Re: Ability, Talent and Skills

From: <Christopher>
Date: Sat Jan 14 2006 - 18:07:00 EST

On Jan 12, 2006, at 5:53 AM, Paul Bowers wrote:

> Drafting skills (or engineering drawings, technical drawings) were made
> redundant within about 20 years. This killed-off a few thousand years
> of
> tradition and historical heritage.

I've been preaching about this for years, but what killed off drafting skills was the notion of reducing head count by using people of lesser skills to do work previously done by skilled people. That's what appeals to management. People who know nothing about design can produce representations that look very much like engineering designs, because CAD software does all of the cosmetic work to look just like a real designer had done it.

The laity thinks that engineering design is simply representation--make a picture and you have a design. It works that way for high fashion and a lot of interior design, but not in engineering. Engineering design involves accurate communication, definitive specification and an understanding of service requirements and fabrication. You can color walls and draw in nice-looking drapes and trim when you're designing your living-room, but you can't just cartoon something up when you're designing cooling water system for a nuclear reactor. More and more people in responsible positions don't understand that distinction, so they think a CAD guy understands valves because he knows how to drop a downloaded vendor file into his solid model. You can talk about water hammer and material compatibility to managers like that 'til hell freezes over--they'll nod like they understand, but they don't.

The same thing happens with FEA. Bundle something that seems like FEA software with a 3D modeller and -->fazool!!!<-- your CAD monkey is now an analyst who can do seismic analysis and thermal calculations automagically. For managers, including former engineers who haven't kept up, it's the answer to their head count prayers. I see it every day on the FEA lists I follow--just the other day here comes a post from a guy who's managed to run a random response analysis on something and he doesn't know what to do with it because he doesn't understand random vibration theory. Which means he doesn't know how to decide if his model is even valid, let alone accurate. I've done some work off of some really weird and wonderful CAD models done by very CAD-literate young people, but they had no idea what the thing was to be made of--best they could tell me was 'yellow brass.' The part is to go into a very sophisticated airplane engine and has to pass a number of demanding tests, but the designer doesn't know how to specify the material. Somebody told him 'yellow brass' and that's what he wrote.

To be fair, it makes a good business opportunity for me, but it's a little scary when I fly commercial.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=m_hyKXg9VCzHlMVR1eJzxPdVKZkD-60lCxF3Bl4RenM1Qa4wMhR1cjrSTtXCnoUPZXQKKp3kDaN5TA">chrisw@skypoint.com</a> | this distance" (last words of Gen.

____________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)

<a href="http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw">http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw</a> Received on Sat Jan 14 18:07:00 2006