The joys of having a non technical manager.

[Phil Allison]

"John Larkin"

mpm

That consideration is orthogonal to prototyping.

** What asinine, issue avoiding drivel.

It's a cultural thing:

** Worse than ridiculous.

do we do our best to make the initial design 100% right, or do
we hack a first attempt and assume it won't be good enough to sell?

** Attempts to falsely define the issue = same as avoiding it.

Frankly,

** Frankly - John Larkin is a ridiculous, posturing nut case.

Thousands of his putrid piles of autistic verbal diarrhoea here prove that.

the prototype approach will probably result in an inferior,
buggier product getting into the field.

** The truth is the exact opposite, of course.

Larkin is nothing more than another trolling jerk off.

Plus a complete ASSHOLE.





...... Phil

 

[Don Klipstein]

"John Larkin"

** What asinine, issue avoiding drivel.


** Worse than ridiculous.


** Attempts to falsely define the issue = same as avoiding it.

Those designing widgets to be sold have a profit motive to add
improvement everywhere possible - such as at an earlier stage when it
would cost less. There is also profit motive to anticipate and get in
improvements and bug fixes early enough to reduce iterations of any/all
stages of development.

** Frankly - John Larkin is a ridiculous, posturing nut case.
Thousands of his putrid piles of autistic verbal diarrhoea here prove that.

I find such to only be within the case for some engineers frequently
posting to this NG to be denialists of AGW in order to support ability of
Homo Sapiens to survive such and to oppose possible (probable to
engineers) octopus-like taxation schemes.

** The truth is the exact opposite, of course.

My experience is that an extra iteration of development increases
time-to-market, and that causes great disadvantage against "The
Competition".
An extra iteration of product development is sometimes necessary, but is
better to be avoided. All-too-often, aggressive "watchdogging" by
anyone/everyone who has itchy trigger fingers to find both problems *and
economical solutions to such problems* leads to less-buggy products
entering "The Market" at prices at which they sell (by doing so sooner),
and often that is the path for success via selling widgets.

Larkin is nothing more than another trolling jerk off.
Plus a complete ASSHOLE.

Appears to me more like a successful business owner despite less-
favorable "business climate" in a municipality and "State" (province)
of the USA where he has been making his living by being a successful
business owner in electronics.

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[[email protected]]

I think there's a big difference, though, between assuming that you
_must_ get a 100% success rate and aiming to get a really high success
rate like 80 or 90 percent.

Further, if the guy really treats "every little design problem" as a big
failure, then your testing and tweaking before you get your rev A boards
into production would be signs of failure.

I've worked for companies run by sales guys who really did well at the
motivational speaking, but just didn't have a clue about how engineering
worked -- including the necessity to hash out problems. Consequently,
if one of them got too close to a project the engineers were not
_allowed_ to hash out problems before going into production, so the
problems all came out in production.

--

That's exactly the situation.

 

[[email protected]]

I think there's a big difference, though, between assuming that you
_must_ get a 100% success rate and aiming to get a really high success
rate like 80 or 90 percent.

Further, if the guy really treats "every little design problem" as a big
failure, then your testing and tweaking before you get your rev A boards
into production would be signs of failure.

I've worked for companies run by sales guys who really did well at the
motivational speaking, but just didn't have a clue about how engineering
worked -- including the necessity to hash out problems. Consequently,
if one of them got too close to a project the engineers were not
_allowed_ to hash out problems before going into production, so the
problems all came out in production.

--

That's exactly the situation.

 

[[email protected]]

I freaked those 2 guys I worked with because I didn't 'stripboard' my designs. I

For a design of any complexity, using modern surfmount/chip-scale/BGA
parts, a non-pcb breadboard will be a nightmare, and waste weeks or
months to prove what a design engineer is supposed to know already.

I agree on going for a smd board directly as current tolerances won't allow
for much else (unlike in the throughhole days). However the first board
just.. might have some misses. Proberbly easy to fix. But not a working board
out of the box.

 

[krw]

Yes.

