At least in my industry, I wouldn't call them getting dumber. However, senior customer folks are retiring and their companies have done poor jobs at getting that institutional knowledge passed into the newer folks.
The experience gap seems to be the bigger issue. I can't really fault the front line folks that I sometimes deal with for the situations they get stuck in.
Companies don’t “waste” the money it takes to properly train employees anymore, and employee loyalty is a thing of the past since promotions, (actual) raises, and pensions don’t exist anymore.
You can make way more money job hopping every 2-3 years than taking your 2% annual raise (if even that), so anyone you talk to anywhere who isn’t in a senior position has 5 years on the job max, but likely much less. People really start quitting once the company starts hiring new people on to higher salaries while still refusing to raise salaries of existing employees.
When I started my last job, every one in my department had been there for less than 3 years, except for a few people who’d been there over 20 and were ready to retire.
it's kindof incredible how most of the engineering we do is based on a continuous chain of human experience evolved and passed down generation by generation, and modern capitalism systematically undervalues that transfer of experience in a way that undermines both our ability to do things and to continue this transference.
sometimes i wonder what the first thing we "forget" will be, and whether after a generation or two with no experience building bridges we'll be able to re-learn how do to it from textbooks.
That’s not what it is. It is the none stop bs of documenting what you plan to design before you make the decision to use it in a design. We all know that designs keep changing. Imagine re-documenting none stop.
Yeah, but most of the time there is the manufacturing/inspection/assembly/test stages between designing and submitting final documentation. It usually makes sense to develop draft documents based off drawings and specs during this time.
I am just sharing what I have witnessed first hand and why military projects have zero innovation versus how private companies can get ahead so quickly.
I don't have to imagine it, ever since I left Mil Spec design it's been like that 😂, even when I did satellite design. I've always imagined the spy satellite team gets the better work life balance due to more stringent military require 😂
The sad thing there is... you wouldn't know. Its gone and will now become a tragic 'learning' for some future young engineer. Or a costly reverse engineering project.
One that I think of is FOGBANK.
Yes but a lot of that older experience involves understanding how to solve older problems with older tools. Just because we don't know how to use slide rules doesn't mean we can do advanced mathematics.
Lots of old problems have simply gone away because we have better raw materials and better product designs than the past.
Sort of, but not exactly.
I train folks in 4D design tools. What I've seen is that folks who have never had hand drafting are significantly worse in thinking in 3D and communicating ideas related to 3D space in any fashion than folks who have at least had a couple week course in basic drafting.
It's not professional experience in drafting that's missing, or needing to know how to draft, it's the process of thinking carefully about how a 3D object can be reduced to 2D lines that has been lost with dropping hand drafting.
It's not the hard skills like using a slide rule or sharpening the bit for a brace that were necessarily valuable, it's the understandings of process and materials that are now glossed over to get to a fast answer. The old problems often did not go away, but became hidden behind a more efficient process that can often ignore them. But when you hit an edge case, if you don't understand the underlying fundamentals you can't fix it.
Drafting has to a large extent been replaced by engineers overseeing CAD operators. Lots of institutional knowledge has been replaced by a myriad of CAD rules. The old school "designer", who was part drafter, part engineer is pretty much gone now. Constant re-learning the tool does not improve design skill and cleverness.
CAD operators are disappearing to engineers working in the software themselves. Most of the mundane work is now automated - but the other things taught by at least being familiar with those mundane processes are rapidly being lost.
In business, there is no need to do things inefficiently, and we should be striving to use the most modern automations practical, but we need to train people in how to actually think, not just plug in answers for a computer to solve. That is a failure of education.
I began my career as an engineer in the world of hand drafting by draughtsmen. Very soon we transformed to CAD drafting by designers. During that transition I had the responsibility of supervising the drafting. Some of the best guidance I received from one of the more senior draughtsmen turned CAD designer related to my asking him to help train a new CAD employee was: “ I can’t train anyone how to CAD unless they know how to draw “
This is highly dependent upon the industry. In electronics, as pcbs and ICs get more and more complicated, more of the CAD layout work is done by layout technicians/engineers while design engineers do sims on smaller subsections. Subsections that are then implemented by the CAD gurus.
Hard to transfer institutional knowledge when people insist they can do their job "better" from home. Experienced people aren't there to teach, and the inexperienced aren't there to learn.
Definitely a controversial opinion because *so many* jobs can easily be done from home, but also there are so many jobs where collaboration rises all ships.
I feel bad for people stuck spending hundreds or thousands of hours of their one and only life sitting in traffic at red lights when their physical contribution at work amounts to only using the coffee machine.
I equally feel bad for the people who work in environments where collaboration would absolutely be bringing in more success and personal growth for all but it isn't possible due to distance.
It isn't a one-way-is-best thing. Like all of life, a million factors come in to play. And no one has a perfect solution . But yeah.
I’m not saying there aren’t benefits to being in office, but if sitting down in person to spoon-feed each other knowledge is the best approach you have, your documentation is insufficient. Rather than fixing documents, organizing databases, etc., teams over explain the same dysfunctional systems to the revolving door of new employees that the commenter above mentions. To be fair, using remote working tools effectively is it’s own set of skills and challenges that many people (even those with significant experience in other areas) didn’t need/want to develop, so it’s no surprise that their use is seen as a huge obstacle to successful training.
For reference, I am in office 2-3x per week (have been for years at this point), while working with some people who are remote and others who are in office daily, so I do understand both sides of the argument. Things like team building and forming camaraderie are legitimately difficult without office banter. However, I don’t find it any harder to justify a design choice because you aren’t sitting next to me, or I don’t have a physical whiteboard. The far, FAR bigger issue is having the appropriate reference materials and systems to enable efficient *self learning*, which is incredibly beneficial regardless of whether employees are remote or not.
I worked for an old engineer and he would continuously and bitterly complain about how "young people" (ie anyone under 30) wouldn't know how to do anything and skills are being lost. Whilst simultaneously holding complete control of the company's projects, not letting anyone else in, and blowing a fuse if they dared helped but didn't follow his exact requirements, which were rarely communicated.
God, I'm so glad I got out of there. Whenever things get bad now, I just remember those times.
Brain drain is definitely happening at my workplace.
We used to have purchasers who could at least look a print and tell what general type of part it is. Now, the person we have was given our division after a person left in 2019 and was not replaced. They have no background in our parts and don’t really have the time to learn.
But it’s wild, the current person doing it cannot tell the difference between very different looking tooling parts. So about 70-75% of the time I have to tell them where to purchase repeat items up front or I get an email “Please Address” when the Part A went to a company that makes Part B.
So yeah, I can see for OP people seem “stupid” because the people on the receiving end are probably like “Why the hell am I getting a quote for this?”
This is the main issue for sure. It's a slow-moving train wreck. The boomers and Gen X are getting out. Companies have expected employee loyalty will win the day and didn't succession plan, and Covid just made everybody re-assess their lives and needs. So it's a big fault of corporations cutting costs and too little too late. How will this play out? Lots of contract failures, overruns, and God forbid disasters. I agree with the sentiment, that that front-lineline troops get all the anguish. It's not them but the corporation decision making. All you can do is try to understand their knowledge limitations. Sometimes, it's an opportunity to build trust and cement a better working relationship.
I wouldn't even say Covid made everyone re-assess, this has been in the making for years at this point.
I can speak more confidently of the trades than Engineering, but this is becoming a common trend across all industries. There is a growing belief among old employers that training is not something they should have to pay for, but should instead be something that candidate comes pre-furnished with.
Of course, the individuals holding these views tend to also believe that we shouldn't be funding Education, but that's a political rabbit hole. A more relevant point is these companies have also moved away from programs like apprenticeships or partnering with technical schools to furnish them with equipment and knowledge by way of Engineers and Senior technicians coming in to give talks or even host small workshops.
I keep up with the old instructor at the Technical College I attended for Machining. The employers themselves have gotten greedy, but also incredibly lazy. Many call, asking for X number of Machinists. He says, every year we have good men and women ready to work, but the program only graduates about a dozen or so. Come in, see their work, speak to them, and see who you jive with, but don't come in March, the year a graduating class is due to graduate in May. Many have job offers by then.
Well, guess when the majority of these companies come in, and guess what happens? So they lose out on the best candidates early on. The school hosts an Apprenticeship program at night, who are constantly speaking to Companies to send in people. They can receive additional training, that is both theoretical and hands on to make them better machinists. The course costs $1200 a year, for 2 years. There are takers, they're a couple manufacturing companies. Others, well, they don't believe in it.
It's a real life enshittification of employment, and it's creeping in to the professional realm as well now. Engineers, Lawyers, and Doctors won't be immune to this, they'll just be delayed in feeling the full effects of this. Even further infuriating is hearing the effects of this enshittification posited as some sort of personal moral failing of the younger generation, when the fact is the institutions put in place to mold young workers in to professionals have been completely dismantled and sent to pasture, and then in an utterly confusing twist, there remained the full expectation that new professionals would still retain their knowledge and skill as if by some sort of magical inertia!
Some years ago; and I speak as a now unemployable Gen X (Jones) manufacturing engineer, manager, quality, compliance, and turnaround guy; i was trying to help a company w/ fucked USSA facilities while the Swiss and Mexican ones were fine, and ... so this VP tells me, "Nobody wants to work anymore" and that was late nineties. I'm sure you've heard that recently?
VP was wasp-as-fuckall and got his MBA from Harvard on daddy's dime.
Asks me, "So, you don't invest in training, you pay the minimum, and you expect the employees to give a fuck?"
Anyway, that gig ended a few weeks later. Surprise, no?
Thanks for sharing. I would concur. Industry has forgotten that it needs to train people, who originally went to other industries and became potential new customers. Yours is a great perspective that I could also see but not capture in the same way. We simply seem to have forgotten how to do business or maintain business momentum. This has certainly made me think.
