Well a chain of events has happened in last few days which has turmoiled my mind exercising all 6 degrees of freedom and compelled me to express myself on AIRTEL.
The post has some mechanical engineering, Although design has lot of Mechanical Engineering involved in it but as always there is always a philosophy or some principles involved, I would try to keep my writing pretty neutral for better understanding.
I am caught between two professors--
Professor I: I was working with a professor in industry earlier and i was responsible for a component's design. The objective was the component should serve its intended purpose. He told me some priorities, we call Pa
Professor II: We are nowadays learning about Design of components, aspects, theories to consider, materials to be selected, equations to solve and test to be conducted. Failure Analysis is a subject where failed components are investigated to find the reason and henceforth prevention of failure in future.We were looking at a design concept of a component and he was discussing priorities to consider for design, we call Pb
Lists for Pa & Pb are long, primarily both told me same content - cost, time, optimized design, only the order was different.
Pa: Time-->Cost-->Optimized design
Pb: Optimized design-->Cost-->Time
We can see in a very simple manner just playing with the priority order, the total meaning has changed. It's a race - industry tells us and learn to run. I want to ask do you guys find yourself in this situation often?
We were taught at the university earlier too take care of equations of design and proper tests of course keeping in mind the cost and time. The same thing is told to us in the industry but in a blanket of time & cost, where literally i forgot the priority list. We were taught just as Doctors, Engineers carry a huge responsibility because life depends on our structures and designs, still when we landed up in the 'Corporate' the blanket of cost and time was already on. I mean nobody tells the doctor to make an inception in body at double the speed, because there is another patient waiting.
Then why Engineering? Has this profession taken more technical advancement compared to others so there is a huge competition and so called 'rat race'. or People have themselves disregarded and fallen prone to 'Cost & Time'. Industry told me to work for 'Customer Satisfaction', but keeping the 'costs' minimum :)
Well some people argue that customers will not pay if the product is too slow to launch and costly, that seems quite a reasonable argument, but we forgot that damage that a failure of component can cause to somebody's life. The damage then is irreversible...
I am not against Management and its principles, but somehow this subject has dominated in all fields, people including engineers now look to find solutions in the field of management, the measurement or quality of design is measured by principles of management. This is a pathetic situation and leads nowhere.
I wish i had a Time Machine and i was able to fix it.......!