For a design of any complexity, using modern surfmount/chip-scale/BGA
parts, a non-pcb breadboard will be a nightmare, and waste weeks or
months to prove what a design engineer is supposed to know already.

As you pointed out in a previous article, there are times when the
datasheets aren't clear (or wrong). If it's a modification of
something that's been done before, it should work. If it's an
entirely new design, it often won't on the first pass.

So if you're gonna do a pcb, do it right the first time, electrically
and mechanically and thermally and cosmetically. And have
manufacturing build it for you. That "prototypes" the whole process,
with the bonus benefit that, if you do get it right, you're already in
production.

However, leaving room for a spin in the schedule is also important.
The board I'm working on now (my part is firmware only) left that
part out. It will *not* work the first pass and I've told them as
much. The schematic is a mess.

Every design spin, proto or presumed-sellable, takes, what, months?

Should be able to get a spin in a few weeks, though It's been so
long on the current one that I'll likely never see hardware (major
screwups). :-( I leave in a week. ;-)

 

[Phil Allison]

"John Larkin"

mpm

That consideration is orthogonal to prototyping.

** What asinine, issue avoiding drivel.

It's a cultural thing:

** Worse than ridiculous.

do we do our best to make the initial design 100% right, or do
we hack a first attempt and assume it won't be good enough to sell?

** Attempts to falsely define the issue = same as avoiding it.

Frankly,

** Frankly - John Larkin is a ridiculous, posturing nut case.

Thousands of his putrid piles of autistic verbal diarrhoea here prove that.

the prototype approach will probably result in an inferior,
buggier product getting into the field.

** The truth is the exact opposite, of course.

Larkin is nothing more than another trolling jerk off.

Plus a complete ASSHOLE.

Plus congenitally autistic.





...... Phil

 

[Phil Allison]

"John Larkin"

mpm

That consideration is orthogonal to prototyping.

** What asinine, issue avoiding drivel.

It's a cultural thing:

** Worse than ridiculous.

do we do our best to make the initial design 100% right, or do
we hack a first attempt and assume it won't be good enough to sell?

** Attempts to falsely define the issue = same as avoiding it.

Frankly,

** Frankly - John Larkin is a ridiculous, posturing nut case.

Thousands of his putrid piles of autistic verbal diarrhoea here prove that.

the prototype approach will probably result in an inferior,
buggier product getting into the field.

** The truth is the exact opposite, of course.

Larkin is nothing more than another trolling jerk off.

Plus a complete ASSHOLE.

Plus congenitally autistic.





...... Phil

 

[Jamie]

Isn't endless repetition one of the symptoms of autism?

John

--
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"

"Daily Thought:

SOME PEOPLE ARE LIKE SLINKIES. NOT REALLY GOOD FOR ANYTHING BUT
THEY BRING A SMILE TO YOUR FACE WHEN PUSHED DOWN THE STAIRS.
http://webpages.charter.net/jamie_5"

 

[[email protected]]

The way to get 90 is to aim for 100. Which means checking everything;
asking other engineers to check everything; reviewing the PCB layout
yourself, in detail; not taking risks unless the payoff is huge;
reading the hell out of datasheets; making sure hooks are available to
get out of trouble. We're talking a couple of days of checking saving
a month or more of revision spin.



Spinning the layout to rev B, which will take weeks at best and trash
other projects, is the failure. Changing a few resistor values, or
even a small kluge, is perfectly fine, so long as we can sell
presentable and functional rev A boards about the time we promised.

We often know that parts values will change before we release the BOM.
Like for a filter we haven't finished designing, or a temperature
compensation factor or a loop compensation. Some parts are "TBD",
unstuffed, when the first boards are built. Failure is being slammed
by something major that you didn't anticipate, and having no hooks to
fix it.

When we do screw up, we go to the other engineers and say, "Wow, look
at the incredibly dumb thing I did!" We learn from one another.