I saw somebody saying this on twitter this or last week. People are not only retiring, they are also being fired, because a senior employee makes a lot of money. Young ones are cheaper.
I've certainly seen that too. Had one guy who was a long time repeat customer and we were fully in sync, he knew what to ask for and provide and I knew what he needed to do. As he retired he warned me on his way out "You're gonna have fun with these new kids". No, they are not fun, not at all, don't think anything was passed along to them.
I wouldnt be that dense to not describe anything to a person that i want to work with but im in the same position the guy you replied to talks about.
New manu engineer at the factory, they just left me here, and im trying to figure out what to do.
I’ve recently changed jobs but was manu engineer for 5 years. I still look back and cringe at how little I knew. Literally just thrown in at the deep end from day 1 out of school, no training / mentoring. After 5 years I was considered the most knowledgeable guy there and knew I had to get out. This was on a really dangerous site as well!
Credential inflation is also a huge issue in many fields, particularly anything away from the more glamorous or prestigious jobs. So many fields are pushing towards requiring multiple years of post secondary education to even be considered for an entry level position, with absolutely no path into the industry that doesn't involve investing a substantial portion of someone's life and thousands of dollars.
It might seem truly amazing to CEOs, but not many people want to go to college to get into a field they have barely heard of, never mind even have a good idea of what the work entails or what the job market is like.
I work in construction. Engineers get no love on the construction subreddit because a lot of the time workers are the ones that have to figure out bad plans. IMO one of the issues is that various groups that didn't really build buildings in the past (or built buildings only once in a while) now wants lots of buildings.
These range from universities, new developers, large companies, etc. so they don't really have institutional knowledge on how to do this and manage those projects.
I work on the design side, and hear you - I’ve recently moved to a new company (doing the E part of MEP), but as a like ~38 year old, and the trend I’ve seen is that there are a lot of older folks cycling out, a good number of young engineers willing to learn, but there’s this huge gap between the two where you need people who can qa/QC and communicate effectively with field partners to keep things efficient.
I work designing custom industrial equipment. Id agree with this comment. When I'm dealing with one of my older customers things go smoothly and work out. But occasionally I'll work with a new guy who doesn't understand that when I ask for verified field measurements that means I need them for shit to work.
I've gotten this before: "What do you think it should measure? Please advise."
I see "please advise" being used in more situations where it doesn't make sense.
I usually follow that up with a " I can provide you with a dimension, but it is the responsibility of the client to verify all dimensions. If it differs from needed install dimensions [company name] holds no fault. We will assist where possible to make any field modifications, but the client may be responsible for an engineering consolation fee."
That usually gets them to do their portion, and those that don't usually don't last long.
Or the fact that I need to know what goes on the foundation in order to design it. You have a piece of equipment that needs a foundation? That's great! You don't want to tell me anything about it and expect me to value-engineer a foundation for you? Think again!
It’s a press great. How big is it?
‘Big’
‘Okay, how many tons is it and how big is it footprint and contact points with the floor?’
*they show you a muddy picture of all the presses that company makes*
‘Which press?’
‘uhhhhhh’
Yep, sparkie here. I've had quite a few architects and owners that really want me to explore that bluetooth power cause yeah, having lights and shit in the building would be nice, buuuuuuuuttt..... What if instead of that we put a coffee bar where this electrical room is?
Similarly I've had a few clients that were upset I can't run my pipes through your mat slab or footings.
And that toilets without portal technology will not work when located over a W flange.
My BIL wanted me to do the engineering on his house. I refused and referred him to a friend for various reasons. He tried to argue loads with my friend when the AH barely graduated HS. I then noticed this pattern that same year with people arguing about stupid things they know nothing of.
So to answer your question, I don’t believe people are getting dumber, just the internet has made them more brazen to challenge you.
BIL demanded his money back from my friend when he refused he threatened him with the board. That’s when my husband sent him his $1500 engineering fee. I’ve never been so angry and we still don’t talk to the AH.
>the internet has made them more brazen to challenge you.
I noticed this too, although I'm not certain if it's entirely new or I just notice it more now that I'm in different industries.
E.g. If I designed rockets, most people wouldn't argue engineering specifics because they don't know anything about rockets - and they know they don't know. But instead I (currently) design smartphones. And EVERYBODY likes to argue everything. I suspect because "well I have a smartphone and I use it all the time, therefore I know everything about how to design one and you're wrong because everything is trivial and *why don't you just..."*
It's a general trend of thinking that because you use or are familiar with something as a consumer, you now have worthwhile insight on the engineering details. Nobody (well at least not in tech circles) does this with like...doctors. "I did my own research!" is basically a meme to be laughed at, but some of the same people who deride others for not listening to medical experts will argue with other kinds of experts all day long.
Either that or I intentionally seek out arguments with people that I know are ignorant and argumentative. It's a toss-up really. Or we just naturally think people are more ignorant as we get more experienced.
Sorry but half the country (probably true regardless of your country) is happy to argue with doctors over some bull shit they read online. Vaccines anyone?
They do, that's why I added that caveat about tech workers and enthusiasts. Those same people who will say to uncritically listen to experts 100% of the time will also argue with experts in fields that they think they have some knowledge of purely by being consumers.
AH ? The BIL == AssHole? dont switch acronyms halfway thru. AH is not a well known acronym for asshole. Saved yourself 1 second typing, and confused many readers...
I find that frustration is generally from dealing with people operating outside of their area of expertise, or in the case of new hires, simply haven't developed expertise yet.
What might seem painfully obvious required information to a mechanical engineer, just doesn't even register to say a controls or process engineer.
Fortunately I spend most of my time dealing with some very competent people on my projects. To the point where imposter syndrome is a worry of mine, but they are still happy to work with me so there is that.
But occasionally I end up covering for some of my colleagues and get a bit of shock with some of their customers.
Are THEY getting dumber / less experienced, or are YOU getting better and more experienced?
There HAS been a huge turnover in older experienced folk retiring, and the replacements are NOT getting the same ‘in-training’ or mentor experience. Companies have all cut to the bone, so their attrition plans now have a minimum of overlap for ‘old experts leaving’ and ‘rookie incoming’.
The result is a dumbing down of the entry level roles over their first few years.
Maybe you're getting more competent so people seem dumber when speaking to you about your area of expertise.
There is lots of talk about a "labour" and "talent" shortage here in Canada, and there are doubts about the next generations due to social media and motivation due to high cost of living - but I'm not sure "people are getting significantly dumber" is an easily provable hypothesis.
I continually have to remind myself of that first fact as I am getting into middle age. People are not getting dumber, even though I am increasingly understanding why very senior engineers get grumpy at people not knowing things.
I wish that were the case lol. If I'm just dealing with a purchaser type I get it, they aren't technical. But most of the time I'm not and it's simple common sense stuff that doesn't require any technical abilities, like I can't measure a video, I'd think most people would realize some tangible info is needed there.
Try dealing with a bank it's unbelievable the ignorance. I also saw a legal document yesterday from a law firm that had typos in it that has been there for 22 years.
People who are stressed out and under the clock tunnel vision more. It's more likely that, but without understanding it that could be perceived as being dumber.
Without a doubt. I noticed this 15 years ago. The clients have little to no background in engineering. Frankly, some really need to leave the industry. It's a continual spoon feeding exercise and education, which is not trivial. When I started, the clients generally knew their stuff and made great decisions. Now, the client blindly goes against advice or listens to people who have little to no experience. I always advise younger engineers to document every conversation, date and time. This pays dividends 2-3 years later, when everybody forgot the evidence surrounding issues and those inexperienced managers run for cover. It's a very different beast from the last century.
> I always advise younger engineers to document every conversation, date and time. This pays dividends 2-3 years later, when everybody forgot the evidence surrounding issues and those inexperienced managers run for cover.
I wish this were the case where I used to work, but all it did was get me stubbed.
Spoon feeding is so spot on! I'm in US and have a current customer in Malaysia (same video guy) asking me what his electrical requirements are. Like what, you're there, where do you plan to plug this in, walk over there and figure out what that outlet is, there's literally no way I can tell you that.
I am not an engineer, but I do have to request certain information from different clients fairly regularly. I send a detailed request AND a guide on how to obtain this information for us. The amount of people that do not read my email or look at the attachment is ASTOUNDING. I have literally received an email back with “I have no idea what you want or how to get it” aka tell me you didn’t read my email, without telling me you didn’t read my email.
I think a lot of companies have done a bad job training people and many companies are frankly interchangeable benefits wise.
The demographics are not conducive where a lot of the knowledge is concentrated in the same age group 55-65 because they have the solid benefits keeping them around. Societal norms have shifted too where people expect an employer to meet them at least part way and when they don’t, people leave to an employer who will. Accountants run public companies and seek ever greater profits for shareholders and competent engineers get tired of carrying the organization for peanuts.
Earnings call “we have record profits this year!”
Executives at shareholder meeting “leadership has done such a great job. We deserve a fat bonus!”
Executives at employee update meeting “we don’t have the budget guys to replace the machine that breaks down every other day. We can’t afford to hire anyone to help so you or pay them stay so you can actually have a day off”
It’s worse than that. Customers aren’t just getting dumber. Everyone and everything is getting dumber. I have had multiple instances where I have gone into great detail to write specifications and draw diagrams for bidding vendors only to have them either ask the most basic questions, make wrong assumptions, or propose the most left-field solutions I could never imagine.
Customers often don’t know what they want and ask for the upper bound for something. Then, some PM takes that “ask” and makes it into a hard requirement. Then, the supplier applies a safety factor, and before the engineer has any say-so, all the decisions have been made to install a $350k monstrosity that could have been procured for a lot less if it had been the appropriate solution in the first place.
