? If yes, fix the sharp edges. People don’t like paper cuts. Anywhere.
If you’ve chosen a shape for your product, and that shape is hard to make in “real life”, then fix it, change the shape.
If you can’t make it, you can’t market it.
If you can’t market it, you can’t sell it.
Is your product meant to be desired by humans? If yes, is your product ugly? If yes, fix it, make it not ugly. Pro Tip: Almost all mech engrs will make parts that end up looking like robots. Plan accordingly.
Someone much smarter than myself once said: If you can’t sell it, you don’t have a product. This was probably someone like Steve Jobs or something. If so, it’s almost certain he stole the idea outright (or at least the sentiment for it) from someone in ancient Greece. Which means those dudes had lots of time to sit around and think, which probably means those dudes had some sweet products that enabled them to sit around thinking of wise musings for generations to come.
The most pain in the ass employees you’ll ever have are useless, or brilliant. Fire the useless ass-pains before they piss off everyone else. This will free up your time to point your finger right in the face of the brilliant-ass-pain, and tell them you love them no matter how many ass-pains they give you, and that you’ll give them a wide berth to do what they do best, PROVIDED they FIRST stop treating you and everyone else like their doormat. Music will burst forth, birds will sing, and you and them can get back to work…while implicitly agreeing they’re going to continue being an ass-pain. Such is life, but they’ll save your ass when you need it most.
This one has sometimes been hard for me, but it’s probably most important on the list:
Put your people first. Even the useless ones. Sometimes they can turn the corner. They all deserve at least three chances (and patience). You’ll (probably) not regret giving them all the chances. You will definitely regret eating them though…much later in your life. When it’s too late to ask forgiveness. Given the prior entry, this is either irony, hypocrisy, or both. You pick.
Some topics / engr disciplines / classes are difficult just because they’re difficult.
Example: Aerodynamics is, I believe:
[a few formulas] + [“because I said so”] + [feelings] + [“you’re stupid” (…really, you probably are)] = [mediocre results].
Other topics like economics and politics are difficult, PLUS they’ve been buried under MILLENIA of human manipulation, obfuscated on PURPOSE…so do yourself a favor, hone your mech engr craft, and ignore this stuff in the office.
Chemicals and electricity will kill you without warning…mechanical things always warn first…that’s why they’re better. Most other types of engr won’t accept this. Find ways to gently notify them of their error.
Validation. Is. Very. Important.
I do NOT mean “applying engr judgement”, because most engrs don’t have crystal balls…some of them have egos as fragile as if they did…I mean actually testing your products. Not the “validation” as in everyone gets a trophy. But using the product, and treating it harshly. Don’t treat it like “your baby”…treat it like a random llama in the field next to your parents house that acted like it was going to stomp your pregnant wife to death…treat it harshly. Rocks to the face. Because if you’re not willing to break your product, most likely no one else will tolerate having broken it themselves.
See above, warranty replacements are very expensive. Avoid them by validating your products.
See above and above that, (whispering now…)…recalls…ARE EVEN MORE EXPENSIVE!!!! Holy moly don’t use the “R” word!!! And if there ever is a … R-word, see below…and above again.
Documentation. If you believe your memory is iron clad, and you’ll remember all the reasons why you did stuff, you’re wrong. Take GOOD notes, even if only for yourself. Especially if you’re talking w/ a manager. And whoa betide the fool that fails to take notes when talking w/ a CEO…they will change their minds literally 180deg from the day prior because they saw a scary tweet from a basement-dweller. So you have to write down enough bread crumbs to ‘know how you got to today’.
See above. CEOs don’t like being held accountable to the bad (or panicky) decisions they made the month prior, and if you didn’t write it down when things changed direction, well, you deserve what happens next.
The example that follows is a recipe for an ass-kicking if you fail to take notes when talking to a CEO.