Here's a good one: I got used to deriving fpga Vaux (2.5 volts) from
+5 using an LM1117, so I just copied the regulator circuit to a new
design, but ran it from +3.3. The 1117 has too much dropout for that,
so my 2.5 was low. I found a melf zener diode in stock whose *forward*
drop was just right to take 3.3 down to 2.5, so we pulled the
regulator and dropped the diode in.

ftp://66.117.156.8/DiodeKluge.JPG

I got some serious groans over that one. Worse groans when I started
doing the same thing on new designs.


That's silly too. If some manager doesn't want to see how engineering
is done, he should stay away. And engineers shouldn't RFM anything
that's not ready.

Life is simple: do the engineering right, and don't take any crap from
anybody.

John

I think we're actually on the same page here.

 

[legg]

We cope by getting it right the first time.

My company philosophy is to go from paper to production. That means no
prototypes. The rev A drawings and parts lists and manuals are
formally released, manufacturing builds a few, and we make them work.
Over 90% of the time, we can sell rev A.

We do simulate or breadboard small circuits if we feel that we don't
fully understand the parts, but mostly we design from the datasheets.
But we never simulate or prototype whole products.

Prototyping is self-fulfilling. If you assume the first (or second, or
third) iteration won't be right, you won't make the effort to get it
right. The insidious factor is that debugging by testing prototypes
seldom finds all the bugs... *especially* when the designers are the
ones doing the testing.

We do keep a NEXT file on every rev of every product. Anybody in the
company can add comments or requests for things to be changed on
future revs. Manufacturing creates a lot of these, like about
mechanical clearances, or requests for test points, things like that.
Before we order future/large batches of boards, we review the NEXT
file to see if it's worth spinning the board.

I've had first builds go through HAST, but anything new has already
been breadboarded, and nothing else 'new' is knowingly permitted - not
even types of screw, given previous experience. It's the 'knowingly'
that is the catch 22 and that's why it's called a prototype.

You can waste a lot of resources getting the wrong things 'right'.

If all your unknowns are in firmware, aren't you just consuming
resources the non-technical manager is too dumb to count?

RL

 

[qrk]

My non technical manager thinks that our (very) complex electronic
products shouldn't have prototype stages in the project plan because
electronics engineers should aim to 'get it right first time'. This
guy has had 20 highly successful years of managing the production of
speakers, and treats every little design problem as a sign of
incompetance (and I do mean little).

Has anyone else had this kind of experience and how did you cope?

We do prototypes only rarely for those circuits that are hard to
simulate, data sheets that are questionable, and/or layout is very
critical. Granted, our multi-channel analog designs only go up to 1
MHz with gains up to 90 dB and our digital signaling going across a
PCB are under 200 MHz clocking frequencies. That does make life
easier. I've only done one special prototype PCB in the past 10 years
for a pair of switching power supplies we were designing. I put 3
power supply designs, plus some other instrumentation circuitry, a
personal project, and a special BGA part which had to be
environmentally tested on this board. It was a well utilized proto
board.

We can usually get the first boards working as deliverable items. I
usually build up boards a section at a time so I can test isolated
areas which are likely to have design issues. This sort of design
process is achievable with a small, cohesive, design team and folks
who have had many years of experience - including the manager. If the
manager manages from a spreadsheet, there will be lots of problems.
More than five engineers, there will be interface problems. My
solution was feed the manager data, then have the engineers do stuff
behind his back to work out issues in an informal way. Next week, I
would feed information back to the manager which would piss him off
because we weren't following the previous block diagram to a tee.

The last company I worked for had a hostile management takeover. Going
from a CEO that was technically savvy and made the necessary big
decision risks to a bunch of twittering investment-type management
who's only interest was to sell the company and bilk the company
reserves. Millions of dollars were spent giving each other high
salaries, bonuses, and golden parachutes. In a matter of months, they
took a very successful company into the doldrums. The company went
from a very open structure to secretive meetings. However, their
meeting outcomes were public knowledge amongst the peons because they
would leave lots of information on the printer output tray, including
salary lists and their employment contracts. My solution was to quit.
In fact, all the key personnel quit within a year.

 

[qrk]

On Sun, 03 Aug 2008 09:44:45 -0700, John Larkin

[snip]

When we do screw up, we go to the other engineers and say, "Wow, look
at the incredibly dumb thing I did!" We learn from one another.