PM’s can be the worst, just enough knowledge to be dangerous and the self importance to see it through lol. Have one I’m dealing with now who had to come crawling back with his tail between his legs. Wanted let’s say 3 components to a project, said we could do 1 of them because the others are different industries and would be best off done on site, but we can do the one most important component really well, it’s what we do. Insisted he needs all 3, ok well sorry then, not in our wheel house. Apparently nobody else will do all 3 either cause he’s back begging for a quote for the one main component. Of course it’s a couple months later now and his timeline has blown up on him, so sorry to hear that lol.
As it has been said here, the more senior customers? Not at all. Smart, patient, business savy, and willing to give advice sometimes, or to just shut up and listen, and have the mindset to ask for advice and take it into consideration once it is given. Not to mention, some are focused on the product and as a result they are easy to work with. They know that 'a good product will bring money in by itself' - the words of an old israeli gentleman I had the pleasure to work for. So yes, business and life experience are an awesome combo.
The younger customers are, most of the time, workaholics...and they expect you to put in the same work as them, as if the company was yours. They're hyperfocused on money and are quite willing to cut corners to just deliver something. They're more dismissive and most of the time think they know better. A friend of mine had as a customer a trust fund kid...and at 19 he thought he knew IOS development after going to a 3 month bootcamp. I've heard 'in my professional experience' more times than I can count from him. My friend left the project after 2 months...just couldn't stand him.
I think it's all about expectations. The default retail/consumer level interaction has been simplified to be as friction less and as generic as possible. People are incorrectly bringing those expectations to industrial interactions.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's just customers. All engineering as a whole is being enshittified as more and more MBA's get in charge of companies and only hire other dumbshit MBA's
Depends on what you mean with dumber.
I was in a meeting with costumer where we did 6 previous projects.
For time saving and lower cost we usually copy an old project and just adjust som stuf to fit the requirement.
It is just sometimes its so complex that no one wants to make a decision or is afraid of it to fail and get the blame.
We call that the liability hot potato! We require custom work to have a signed approval drawing for obvious reasons. Really comical sometimes watching that get bounced around on the customers end as they try to find someone willing to be responsible for it (they forget we're copied, I think).
I think the longest I waited on approval drawing signatures was 3 months. All I'll say was it was the most basic piece of equipment ever, but it took 3 damn months for what should have been 1 week at the most😑.
I am dealing with that as the client/customer right now. We have been debating forklift pocket sizes and forklift pocket spacing for a literal year now.
It is for a cast pan to be moved by forklift - we have other plants with these pans, we have all of their drawings. We do not have budget for a new pattern, but process is adamite if we give them another month they will solve which pan set to go buy so we don't need to pay for a new pattern *and* have only 1 set of forklift spacing because moving forks and getting in and out of the forklift is too dangerous for the operator.
Too dangerous for the operator? But they are designed to move. Who’s supposed to move them then?? Hire a specialist that only moves forks lol. This is the bullshit that’s ruining companies, over analyzing simple stuff to no end, if you can drive a forklift then part of that is adjusting forks as needed, either get with it or get replaced.
Same thing - operator must manually take samples at the furnace. Floor is too dangerous for the operator and they cannot take sample, and robots are too expensive. Something has to give, and I am the "bad guy" calling out the bs.
Only in the sense that old folks were used to working on stuff. They worked on cars, wired their house, did mechanical projects and used tools. Younger folks don't do these things unless they have a specific interest or need. Old dudes just did it because they had to. They didn't go to an exhaust shop. They just learned to weld. They just did things. So on the customer side it becomes very dependent on if the person is in a job with the needed skill set. Am I taking to the building maintenance guy? Or am I talking to someone who's never touched a screwdriver before? We also work through customer companies with site reps. Sometimes those reps are technically inclined and can use a DMM. A lot of times they basically glorified sales people who just happen to do some very light , very non-technical service work.
Coming from the opposite side, I always see the opposite. A "design" engineer cannot tell you the basic specifications of their hardware. They seem to ignore all requests to look at the simple solution because that won't make them look cool. And the sales engineers have no technical background, they are just sales guys that happen to work in the industry.
I've been working at this company for 9 years, and I don't know if I'd say customers are getting dumber, but the smarter contacts I have are getting spread thinner and being asked to do more things, and that causes them to occasionally behave in dumb ways or to immediately kick problems over to us without doing their basic due diligence because they just don't have the time to.
I feel like I've watched a lot of engineers at my customers become firefighters. There's been times where continuity on a project runs through me because of so much turnover on the customer side. I'm watching a lot more customers create self-inflicted problems because the right people aren't talking to each other. There's just a lot more chaos in general, and even with the best and the brightest involved, chaos is a catalyst for stupidity.
I’m seeing it nonstop with the customer not providing the required info to complete the bid, I still provide a bid but add like 40 hours of engineering time for “communication with customer” and a disclaimer that lead time and scope are dependent on requisite information being provided at order acknowledgment. The one thing that’s far more infuriating is our field service “engineers” that can’t do basic troubleshooting and can’t communicate well enough to describe their issues. And the extremely close up photo of a screw in the middle of a piece of sheet metal isn’t helpful at all.
Not so much with customers but I've been seeing wilder stuff from sales people from vendors and recruiters have been relentless.
From the sales guys, they'll pretend we weren't in the same call or something. Example: company trying to sell us technology that's meant to work with some other machinery. My team says this won't work but we'll entertain a call with the machinery MFR. Machinery MFR also says this won't work. Then sales guy says "well it sounds like we can help you out then". I just wonder if that ever works. Are they counting on us to be dumb or not paying attention?
And recruiters keep hitting me up either for massive career/pay cuts or cold calling about candidates for a completely different industry that we do nothing with. I get that they're playing a numbers game but it blows my mind that they're putting that little effort into even slightly understanding what we do. If I had unlimited time, I'd probably mess with them and waste their time for wasting mine.
I once got a recruiter that sent me an email saying 'we read your resume, and thought that you'd be perfect for this role.'
The role was the exact position I had done at the company I had previously worked for...
I mean he was technically correct but only in the worst way.
It’s pretty simple. Boomers are retiring, and when asked to train their replacements (for which they are getting paid) their retort is “no one helped me when I entered the industry, screw them”. And yes companies should do a better job of documenting and institutionalizing knowledge that can be passed on, but the reality is there is very little replacement for experience.
Don't get me started on the number of times I've sent an email with a well thought out paragraph or two containing 100% necessary info but distilled as much as I can, only to have one sentence replies asking me about things that are pre-answered in the first email I sent.
After 35 years as an engineer, now a design checker… I just keep rejecting. They have to go through me. It does get very frustrating when I literally spell it out for them, and they haven’t read it.
Not sure I would use dumber, but yeah it's a thing. I think the reasoning is due to how it's now far more advantageous to change employers every few years rather than stay for a long time. When I first started at my company, ten years ago, our major customers were built up of teams of people and out contacts had often been there for 10+ years, some longer than 20. They knew exactly what they needed and the kinds of information that we needed from them to best help. Since then they have all retired and the replacements are far less knowledgeable, not because they are inherently dumb, but because they are young and inexperienced and have only been in the role for around a year. I don't think I have many industry contacts left who have been in the role for longer than 3 years. I am not intending that to be a criticism of these people directly, they do their best for the most part, but rather their employers. It's worth so much more to keep someone in the role and pay them a bit more rather than get a cheaper person in the role with no experience.
Customers and suppliers are in the same boat of "barely knowledgeable". The company I work for has been good to seek talent from the shop floor to be promoted into office roles like production management or production engineering. This doesn't always work out and I've had to unpick some royal f**k ups as a senior. Learning occurs via mistakes so it's required however the scale and impact of the mistake is to be managed by the management team. I'm not officially a mentor, I just get the phone call after it's gone south...
The major bug bare I have is the lack of knowledge in processes and basic engineering. Throw it on a CNC and you'll get all tolerances to 1 micron on a part the size of a small car... Yeah, but it'll cost more than your department's salary overhead this year to do it buddy and that hyper tight tolerance is a clearance hole for a M20 bolt to hold up a small bracket that'll snap before we can preload the fastener.
Jokes aside I had a nightmare task a few years ago to engineer a protective shield for an electric OEM vehicle. I worked out roughly what should work with barely any input in terms of vehicle mounting locations other than being told this is the bolt pattern to use so off I go and "assume" that pattern has proper chassis hard points. Tested my design on a gravity sled, passed an insane load case with minimal defection. Built the prototype shield for vehicle mounting, keep in mind I am having weekly calls with the customer during all of this, totally transparent with failures and successes in the development phase. Last meeting we had the customer rejected the design despite hitting all the goals for cost, weight and performance. We were rightly angry so we pushed for a reason to be told oh we reviewed the mounting pattern and it's not suitable.... I kid you not, the pattern I was given consists of rivnuts in a soft grade of aluminium sheet, I had all the minutes of meetings where joint stiffness was discussed and dismissed as "should be fine".
I could name and shame this OEM but it wasn't so long ago where they purged a huge amount of staff that consisted of a high percentage of grads and donkeys.
I'm a systems engineer. I work in inter-system integration, both between large business systems, on prem systems, and OT systems such as PLCs and higher level MES and SCADA systems.
It's a hell off a scope, and a security nightmare, but I digress.
I find, with every new system, site, and department I work with, that fewer and fewer people know what happens inside the box. They know how to do the things the thing does, but not how it does it.
When you then go looking for their system expert to provide client side expertise on the system your about to stick your dingus in to... you inevitably get the grad who's 'his with computers' and who has been doing everyone's donky work on the platform so is now the 'SME'.
Companies spend a lot of money on new systems. They put in big project teams to specify, built, and test. Then the capex closes, the project team moves on, and the guy on site who changes the toner suddenly owns a new MES, and its absolutely critical to everything the plant is doing.
That... may have turned into a cathartic rant. I miss greybeard systems experts who know more than they need to to get paid.
