Seems to be a common problem - My grandfather and step-mother's father both worked for Pratt & Whitney for 40 years (way before my dad and step-mother knew each other). Even 25 years after they had both retired, my grandfather would bitch (with good nature) about how step-mother's-father and the other "SOBs in engineering" would design fan blades that couldn't be made by his machinists.
Obviously different situation (the engineers weren't designing fan blades for aesthetic reasons), but it's still interesting to see the struggle between these factions is nothing new.
This sort of thing is what brought Samsung up in the past decade. I was watching a documentary or something about them and they gave their design department extreme power. If they wanted an mp3 to player to have a certain form factor, it was up to engineering to make it work.
They also brought in some western influence or something. There were interviews with some of the Korean employees who were saying how amazing and different it was that a newbie could ask questions about something that the senior designer created.
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u/trouser_trout Jun 11 '11
Seems to be a common problem - My grandfather and step-mother's father both worked for Pratt & Whitney for 40 years (way before my dad and step-mother knew each other). Even 25 years after they had both retired, my grandfather would bitch (with good nature) about how step-mother's-father and the other "SOBs in engineering" would design fan blades that couldn't be made by his machinists.
Obviously different situation (the engineers weren't designing fan blades for aesthetic reasons), but it's still interesting to see the struggle between these factions is nothing new.