Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to re: Here's one:

"Quality just doesn't happen. You can't design it into a product up front"
Robert — (archived)

I might quibble a bit with the statement on technical points, but the essential point is human: Good engineers have a powerful instinct to do the best job possible. They overdesign and overspecify, they reinforce where instinct and experience suggest a failure might occur, they make damn sure to the best of their ability that the thing won't fail and will excel at its intended function.

Good engineers are the reason that you and I grew up thinking of a product warranty as the minimum useful lifetime of a product, and expected all products to last much longer.

But to their employers, good engineers are wasteful by nature. They use more material than is strictly necessary and design to finer tolerances. Worst of all, they leave money on the table by designing products that outlast the warranty. To plug this hole in profitability, the job of "manufacturing engineer" was invented, specifically to shave away all that unnecessary quality and build the minimum product possible. Manufacturing engineers are why, nowadays, we should think of a warranty as representing both the minimum lifetime of a product, and a reliable predictor of its maximum lifetime as well. We used to joke about products falling apart the day after the warranty expired, but in fact that's the Holy Grail of the manufacturing engineer.

So ya see, quality can in fact be systematically designed out of products, and manufacturing engineers are getting better and better at doing just that.

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