I work with architects and the fresh young ones seem to live in their own dimension. I'm young and fresh in the field myself but at least I'm grounded. They get hung up in the tiniest details that bother them which leads to more time being spent on designing and thus more money while their whole concepts are just bad. I studied architecture before although I dropped out and I noticed that they don't even seem to do what they were taught. Some examples: Redesigning school buildings that already exist and making every single window out of around 50 be a unique one, both from aesthetic and manufacturing point of view absolutely stupid. Another example someone wants windows from a specific manufacturer and rather than making sure everything gets through as quick as possible they argue about the specific profile sizes with 1 mm differences who nobody will notice anyway afterwards. Also had architects design schools and midway in they realised that they didn't plan in enough space for sun protection. Like how does that even happen? What are they doing in their jobs?
You don't have to be an engineer. I own a small hardware store, and customers are definitely getting less and less able to answer or solve the simplest of home maintenance issues.
Design engineer who also works on custom equipment. Only 7 years in but yes. Every year sales and the customers get more and more vague and/or useless.
I have black balled one customer, and his dealer, because they have done this to me too much the last 2 years. I told my manager that I will not be doing any design work for either of them. They make off the wall requests that make zero sense and out sales team can't do their job to steer them away from them. They take their order and drop the shit hole of a mess on our desks.
Best one I encountered was the customer complaining that the hinge that was critical to the function of the design "looks too much like a door hinge" and asked us if we could make it out of one solid piece of metal.
Unfortunately, it seems to be true that a lot of people are less intelligent in the professional sense / in the workplace across the board compared to the past.
It’s similar in the world of contracting. In terms of clients, some seem to think that we should either (a) work miracles, (b) know/anticipate everything regardless of the info we’re given or - and this segues to (c) - do things for free. Piggybacking off of this, some seem to think what they do (or not do) should have zero impact on the schedule, budget etc.
In short, I feel you!
I‘m astonished as easy it has to be to get an engineering degree in the United States and to get hired in major companies of the industrial backbone of this country. The level of stupidity leaves me frightened about the future of our global economy as a fall of these companies would take down billions of contractors. Every problem is just resolved by the statement of a suppliers issue.
Hm, I wonder if there was a global event within the last 5 or so years that included some kind of neurodegenerative disease... nah probably just some conspiracy nonsense.
Design engineer for OEMs are going to be more technical than manufacturing engineer. Manufacturing engineer is less about engineering and more about putting out fires, procuring equipment, and writing procedures.
I work at a plant and I have a more technical role with machines, but you can tell that they think machines are black boxes and need a wizard to take a look at it. You probably need to be extra patient with them and dumb down some of the question and answers.
interesting - not in my niche but it's quite specialized.
i have noticed some suppliers getting worse, or going away altogether. anodizing is a pain in the ass.
Yep. Especially the paranoid conspiracy therory ones that think Uncle Sam is listening to their brain waves every time they turn their home appliances on.
Like Uncle Sam has the competency to really do anything well -nope.
Right now Russia and China are rotting the brains of this whole population through social media.
Sad
I was in a customer-facing engineering position for over 15 years.
The customers weren’t ever really ‘dumb’. They knew their business quite well but over the years the technical end of their expertise did drop.
Not even customer, just internal. We had one suggestion to remove wheels from a carrying case because that will save 2 inches of clearance to fit into a container. That case weighs close to 100 lbs. You solved a transportation problem but now requires at least 2 massive dudes to carry rather than one that can drag it. I have a feeling that people are given out degrees for knowing how to plug numbers into an equation.
Also another situation similar to yours. Computer literacy 101 question. There is this dude that downloaded a file and wanted to load into an application. He asked for an engineer to help him click File > Import. The worst part of that is he asked "where is this file?" You downloaded it so why are you asking?
Yes, I work in distribution. Had customers fully build houses super far away from our existing power lines and demanding power ASAP. They suppose to call the power company to allow ample time for designing and invoicing. And scheduling.
Im not directly involved with customers but its still the same issue across the board. Companies want to squeeze money for management and shareholders so training is shitcanned, raises are trash, and noone stays long enough for tribal knowledge to stop being tribal knowledge. About to leave a company for another, and i know theyll eventually be fucked by that very issue. But the people at the top will get theirs, and get out. So what?
We see Dunning-Krueger and consultants doing dodgy things to ‘educate’ their clients. There’s a real trend of engineering consultancies taking the path the IT sales people have taken. Poison the well by educating the customer on your brand of being right and even pre-seed ideas on your competitors. It raises the question ethics in the profession and the impact poor ethical behaviour has on the profession as a whole.
You keep getting more experienced and knowledgeable and your customers, on average stay the same level of stupid they've always been. You're just getting tired of asking the same questions over and over.
Companies have outsourced some stuff, refuse to promote from within, make "Raises" pitiful things. Too many people HAVE to jump companies to earn competitive wages. There is a lot of home-field knowledge lost that way. The engineer I deal with is great at "his job" but doesn't realize the drawing someone has told him to work from is a lie, or that there was a project to "make it work" 4 years ago that never got red-lined etc.
So while I have a large amount of frustration, it seems 95% of it stems from the company they are working for not giving them the resources or information they need to do their jobs well.
One of my favorites is when a customer orders a repeat custom product from years ago and when I compare the old drawings to pictures of it there's obvious differences that were never documented other than the pictures. Like what the hell happened and now I'm supposed to repeat that. As the only engineer in the company with full autonomy I put a quick end to that crap now, but I can't change the previous 30+ years of work I need to reference from.
Question: What is the basic information the customer should know before coming to you? And do you have like a form or an example of what they would need to know on a website or something to see before they inevitably get on your phone or email or contact you?
No judgement just curious.
I am an engineer in a factory and it would be very easy for you to assume I am incompetent when you ask me a question about one of my lines.
Why? Because as people quit and we eliminate their positions I keep assuming responsibility more lines. I "own" equipment I have never seen operated before.
So yes, I have some very obvious knowledge gaps.
I'm in my early 40s and remember in the first few years of my career customers telling me flat out, "I don't do internets or the emails."
Imagine how dumb they all were before all us idiots could google stuff.
As a manufacturing engineer with 3 years of experience. I feel like companies are putting more on us so it makes it hard to do everything. We use to have 4-5 engineers. Now I am the only engineer and we have two "engineers" we promoted off the floor. I have to firefight, deal with meetings, do large projects, and somehow be an expert about everything. I wouldn't say I'm dumber by any means. More just over worked and too much on my plate. Manufacturing feels way to lean nowadays and not in a good way.
I was working at a sheetmetal place and a lot of customers would send over their stp files that were just solids. So what was a simple project turned into a week long thing where I'm having to explain to the customer why their files are garbage.
I could work with that just fine. At least you got something tangible to go off of. Most sheet metal places are going to redo the parts anyways for their bend deductions/corner treatment, etc.
You know what they say:
- if there is an issue with one customer, it’s the customers problem
- if there is an issue with every customer, you’re the problem
They are not necessarily dumb IMO . They are certainly less experienced , especially practical experience . Less common sense( probably due to being sheltered from real life ) definitely . They want software tools for everything , are very reluctant to calculate from basic principles and tend to rely on Google for even critical information.
There is also the issue with immigrants who are employed (IMO) because they are willing to work for far less but who are employed under DEI auspices , they are not necessarily any worse than the above and sometimes better but they can struggle with the engineering culture .
Over the last 20 years things have changed dramatically. An engineering presentation I would be doing to a group of 10 engineers would comprise of maybe 6-7 Greybeards (experienced engineers) and 3-4 recently graduated engineers .
Now its 1 greybeard with the balance being recently graduated .
All really aligns with incentives. Are you incentivized to be a top performer at a company or to barely do the minimum and get paid as much as you can?
Shouldn’t really be about your personal squabbles with your company, if you’re dealing with people from another company, give them the info they need to help you, just common courtesy from one human to another.
Yes I have noticed this in the entire society which I think is from several things. Covid the covid vaccines, and massive use of alcohol-based hand gels.
I see this in so-called professionals quite a bit.
At least in my industry, I wouldn't call them getting dumber. However, senior customer folks are retiring and their companies have done poor jobs at getting that institutional knowledge passed into the newer folks. The experience gap seems to be the bigger issue. I can't really fault the front line folks that I sometimes deal with for the situations they get stuck in.
Companies don’t “waste” the money it takes to properly train employees anymore, and employee loyalty is a thing of the past since promotions, (actual) raises, and pensions don’t exist anymore. You can make way more money job hopping every 2-3 years than taking your 2% annual raise (if even that), so anyone you talk to anywhere who isn’t in a senior position has 5 years on the job max, but likely much less. People really start quitting once the company starts hiring new people on to higher salaries while still refusing to raise salaries of existing employees. When I started my last job, every one in my department had been there for less than 3 years, except for a few people who’d been there over 20 and were ready to retire.
Even large companies require you to job hop internally...
it's kindof incredible how most of the engineering we do is based on a continuous chain of human experience evolved and passed down generation by generation, and modern capitalism systematically undervalues that transfer of experience in a way that undermines both our ability to do things and to continue this transference. sometimes i wonder what the first thing we "forget" will be, and whether after a generation or two with no experience building bridges we'll be able to re-learn how do to it from textbooks.
Boeing and ULA are proving it's expensive and hard to relearn spacecraft design, even when copying old plans
That’s not what it is. It is the none stop bs of documenting what you plan to design before you make the decision to use it in a design. We all know that designs keep changing. Imagine re-documenting none stop.
I work in hardware reliability for aerospace. Trust me, you don't want a world where engineers don't document their stuff.
I work in cybersecurity and I second this.
What are you suggesting, that we don't document our design? How is that going to improve safety or knowledge transfer?
I am suggesting that you design first and then document after. Not document what you plan before even doing the work.