“You, CEO, said, on 5 Nov 2014, which was a Wednesday by the way (and I know because I took these fine-ass notes), and I’m quoting verbatim here (Pro Tip: they do NOT like the word “verbatim”), that you don’t give a damn how expensive it is, and that I need to “make the problem go away”, and that you’d give me all the resources required to do so…and that is the reason why I’ve spent $227k on OPEX in the last month…”
Having taken notes gets you: CEO saying “Well, shucks, I do recall that…well hurry up, you never said it would take that much to fix it (but I did tell you, wrote down that I told you, just didn’t want to embarrass him, amiright?!), just tell me when you’re done harrumph harrumph bother and toil etc etc”…
Not taking notes gets you: CEO saying “You need to go talk w/ HR”.
If your 3D mate constraints suck, you suck. As a person. You probably don’t return shopping carts to the “return area” either.
See above, INTERFERENCE CHECKS. It’s THE SAME AS clicking a single button for spell check for cryin out loud. Do it.
See above. Spelling doesn’t really matter if you’re an engr. Just hammer away at that keyboard and hit F7. I don’t know what Google Docs wants for spell check because they just HAVE to be different, don’t they?!
Check your own work. If your name is on it, you own it.
If mistakes happen, as they will, and you’re name is on it, APOLOGIZE FIRST (using the words “I’m sorry”)…then say other stuff.
If you made the mistake above, don’t make excuses, just go fix it as fast as possible, even if you have to work for free. Everyone has to be a grown-up at some point, now is the time. Eat it and don’t complain. Then pontificate about it on the internet years later.
Ugh…I really don’t like this next one, but it’s kicked me a few times:
You may have a huge IQ…but if you have a tiny EQ…you’ll be right a lot of times, and no one will care because you’re being a jerk. Don’t be a jerk.
Learn what is good enough. Your ideas of “perfection” are usually a waste of time. “Minimum viable” is how we all got to such terrible software that constantly needs to be updated, but in the mech engr sense, it will allow you to “fail fast” (which actually means “learn fast”). Prove it works, make it fancy later.
Work will expand to fill time. Especially if you’re dealing w/ younger engrs, or “artists”, or industrial engrs.
Seek to understand, not just to be understood.
Most people in a meeting are thinking about themselves, not you.
Be patient, let others speak first and finish without interruption. Unless they very clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. Then challenge them with some of my favorite words: Sorry to interrupt, but please help me to understand…”.
If you don’t know what all the buttons in your CAD program do, figure out a way to learn what they do. Go learn all the buttons.
Design things for yourself. Or your family, friends, neighbors, kids, dogs, cats…whatever. Find [some stuff] to design, especially if you’ve never designed [that stuff], and go do it. Even if it never leaves 3D-land. You’ll learn so much more about ‘why’ things are the way they are than you would by looking/watching. You have to GO DO.
Do not fail to start. “Failing to start” is an active decision to sit and wring your hands like a rabid raccoon…not terribly productive. Get up. Start. Even if you’re running in the wrong direction, you’ll learn that is a wrong direction. Would you have learned that sitting still foaming at the mouth? No.
Make things for yourself. There are ZERO brilliant designers that can’t make anything w/ their own two hands. Zero. If you consider yourself super-awesome at design, but haven’t physically made things w/ your hands/tools/machines, you’re a fraud. Imposter syndrome is a real thing…but you don’t have that. You have actual fraud syndrome. Start fixing this right now.
If you can’t make money selling it, redesign it until you can.
Suppliers will, in fact, lie to you. Dates, quality, materials, coatings, corrosion test results, parts handling, packaging, the cost of all those things. If you didn’t check the hardness yourself, assume it’s shiny peanut butter and plan accordingly.
If you order 3D printed parts, and they arrive damaged, even if it’s only a squirrel’s fart worth of damage, send them back…but be nice about it…they’ll almost always reprint and resend at no cost to you. Other than the GIANT HOLE it kicked in your schedule…
The United States of American is truly a shiny city on the hill, the current pinnacle of human society, by almost any metric you choose to apply, like it or not, the data bears this out. But don’t take that “exceptionalism” w/ you overseas. People everywhere are the same, we all want the same things (food, shelter, freedom, opportunities, safety for our kids, etc). People of other cultures very likely work harder for less, w/ less ultimate upside, and you are not “better” than them. Honor them, subjugate your pride.
