Like it or not, a lot of "design" work involves calculation or tedious repetitive work.
On the subject of calculation, Leibnitz wrote:
"It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used."
If some of this work can be automated, then either more time can be freed up
to ponder alternative design solutions, or the amount of design resource
decreased while maintaining a similar quality of design as achieved prior to
automation.
I remember a big fuss when cheap electronic calculators became available.
Who would be without one now?
When the above is taken into consideration, the question reduces to something like " do you think management make stupid decisions?". I think we all know the answer to that.
Cheers
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Wright [mailto:chrisw@skypoint.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 2:58 PM
To: ?
Subject: Re: [PipingDesign] Make More Mistakes Faster
>My debate position is that qualified individuals are being replaced with
>software that can do the same job for the same, or less cost.
How's this? Qualified individuals are supposedly being replaced by
software that management imagines, God knows why, can actually do the
same job. Based on a number of observations, I suspect such management
imagines that documents, drawings and reports, are the project
deliverables. Systems which produce documents faster are therefore more
productive, so the designers go and the software comes in.
In fact he design is the deliverable, and the documents only communicate the design. If the design is actually mediocre, but the doc package is delivered at less cost, maybe engineering management never hears about it and goes on their way thinking they're more productive and any problems are poor manufacturing, shoddy materials or corner cutting by beancounters. That's a good reason to ask the original question--do the tools actually improve the design or simply let engineering departments have lower budgets?
Interesting that there was no answer to my question. Do none of thge 500+ participants on this list really know if they're doing better work with computer aided engineering tools? Does anyone care?
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen. ___________________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw
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Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ Received on Sat Jan 11 23:26:00 2003
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