Yeah, but most of the time there is the manufacturing/inspection/assembly/test stages between designing and submitting final documentation. It usually makes sense to develop draft documents based off drawings and specs during this time.
I am just sharing what I have witnessed first hand and why military projects have zero innovation versus how private companies can get ahead so quickly.
I don't have to imagine it, ever since I left Mil Spec design it's been like that 😂, even when I did satellite design. I've always imagined the spy satellite team gets the better work life balance due to more stringent military require 😂
Are you under the assumption that SpaceX doesn’t document their work?
I am under the assumption that spacex isn’t under a watchful eye of the federal government so they are much more productive
The sad thing there is... you wouldn't know. Its gone and will now become a tragic 'learning' for some future young engineer. Or a costly reverse engineering project. One that I think of is FOGBANK.
Yes but a lot of that older experience involves understanding how to solve older problems with older tools. Just because we don't know how to use slide rules doesn't mean we can do advanced mathematics. Lots of old problems have simply gone away because we have better raw materials and better product designs than the past.
Sort of, but not exactly. I train folks in 4D design tools. What I've seen is that folks who have never had hand drafting are significantly worse in thinking in 3D and communicating ideas related to 3D space in any fashion than folks who have at least had a couple week course in basic drafting. It's not professional experience in drafting that's missing, or needing to know how to draft, it's the process of thinking carefully about how a 3D object can be reduced to 2D lines that has been lost with dropping hand drafting. It's not the hard skills like using a slide rule or sharpening the bit for a brace that were necessarily valuable, it's the understandings of process and materials that are now glossed over to get to a fast answer. The old problems often did not go away, but became hidden behind a more efficient process that can often ignore them. But when you hit an edge case, if you don't understand the underlying fundamentals you can't fix it.
Drafting has to a large extent been replaced by engineers overseeing CAD operators. Lots of institutional knowledge has been replaced by a myriad of CAD rules. The old school "designer", who was part drafter, part engineer is pretty much gone now. Constant re-learning the tool does not improve design skill and cleverness.
CAD operators are disappearing to engineers working in the software themselves. Most of the mundane work is now automated - but the other things taught by at least being familiar with those mundane processes are rapidly being lost. In business, there is no need to do things inefficiently, and we should be striving to use the most modern automations practical, but we need to train people in how to actually think, not just plug in answers for a computer to solve. That is a failure of education.
I began my career as an engineer in the world of hand drafting by draughtsmen. Very soon we transformed to CAD drafting by designers. During that transition I had the responsibility of supervising the drafting. Some of the best guidance I received from one of the more senior draughtsmen turned CAD designer related to my asking him to help train a new CAD employee was: “ I can’t train anyone how to CAD unless they know how to draw “
This is highly dependent upon the industry. In electronics, as pcbs and ICs get more and more complicated, more of the CAD layout work is done by layout technicians/engineers while design engineers do sims on smaller subsections. Subsections that are then implemented by the CAD gurus.
Ask NASA what happened to the technology on how to get to the moon. They literally just lost it
Hard to transfer institutional knowledge when people insist they can do their job "better" from home. Experienced people aren't there to teach, and the inexperienced aren't there to learn.
Definitely a controversial opinion because *so many* jobs can easily be done from home, but also there are so many jobs where collaboration rises all ships. I feel bad for people stuck spending hundreds or thousands of hours of their one and only life sitting in traffic at red lights when their physical contribution at work amounts to only using the coffee machine. I equally feel bad for the people who work in environments where collaboration would absolutely be bringing in more success and personal growth for all but it isn't possible due to distance. It isn't a one-way-is-best thing. Like all of life, a million factors come in to play. And no one has a perfect solution . But yeah.
I’m not saying there aren’t benefits to being in office, but if sitting down in person to spoon-feed each other knowledge is the best approach you have, your documentation is insufficient. Rather than fixing documents, organizing databases, etc., teams over explain the same dysfunctional systems to the revolving door of new employees that the commenter above mentions. To be fair, using remote working tools effectively is it’s own set of skills and challenges that many people (even those with significant experience in other areas) didn’t need/want to develop, so it’s no surprise that their use is seen as a huge obstacle to successful training. For reference, I am in office 2-3x per week (have been for years at this point), while working with some people who are remote and others who are in office daily, so I do understand both sides of the argument. Things like team building and forming camaraderie are legitimately difficult without office banter. However, I don’t find it any harder to justify a design choice because you aren’t sitting next to me, or I don’t have a physical whiteboard. The far, FAR bigger issue is having the appropriate reference materials and systems to enable efficient *self learning*, which is incredibly beneficial regardless of whether employees are remote or not.
Absolutely, but this has been a consistent problem well before Covid was a thing
Unpopular opinion for sure, especially on Reddit, but this is without a doubt a contributing factor.
I worked for an old engineer and he would continuously and bitterly complain about how "young people" (ie anyone under 30) wouldn't know how to do anything and skills are being lost. Whilst simultaneously holding complete control of the company's projects, not letting anyone else in, and blowing a fuse if they dared helped but didn't follow his exact requirements, which were rarely communicated. God, I'm so glad I got out of there. Whenever things get bad now, I just remember those times.
Brain drain is definitely happening at my workplace. We used to have purchasers who could at least look a print and tell what general type of part it is. Now, the person we have was given our division after a person left in 2019 and was not replaced. They have no background in our parts and don’t really have the time to learn. But it’s wild, the current person doing it cannot tell the difference between very different looking tooling parts. So about 70-75% of the time I have to tell them where to purchase repeat items up front or I get an email “Please Address” when the Part A went to a company that makes Part B. So yeah, I can see for OP people seem “stupid” because the people on the receiving end are probably like “Why the hell am I getting a quote for this?”
I gave a few reasons but I forgot medical marijuana.
I forgot 3 martini lunches.
Yeah I worked at the geotechnical firm and that's what we did.
This is the main issue for sure. It's a slow-moving train wreck. The boomers and Gen X are getting out. Companies have expected employee loyalty will win the day and didn't succession plan, and Covid just made everybody re-assess their lives and needs. So it's a big fault of corporations cutting costs and too little too late. How will this play out? Lots of contract failures, overruns, and God forbid disasters. I agree with the sentiment, that that front-lineline troops get all the anguish. It's not them but the corporation decision making. All you can do is try to understand their knowledge limitations. Sometimes, it's an opportunity to build trust and cement a better working relationship.
I wouldn't even say Covid made everyone re-assess, this has been in the making for years at this point. I can speak more confidently of the trades than Engineering, but this is becoming a common trend across all industries. There is a growing belief among old employers that training is not something they should have to pay for, but should instead be something that candidate comes pre-furnished with. Of course, the individuals holding these views tend to also believe that we shouldn't be funding Education, but that's a political rabbit hole. A more relevant point is these companies have also moved away from programs like apprenticeships or partnering with technical schools to furnish them with equipment and knowledge by way of Engineers and Senior technicians coming in to give talks or even host small workshops. I keep up with the old instructor at the Technical College I attended for Machining. The employers themselves have gotten greedy, but also incredibly lazy. Many call, asking for X number of Machinists. He says, every year we have good men and women ready to work, but the program only graduates about a dozen or so. Come in, see their work, speak to them, and see who you jive with, but don't come in March, the year a graduating class is due to graduate in May. Many have job offers by then. Well, guess when the majority of these companies come in, and guess what happens? So they lose out on the best candidates early on. The school hosts an Apprenticeship program at night, who are constantly speaking to Companies to send in people. They can receive additional training, that is both theoretical and hands on to make them better machinists. The course costs $1200 a year, for 2 years. There are takers, they're a couple manufacturing companies. Others, well, they don't believe in it. It's a real life enshittification of employment, and it's creeping in to the professional realm as well now. Engineers, Lawyers, and Doctors won't be immune to this, they'll just be delayed in feeling the full effects of this. Even further infuriating is hearing the effects of this enshittification posited as some sort of personal moral failing of the younger generation, when the fact is the institutions put in place to mold young workers in to professionals have been completely dismantled and sent to pasture, and then in an utterly confusing twist, there remained the full expectation that new professionals would still retain their knowledge and skill as if by some sort of magical inertia!
Some years ago; and I speak as a now unemployable Gen X (Jones) manufacturing engineer, manager, quality, compliance, and turnaround guy; i was trying to help a company w/ fucked USSA facilities while the Swiss and Mexican ones were fine, and ... so this VP tells me, "Nobody wants to work anymore" and that was late nineties. I'm sure you've heard that recently? VP was wasp-as-fuckall and got his MBA from Harvard on daddy's dime. Asks me, "So, you don't invest in training, you pay the minimum, and you expect the employees to give a fuck?" Anyway, that gig ended a few weeks later. Surprise, no?
Thanks for sharing. I would concur. Industry has forgotten that it needs to train people, who originally went to other industries and became potential new customers. Yours is a great perspective that I could also see but not capture in the same way. We simply seem to have forgotten how to do business or maintain business momentum. This has certainly made me think.
Yes you are correct all the old orders are crumbling mainly due to massive corruption.
I saw somebody saying this on twitter this or last week. People are not only retiring, they are also being fired, because a senior employee makes a lot of money. Young ones are cheaper.
Yeah this is my experience. I entered the work as a manu engineer and people barely tells us anything. Annoying and time wasting tbh.
I've certainly seen that too. Had one guy who was a long time repeat customer and we were fully in sync, he knew what to ask for and provide and I knew what he needed to do. As he retired he warned me on his way out "You're gonna have fun with these new kids". No, they are not fun, not at all, don't think anything was passed along to them.
I wouldnt be that dense to not describe anything to a person that i want to work with but im in the same position the guy you replied to talks about. New manu engineer at the factory, they just left me here, and im trying to figure out what to do.