Ask LOTS of questions. …and when you bump up against someone who won’t answer all your questions, there is likely a reason that is mostly related to ‘them’, not ‘you’. Be gentle, probe over time, find out why.
Never, and I do mean never, hoard information. If you’re so weak as to put fences around ‘what you know’, you’re a turd. Or a baby. Or a turd-baby. Share freely, train others up in the way they should go. Or, at minimum, stop them from going down the wrong path. Sometimes your sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. If you keep that fact to yourself, you’ll have plenty of company run aground on the rocks w/ nothing to show for it.
Fatigue strength is DIFFERENT. Miner’s Rule is useful. Go learn why. I’ll tell you why: Bend a metal paperclip over and over, that’s why.
Hand-made (generally, not always) = slow and crappy, but it will impart a whisper of a soul upon it. And you can tell a fully machine-made thing, and it’s usually dissatisfying in some way. Which is better? Both. It depends. What method gets you to your required amount of knowledge faster/more efficiently? Choose wisely.
DFMEA and PFMEA are different. Always done either way too late, or because a manager forced it (against the team’s will). They ARE useful, if utilized correctly. Meaning, if you do them without finding anything and prescribing corrective action…you’re just making a word salad. No one actually prefers salads. Pick products apart, do it right, fix the problems before you make parts. Before customers hate those parts.
It’s far easier to make a cheap product expensive than an expensive one cheap. Start from the right footing, make very deliberate choices targeting that BOM cost. Or enjoy learning about the two chapters no one likes to read: 7 and 11.
This one gave me actual brain damage: Bankruptcy of an employer, and them not helping people that got fired: If faced w/ bankruptcy, do all the things you can to help others get placed at new jobs. You’ll likely be 50% successful. The other 50% will find their own way. Hopefully all of them felt supported by you through it all. Some of them will hate you for it regardless.
If you ever go to work on a Monday, and put your hand on the door knob, but cannot summon the will to pull the door open, that’s your sign you should have quit years ago. This is bad advice, but I’ll give it anyway: 7yrs is about as long as you should stay at any job. 10yrs if you LOVE it. More than that, you might be coasting on past performance and not testing your own boundaries, not learning anything meaningfully new.
Learn things you don’t want to learn. Wires are dumb, I really don’t like any of them. So when I finally learned how to add my own electrical outlets in my house, I felt…energized…
Ooof, that wasn’t the best…but I had a…spark…of inspiration. I should stop, I agree.
If you don’t have independent (and accountable) observers for your validation testing, you’re doing it wrong. You can’t allow only the people designing the thing to validate the thing. Foxes love watching hen houses, they’ll protect the hens, they promise.
If you’re validation plan is not finding issues, you’re doing it wrong. If you can’t break it, the very first customer you hand it to WILL break it. In the first 10 seconds. Right in front of your boss.
If you ever hear one of your engrs say “do you want me to write down the tests I’m doing (because that’s a waste of time, right?!), or do you want me to do the tests (because making a plan is a waste of time, amiright?!)?”…that’s the fox asking if you like chicken dinners too.
Most engrs have no idea how to write a validation plan. Or execute it. Especially the younger ones, you’ll have to teach/guide/and do some shoving of them up that hill. I started the same way…not knowing.
If you walk into an ‘external meeting’ (e.g. w/ a supplier, client, whatever), and the body language of most of the people in the wrong screams “something is wrong”…then SOMETHING IS WRONG. They won’t tell you, because ‘we’re us, and you’re them’, so you ‘don’t need to know’. But ask anyway, “why is this meeting so gross and full of faces that very obviously were either forced to sit in this meeting, or don’t want to be here?”. You probably won’t like the answers, because something is definitely wrong…
