Another great blog post by Rob Evans, Technical Editor at Altium.
A friend of mine spends most of his working hours designing huge steel contraptions that mount on the back of equally huge earthmoving vehicles – things like multi-baffled tanks, earth scrapers, lifting jigs and so on. They're heavy duty, but nonetheless quite sophisticated designs, as it happens.
Like all design engineers, he uses his experience, engineering knowledge and CAD skills to take on the complex process of creating the accurate, detailed engineering description of what needs to be manufactured. A man of few words, he's given up trying to explain exactly what he does to non-engineering types that ask.
He now simply responds with "I make documents". Not one to cause confusion, he usually follows up with a qualifying statement in the same laconic vein; "The documents are instructions for building big machines." It's a terse summary, but it's also correct.
For all the effort and skill involved in the process of designing those huge contraptions, he knows that the end result is a set of design data documents that are passed on to the broader organisation. Or more specifically, the appropriate subsets of output documents are sent to senior management, company records, procurement, manufacturing, testing and so on. He also knows that both his reputation as a design engineer and the success of the manufactured design are dependent on the quality and integrity of those output documents.....
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Read the rest at: http://ow.ly/1JSLk