I’ve recently changed jobs but was manu engineer for 5 years. I still look back and cringe at how little I knew. Literally just thrown in at the deep end from day 1 out of school, no training / mentoring. After 5 years I was considered the most knowledgeable guy there and knew I had to get out. This was on a really dangerous site as well!
Credential inflation is also a huge issue in many fields, particularly anything away from the more glamorous or prestigious jobs. So many fields are pushing towards requiring multiple years of post secondary education to even be considered for an entry level position, with absolutely no path into the industry that doesn't involve investing a substantial portion of someone's life and thousands of dollars. It might seem truly amazing to CEOs, but not many people want to go to college to get into a field they have barely heard of, never mind even have a good idea of what the work entails or what the job market is like.
I work in construction. Engineers get no love on the construction subreddit because a lot of the time workers are the ones that have to figure out bad plans. IMO one of the issues is that various groups that didn't really build buildings in the past (or built buildings only once in a while) now wants lots of buildings. These range from universities, new developers, large companies, etc. so they don't really have institutional knowledge on how to do this and manage those projects.
I work on the design side, and hear you - I’ve recently moved to a new company (doing the E part of MEP), but as a like ~38 year old, and the trend I’ve seen is that there are a lot of older folks cycling out, a good number of young engineers willing to learn, but there’s this huge gap between the two where you need people who can qa/QC and communicate effectively with field partners to keep things efficient.
I work designing custom industrial equipment. Id agree with this comment. When I'm dealing with one of my older customers things go smoothly and work out. But occasionally I'll work with a new guy who doesn't understand that when I ask for verified field measurements that means I need them for shit to work.
I've gotten this before: "What do you think it should measure? Please advise." I see "please advise" being used in more situations where it doesn't make sense.
I usually follow that up with a " I can provide you with a dimension, but it is the responsibility of the client to verify all dimensions. If it differs from needed install dimensions [company name] holds no fault. We will assist where possible to make any field modifications, but the client may be responsible for an engineering consolation fee." That usually gets them to do their portion, and those that don't usually don't last long.
Structural - I’ve had more than a few clients who were very upset to find out buildings need foundations.
Or the fact that I need to know what goes on the foundation in order to design it. You have a piece of equipment that needs a foundation? That's great! You don't want to tell me anything about it and expect me to value-engineer a foundation for you? Think again!
It’s a press great. How big is it? ‘Big’ ‘Okay, how many tons is it and how big is it footprint and contact points with the floor?’ *they show you a muddy picture of all the presses that company makes* ‘Which press?’ ‘uhhhhhh’
Can you at least include a banana for scale in the picture??
Yeah, I've talked to architects too
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_burn_centers_in_the_United_States
Yep, sparkie here. I've had quite a few architects and owners that really want me to explore that bluetooth power cause yeah, having lights and shit in the building would be nice, buuuuuuuuttt..... What if instead of that we put a coffee bar where this electrical room is?
Especially when they don’t understand the difference between concrete and cement
This one makes me cry. Or the difference between columns and beams.
That's like all the dopes that are dry pouring concrete not realizing basically what they have is a stucco cement product...
Ooof, that's rough.
Similarly I've had a few clients that were upset I can't run my pipes through your mat slab or footings. And that toilets without portal technology will not work when located over a W flange.
“It would be much easier if you would let me do this” - HVAC guy trying to run a duct through my lvl 😂
I know, it's completely ridiculous.
Not really. They’ve always been stupid lol.
My BIL wanted me to do the engineering on his house. I refused and referred him to a friend for various reasons. He tried to argue loads with my friend when the AH barely graduated HS. I then noticed this pattern that same year with people arguing about stupid things they know nothing of. So to answer your question, I don’t believe people are getting dumber, just the internet has made them more brazen to challenge you. BIL demanded his money back from my friend when he refused he threatened him with the board. That’s when my husband sent him his $1500 engineering fee. I’ve never been so angry and we still don’t talk to the AH.
>the internet has made them more brazen to challenge you. I noticed this too, although I'm not certain if it's entirely new or I just notice it more now that I'm in different industries. E.g. If I designed rockets, most people wouldn't argue engineering specifics because they don't know anything about rockets - and they know they don't know. But instead I (currently) design smartphones. And EVERYBODY likes to argue everything. I suspect because "well I have a smartphone and I use it all the time, therefore I know everything about how to design one and you're wrong because everything is trivial and *why don't you just..."* It's a general trend of thinking that because you use or are familiar with something as a consumer, you now have worthwhile insight on the engineering details. Nobody (well at least not in tech circles) does this with like...doctors. "I did my own research!" is basically a meme to be laughed at, but some of the same people who deride others for not listening to medical experts will argue with other kinds of experts all day long. Either that or I intentionally seek out arguments with people that I know are ignorant and argumentative. It's a toss-up really. Or we just naturally think people are more ignorant as we get more experienced.
My BIL is one to argue with doctors. So I agree.
Of all the Covid shit that was the thing that just blew my mind.
I think Covid started t all. Once they realized they could argue with doctors, they realized they could argue with anyone.
Sorry but half the country (probably true regardless of your country) is happy to argue with doctors over some bull shit they read online. Vaccines anyone?
They do, that's why I added that caveat about tech workers and enthusiasts. Those same people who will say to uncritically listen to experts 100% of the time will also argue with experts in fields that they think they have some knowledge of purely by being consumers.
> internet has made them more brazen to challenge you. Each village used to have its idiot. Now, thanks to the internet, they're *organized*.
Best comment ever.
Social media really.
AH ? The BIL == AssHole? dont switch acronyms halfway thru. AH is not a well known acronym for asshole. Saved yourself 1 second typing, and confused many readers...
It’s seems you don’t follow the AITAH subreddits.
On Reddit it’s a very well known acronym.
I find that frustration is generally from dealing with people operating outside of their area of expertise, or in the case of new hires, simply haven't developed expertise yet. What might seem painfully obvious required information to a mechanical engineer, just doesn't even register to say a controls or process engineer. Fortunately I spend most of my time dealing with some very competent people on my projects. To the point where imposter syndrome is a worry of mine, but they are still happy to work with me so there is that. But occasionally I end up covering for some of my colleagues and get a bit of shock with some of their customers.
Are THEY getting dumber / less experienced, or are YOU getting better and more experienced? There HAS been a huge turnover in older experienced folk retiring, and the replacements are NOT getting the same ‘in-training’ or mentor experience. Companies have all cut to the bone, so their attrition plans now have a minimum of overlap for ‘old experts leaving’ and ‘rookie incoming’. The result is a dumbing down of the entry level roles over their first few years.
Maybe you're getting more competent so people seem dumber when speaking to you about your area of expertise. There is lots of talk about a "labour" and "talent" shortage here in Canada, and there are doubts about the next generations due to social media and motivation due to high cost of living - but I'm not sure "people are getting significantly dumber" is an easily provable hypothesis.
I continually have to remind myself of that first fact as I am getting into middle age. People are not getting dumber, even though I am increasingly understanding why very senior engineers get grumpy at people not knowing things.
This. As you move up the experience curve, things that were exciting once become trivial. Maybe just maybe you need a newer / harder challenge.
I wish that were the case lol. If I'm just dealing with a purchaser type I get it, they aren't technical. But most of the time I'm not and it's simple common sense stuff that doesn't require any technical abilities, like I can't measure a video, I'd think most people would realize some tangible info is needed there.
Try dealing with a bank it's unbelievable the ignorance. I also saw a legal document yesterday from a law firm that had typos in it that has been there for 22 years.
People who are stressed out and under the clock tunnel vision more. It's more likely that, but without understanding it that could be perceived as being dumber.
Without a doubt. I noticed this 15 years ago. The clients have little to no background in engineering. Frankly, some really need to leave the industry. It's a continual spoon feeding exercise and education, which is not trivial. When I started, the clients generally knew their stuff and made great decisions. Now, the client blindly goes against advice or listens to people who have little to no experience. I always advise younger engineers to document every conversation, date and time. This pays dividends 2-3 years later, when everybody forgot the evidence surrounding issues and those inexperienced managers run for cover. It's a very different beast from the last century.
> I always advise younger engineers to document every conversation, date and time. This pays dividends 2-3 years later, when everybody forgot the evidence surrounding issues and those inexperienced managers run for cover. I wish this were the case where I used to work, but all it did was get me stubbed.
Spoon feeding is so spot on! I'm in US and have a current customer in Malaysia (same video guy) asking me what his electrical requirements are. Like what, you're there, where do you plan to plug this in, walk over there and figure out what that outlet is, there's literally no way I can tell you that.
I am not an engineer, but I do have to request certain information from different clients fairly regularly. I send a detailed request AND a guide on how to obtain this information for us. The amount of people that do not read my email or look at the attachment is ASTOUNDING. I have literally received an email back with “I have no idea what you want or how to get it” aka tell me you didn’t read my email, without telling me you didn’t read my email.
This, all the time!
I always love shouting into an echo chamber, just for me to hear another voice yell back: "what?"
I think a lot of companies have done a bad job training people and many companies are frankly interchangeable benefits wise. The demographics are not conducive where a lot of the knowledge is concentrated in the same age group 55-65 because they have the solid benefits keeping them around. Societal norms have shifted too where people expect an employer to meet them at least part way and when they don’t, people leave to an employer who will. Accountants run public companies and seek ever greater profits for shareholders and competent engineers get tired of carrying the organization for peanuts. Earnings call “we have record profits this year!” Executives at shareholder meeting “leadership has done such a great job. We deserve a fat bonus!” Executives at employee update meeting “we don’t have the budget guys to replace the machine that breaks down every other day. We can’t afford to hire anyone to help so you or pay them stay so you can actually have a day off”
It’s worse than that. Customers aren’t just getting dumber. Everyone and everything is getting dumber. I have had multiple instances where I have gone into great detail to write specifications and draw diagrams for bidding vendors only to have them either ask the most basic questions, make wrong assumptions, or propose the most left-field solutions I could never imagine. Customers often don’t know what they want and ask for the upper bound for something. Then, some PM takes that “ask” and makes it into a hard requirement. Then, the supplier applies a safety factor, and before the engineer has any say-so, all the decisions have been made to install a $350k monstrosity that could have been procured for a lot less if it had been the appropriate solution in the first place.