[snip]

One of my life-forming experiences was sharing a cubicle at Motorola
with Tom Frederiksen.

We picked on each other's designs unmercifully.

We both learned a lot from each other... he references me in his
booklet, "INTUITIVE IC OP AMPS" ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I'm lucky to work with a few very smart people who rag me mercilessly.
I yell "wait! I'm the President!" and it doesn't do me the slightest
bit of good.

John

It takes intellegence to understand intellegent people.

 

[qrk]

Reminds me of 2 guys who said the prototype stage was so you could get it
wrong then fix it.

Reminds me of an old Dilbert comic, where they're all sitting around a
table at a production meeting and Wally holds up the product. The
Boss say "That's only cardboard!" To which Wally replies, "Oh, then
it's Beta."

Or something along those lines..... Went looking for the strip but
could not find it.
[snippage]
-mpm

I love CAD (Cardboard Aided Design)! It's a great packaging tool.
Works when the power goes out, tactile, 3D, & easy to modify.

 

[Joerg]

Most of my chip designs are quoted fixed fee, but with several
paragraphs to cover charges for various degrees of ECO's.

That would be the super-watertight cast in concrete spec path. Almost
none of my clients can do that. Most of the time it's "Well, we think we
need this, that and the other thing but we aren't 100% sure it'll work
that way". Because it's mostly cutting edge stuff, never done before.
That's one reason why I do not have any surcharge for urgent stuff on
holidays or weekends. My dentist does :-(

 

[dalai lamah]

Un bel giorno [email protected] digitò:

My non technical manager thinks that our (very) complex electronic
products shouldn't have prototype stages in the project plan because
electronics engineers should aim to 'get it right first time'. This
guy has had 20 highly successful years of managing the production of
speakers, and treats every little design problem as a sign of
incompetance (and I do mean little).

In this thread two philosophical types of "prototypes" have been
considered.

If with "prototype" you mean a frying pan board, two or three times bigger
than the definitive board, with a lot of different ways to do the same
thing in a sort of trial-and-error process, I partly agree with your boss.
We do that only on very few occasions, when a certain knowledge lacks and
trial-and-error costs less than proper design (either by learning or by
hiring who already knows). The frying pan prototype means little confidence
in your technical skills; this is sometimes acceptable in a small company
like we are, never in a medium-big company.

If with "prototype" you mean a properly designed board, that if all goes
well you can directly put in production, otherwise you will fix with some
easy modifications in the BOM or PCB, then I totally disagree with your
manager. No one is infallible, and whoever tells you the contrary is a damn
liar.

 

[Eeyore]

I agree on going for a smd board directly as current tolerances won't allow
for much else (unlike in the throughhole days). However the first board
just.. might have some misses. Proberbly easy to fix. But not a working board
out of the box.

Totally agreed on the SMD point. How else can you do it ?

Graham

 

[krw]

On Sun, 03 Aug 2008 09:44:45 -0700, John Larkin

[snip]

When we do screw up, we go to the other engineers and say, "Wow, look
at the incredibly dumb thing I did!" We learn from one another.

[snip]

One of my life-forming experiences was sharing a cubicle at Motorola
with Tom Frederiksen.

We picked on each other's designs unmercifully.

We both learned a lot from each other... he references me in his
booklet, "INTUITIVE IC OP AMPS" ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I'm lucky to work with a few very smart people who rag me mercilessly.
I yell "wait! I'm the President!" and it doesn't do me the slightest
bit of good.

"Fine, then do something useful, like fetch me a coffee." ;-)

 

[Eeyore]

I love CAD (Cardboard Aided Design)! It's a great packaging tool.
Works when the power goes out, tactile, 3D, & easy to modify.

Used it to model product styling. It's FUN too.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

We do sometimes mock up a wood/metal/cardboard/duct tape model to
visualize layout or especially to check air flow and cooling. Air is
the most perverse, non-intuitive thing I ever have to deal with.

In spades. So much is counter-intuitive.

Graham