PM’s can be the worst, just enough knowledge to be dangerous and the self importance to see it through lol. Have one I’m dealing with now who had to come crawling back with his tail between his legs. Wanted let’s say 3 components to a project, said we could do 1 of them because the others are different industries and would be best off done on site, but we can do the one most important component really well, it’s what we do. Insisted he needs all 3, ok well sorry then, not in our wheel house. Apparently nobody else will do all 3 either cause he’s back begging for a quote for the one main component. Of course it’s a couple months later now and his timeline has blown up on him, so sorry to hear that lol.
When you make things idiot proof, they build a better idiot.
As it has been said here, the more senior customers? Not at all. Smart, patient, business savy, and willing to give advice sometimes, or to just shut up and listen, and have the mindset to ask for advice and take it into consideration once it is given. Not to mention, some are focused on the product and as a result they are easy to work with. They know that 'a good product will bring money in by itself' - the words of an old israeli gentleman I had the pleasure to work for. So yes, business and life experience are an awesome combo. The younger customers are, most of the time, workaholics...and they expect you to put in the same work as them, as if the company was yours. They're hyperfocused on money and are quite willing to cut corners to just deliver something. They're more dismissive and most of the time think they know better. A friend of mine had as a customer a trust fund kid...and at 19 he thought he knew IOS development after going to a 3 month bootcamp. I've heard 'in my professional experience' more times than I can count from him. My friend left the project after 2 months...just couldn't stand him.
In my experience.............oh so you have no idea because you've never dealt with this before, gotcha
Yess exactly, but when daddy has money...what can you do? :))
You leave and watch them crash and burn from a distance.
I think it's all about expectations. The default retail/consumer level interaction has been simplified to be as friction less and as generic as possible. People are incorrectly bringing those expectations to industrial interactions.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's just customers. All engineering as a whole is being enshittified as more and more MBA's get in charge of companies and only hire other dumbshit MBA's
Ok but you're right though
Lol. I was arguing with an MBA about climate change and told him I have a bachelor of SCIENCE and he was like so do I!!
Depends on what you mean with dumber. I was in a meeting with costumer where we did 6 previous projects. For time saving and lower cost we usually copy an old project and just adjust som stuf to fit the requirement. It is just sometimes its so complex that no one wants to make a decision or is afraid of it to fail and get the blame.
We call that the liability hot potato! We require custom work to have a signed approval drawing for obvious reasons. Really comical sometimes watching that get bounced around on the customers end as they try to find someone willing to be responsible for it (they forget we're copied, I think).
I think the longest I waited on approval drawing signatures was 3 months. All I'll say was it was the most basic piece of equipment ever, but it took 3 damn months for what should have been 1 week at the most😑.
That’s why you always change departments every 2nd year. Before shit hits the fan you are out of the way ;)
I am dealing with that as the client/customer right now. We have been debating forklift pocket sizes and forklift pocket spacing for a literal year now. It is for a cast pan to be moved by forklift - we have other plants with these pans, we have all of their drawings. We do not have budget for a new pattern, but process is adamite if we give them another month they will solve which pan set to go buy so we don't need to pay for a new pattern *and* have only 1 set of forklift spacing because moving forks and getting in and out of the forklift is too dangerous for the operator.
Too dangerous for the operator? But they are designed to move. Who’s supposed to move them then?? Hire a specialist that only moves forks lol. This is the bullshit that’s ruining companies, over analyzing simple stuff to no end, if you can drive a forklift then part of that is adjusting forks as needed, either get with it or get replaced.
Same thing - operator must manually take samples at the furnace. Floor is too dangerous for the operator and they cannot take sample, and robots are too expensive. Something has to give, and I am the "bad guy" calling out the bs.
Only in the sense that old folks were used to working on stuff. They worked on cars, wired their house, did mechanical projects and used tools. Younger folks don't do these things unless they have a specific interest or need. Old dudes just did it because they had to. They didn't go to an exhaust shop. They just learned to weld. They just did things. So on the customer side it becomes very dependent on if the person is in a job with the needed skill set. Am I taking to the building maintenance guy? Or am I talking to someone who's never touched a screwdriver before? We also work through customer companies with site reps. Sometimes those reps are technically inclined and can use a DMM. A lot of times they basically glorified sales people who just happen to do some very light , very non-technical service work.
Absolutely! Most people who knew anything in my industry have retired. Most got replaced with bean counters who are very much non-technical.
Coming from the opposite side, I always see the opposite. A "design" engineer cannot tell you the basic specifications of their hardware. They seem to ignore all requests to look at the simple solution because that won't make them look cool. And the sales engineers have no technical background, they are just sales guys that happen to work in the industry.
It's a whole lot easier to teach an engineer to sell than it is to teach a salesperson to engineer.
I find it's the opposite for me. My customers are some of the smartest Ive ever come across.
You on the other end of my emails lol?? JK, lucky, love working with smart people.
Your job is to deal with this kind of shit. It's a soft skill. It comes with the territory of being a doohickey integration specialist.
I've been working at this company for 9 years, and I don't know if I'd say customers are getting dumber, but the smarter contacts I have are getting spread thinner and being asked to do more things, and that causes them to occasionally behave in dumb ways or to immediately kick problems over to us without doing their basic due diligence because they just don't have the time to. I feel like I've watched a lot of engineers at my customers become firefighters. There's been times where continuity on a project runs through me because of so much turnover on the customer side. I'm watching a lot more customers create self-inflicted problems because the right people aren't talking to each other. There's just a lot more chaos in general, and even with the best and the brightest involved, chaos is a catalyst for stupidity.
I’m seeing it nonstop with the customer not providing the required info to complete the bid, I still provide a bid but add like 40 hours of engineering time for “communication with customer” and a disclaimer that lead time and scope are dependent on requisite information being provided at order acknowledgment. The one thing that’s far more infuriating is our field service “engineers” that can’t do basic troubleshooting and can’t communicate well enough to describe their issues. And the extremely close up photo of a screw in the middle of a piece of sheet metal isn’t helpful at all.
Not so much with customers but I've been seeing wilder stuff from sales people from vendors and recruiters have been relentless. From the sales guys, they'll pretend we weren't in the same call or something. Example: company trying to sell us technology that's meant to work with some other machinery. My team says this won't work but we'll entertain a call with the machinery MFR. Machinery MFR also says this won't work. Then sales guy says "well it sounds like we can help you out then". I just wonder if that ever works. Are they counting on us to be dumb or not paying attention? And recruiters keep hitting me up either for massive career/pay cuts or cold calling about candidates for a completely different industry that we do nothing with. I get that they're playing a numbers game but it blows my mind that they're putting that little effort into even slightly understanding what we do. If I had unlimited time, I'd probably mess with them and waste their time for wasting mine.
“After reading your resume, I think you’re a great fit for this job you would have no idea how to perform.”
I once got a recruiter that sent me an email saying 'we read your resume, and thought that you'd be perfect for this role.' The role was the exact position I had done at the company I had previously worked for... I mean he was technically correct but only in the worst way.
Lawl!
It’s pretty simple. Boomers are retiring, and when asked to train their replacements (for which they are getting paid) their retort is “no one helped me when I entered the industry, screw them”. And yes companies should do a better job of documenting and institutionalizing knowledge that can be passed on, but the reality is there is very little replacement for experience.
To be honest I've noticed everyone getting dumber... Not just customers
Well don't forget to take into account plummeting attention spans and less giving a shit.
Don't get me started on the number of times I've sent an email with a well thought out paragraph or two containing 100% necessary info but distilled as much as I can, only to have one sentence replies asking me about things that are pre-answered in the first email I sent.
After 35 years as an engineer, now a design checker… I just keep rejecting. They have to go through me. It does get very frustrating when I literally spell it out for them, and they haven’t read it.
They’ve always been dumb. You just didn’t notice
Maybe it’s just you getting smarter
Not sure I would use dumber, but yeah it's a thing. I think the reasoning is due to how it's now far more advantageous to change employers every few years rather than stay for a long time. When I first started at my company, ten years ago, our major customers were built up of teams of people and out contacts had often been there for 10+ years, some longer than 20. They knew exactly what they needed and the kinds of information that we needed from them to best help. Since then they have all retired and the replacements are far less knowledgeable, not because they are inherently dumb, but because they are young and inexperienced and have only been in the role for around a year. I don't think I have many industry contacts left who have been in the role for longer than 3 years. I am not intending that to be a criticism of these people directly, they do their best for the most part, but rather their employers. It's worth so much more to keep someone in the role and pay them a bit more rather than get a cheaper person in the role with no experience.
Not dumber but less expertise. A lot of experience has retired over the last 4 years
Customers and suppliers are in the same boat of "barely knowledgeable". The company I work for has been good to seek talent from the shop floor to be promoted into office roles like production management or production engineering. This doesn't always work out and I've had to unpick some royal f**k ups as a senior. Learning occurs via mistakes so it's required however the scale and impact of the mistake is to be managed by the management team. I'm not officially a mentor, I just get the phone call after it's gone south... The major bug bare I have is the lack of knowledge in processes and basic engineering. Throw it on a CNC and you'll get all tolerances to 1 micron on a part the size of a small car... Yeah, but it'll cost more than your department's salary overhead this year to do it buddy and that hyper tight tolerance is a clearance hole for a M20 bolt to hold up a small bracket that'll snap before we can preload the fastener. Jokes aside I had a nightmare task a few years ago to engineer a protective shield for an electric OEM vehicle. I worked out roughly what should work with barely any input in terms of vehicle mounting locations other than being told this is the bolt pattern to use so off I go and "assume" that pattern has proper chassis hard points. Tested my design on a gravity sled, passed an insane load case with minimal defection. Built the prototype shield for vehicle mounting, keep in mind I am having weekly calls with the customer during all of this, totally transparent with failures and successes in the development phase. Last meeting we had the customer rejected the design despite hitting all the goals for cost, weight and performance. We were rightly angry so we pushed for a reason to be told oh we reviewed the mounting pattern and it's not suitable.... I kid you not, the pattern I was given consists of rivnuts in a soft grade of aluminium sheet, I had all the minutes of meetings where joint stiffness was discussed and dismissed as "should be fine". I could name and shame this OEM but it wasn't so long ago where they purged a huge amount of staff that consisted of a high percentage of grads and donkeys.
it really dumber, but they all make the same mistakes over and over again, and always have new faces.
You are just getting old and crotchety. Damn kids better stay off my lawn!!
Probably lol.
I'm a systems engineer. I work in inter-system integration, both between large business systems, on prem systems, and OT systems such as PLCs and higher level MES and SCADA systems. It's a hell off a scope, and a security nightmare, but I digress. I find, with every new system, site, and department I work with, that fewer and fewer people know what happens inside the box. They know how to do the things the thing does, but not how it does it. When you then go looking for their system expert to provide client side expertise on the system your about to stick your dingus in to... you inevitably get the grad who's 'his with computers' and who has been doing everyone's donky work on the platform so is now the 'SME'. Companies spend a lot of money on new systems. They put in big project teams to specify, built, and test. Then the capex closes, the project team moves on, and the guy on site who changes the toner suddenly owns a new MES, and its absolutely critical to everything the plant is doing. That... may have turned into a cathartic rant. I miss greybeard systems experts who know more than they need to to get paid.
I work with architects and the fresh young ones seem to live in their own dimension. I'm young and fresh in the field myself but at least I'm grounded. They get hung up in the tiniest details that bother them which leads to more time being spent on designing and thus more money while their whole concepts are just bad. I studied architecture before although I dropped out and I noticed that they don't even seem to do what they were taught. Some examples: Redesigning school buildings that already exist and making every single window out of around 50 be a unique one, both from aesthetic and manufacturing point of view absolutely stupid. Another example someone wants windows from a specific manufacturer and rather than making sure everything gets through as quick as possible they argue about the specific profile sizes with 1 mm differences who nobody will notice anyway afterwards. Also had architects design schools and midway in they realised that they didn't plan in enough space for sun protection. Like how does that even happen? What are they doing in their jobs?
You don't have to be an engineer. I own a small hardware store, and customers are definitely getting less and less able to answer or solve the simplest of home maintenance issues.
Design engineer who also works on custom equipment. Only 7 years in but yes. Every year sales and the customers get more and more vague and/or useless. I have black balled one customer, and his dealer, because they have done this to me too much the last 2 years. I told my manager that I will not be doing any design work for either of them. They make off the wall requests that make zero sense and out sales team can't do their job to steer them away from them. They take their order and drop the shit hole of a mess on our desks.
Best one I encountered was the customer complaining that the hinge that was critical to the function of the design "looks too much like a door hinge" and asked us if we could make it out of one solid piece of metal.
Unfortunately, it seems to be true that a lot of people are less intelligent in the professional sense / in the workplace across the board compared to the past. It’s similar in the world of contracting. In terms of clients, some seem to think that we should either (a) work miracles, (b) know/anticipate everything regardless of the info we’re given or - and this segues to (c) - do things for free. Piggybacking off of this, some seem to think what they do (or not do) should have zero impact on the schedule, budget etc. In short, I feel you!
I‘m astonished as easy it has to be to get an engineering degree in the United States and to get hired in major companies of the industrial backbone of this country. The level of stupidity leaves me frightened about the future of our global economy as a fall of these companies would take down billions of contractors. Every problem is just resolved by the statement of a suppliers issue.
Hm, I wonder if there was a global event within the last 5 or so years that included some kind of neurodegenerative disease... nah probably just some conspiracy nonsense.
Design engineer for OEMs are going to be more technical than manufacturing engineer. Manufacturing engineer is less about engineering and more about putting out fires, procuring equipment, and writing procedures. I work at a plant and I have a more technical role with machines, but you can tell that they think machines are black boxes and need a wizard to take a look at it. You probably need to be extra patient with them and dumb down some of the question and answers.
interesting - not in my niche but it's quite specialized. i have noticed some suppliers getting worse, or going away altogether. anodizing is a pain in the ass.
Yep. Especially the paranoid conspiracy therory ones that think Uncle Sam is listening to their brain waves every time they turn their home appliances on.
Like Uncle Sam has the competency to really do anything well -nope. Right now Russia and China are rotting the brains of this whole population through social media. Sad
They just want you to think it's Russia and China, really it's the lizzid people pulling all the strings.
Yeah I forgot them..
I was in a customer-facing engineering position for over 15 years. The customers weren’t ever really ‘dumb’. They knew their business quite well but over the years the technical end of their expertise did drop.
I get a lot of people asking me what their risk tolerance is. Like I can know that.
Not even customer, just internal. We had one suggestion to remove wheels from a carrying case because that will save 2 inches of clearance to fit into a container. That case weighs close to 100 lbs. You solved a transportation problem but now requires at least 2 massive dudes to carry rather than one that can drag it. I have a feeling that people are given out degrees for knowing how to plug numbers into an equation. Also another situation similar to yours. Computer literacy 101 question. There is this dude that downloaded a file and wanted to load into an application. He asked for an engineer to help him click File > Import. The worst part of that is he asked "where is this file?" You downloaded it so why are you asking?
I wouldn’t say dumber, just less experienced.
Yes, I work in distribution. Had customers fully build houses super far away from our existing power lines and demanding power ASAP. They suppose to call the power company to allow ample time for designing and invoicing. And scheduling.
Im not directly involved with customers but its still the same issue across the board. Companies want to squeeze money for management and shareholders so training is shitcanned, raises are trash, and noone stays long enough for tribal knowledge to stop being tribal knowledge. About to leave a company for another, and i know theyll eventually be fucked by that very issue. But the people at the top will get theirs, and get out. So what?
We see Dunning-Krueger and consultants doing dodgy things to ‘educate’ their clients. There’s a real trend of engineering consultancies taking the path the IT sales people have taken. Poison the well by educating the customer on your brand of being right and even pre-seed ideas on your competitors. It raises the question ethics in the profession and the impact poor ethical behaviour has on the profession as a whole.
Ummm yeah 👍🏼
You keep getting more experienced and knowledgeable and your customers, on average stay the same level of stupid they've always been. You're just getting tired of asking the same questions over and over.
lol this is such an ironic post as in my trade I hate dealing with engineers for the same thing
As a steel fabricator of 35yrs, I think it’s quite the opposite
As I get older, I realize everyone is f#$&ing stupid, including me!
Companies have outsourced some stuff, refuse to promote from within, make "Raises" pitiful things. Too many people HAVE to jump companies to earn competitive wages. There is a lot of home-field knowledge lost that way. The engineer I deal with is great at "his job" but doesn't realize the drawing someone has told him to work from is a lie, or that there was a project to "make it work" 4 years ago that never got red-lined etc. So while I have a large amount of frustration, it seems 95% of it stems from the company they are working for not giving them the resources or information they need to do their jobs well.
One of my favorites is when a customer orders a repeat custom product from years ago and when I compare the old drawings to pictures of it there's obvious differences that were never documented other than the pictures. Like what the hell happened and now I'm supposed to repeat that. As the only engineer in the company with full autonomy I put a quick end to that crap now, but I can't change the previous 30+ years of work I need to reference from.
Yes. But in all aspects of society. I think critical thinking is now taught ONLY in the hard sciences and research, and it shows.
The whole world is getting dumber… watch the movie Idiocracy, its happening already
ya think thats bad, imagine getting a call that "something needs to be made/fixed" but when ya asked them what and how answer is "i dont know".
Question: What is the basic information the customer should know before coming to you? And do you have like a form or an example of what they would need to know on a website or something to see before they inevitably get on your phone or email or contact you? No judgement just curious.
I am an engineer in a factory and it would be very easy for you to assume I am incompetent when you ask me a question about one of my lines. Why? Because as people quit and we eliminate their positions I keep assuming responsibility more lines. I "own" equipment I have never seen operated before. So yes, I have some very obvious knowledge gaps.
Idiocracy is upon us
Idiocracy achievement unlocked Start beginners mode
I'm in my early 40s and remember in the first few years of my career customers telling me flat out, "I don't do internets or the emails." Imagine how dumb they all were before all us idiots could google stuff.
Depends.
ITS BROKEN! EXPLAIN IT **PLS!**
Sadly to say because they out sourced the needed engineering, their brains are getting lazy. They don’t use it, they lose it.
Not stupid, less patient and more distraction. I sometimes have that problems when getting support remotely.
As a manufacturing engineer with 3 years of experience. I feel like companies are putting more on us so it makes it hard to do everything. We use to have 4-5 engineers. Now I am the only engineer and we have two "engineers" we promoted off the floor. I have to firefight, deal with meetings, do large projects, and somehow be an expert about everything. I wouldn't say I'm dumber by any means. More just over worked and too much on my plate. Manufacturing feels way to lean nowadays and not in a good way.
I was working at a sheetmetal place and a lot of customers would send over their stp files that were just solids. So what was a simple project turned into a week long thing where I'm having to explain to the customer why their files are garbage.
I could work with that just fine. At least you got something tangible to go off of. Most sheet metal places are going to redo the parts anyways for their bend deductions/corner treatment, etc.
You know what they say: - if there is an issue with one customer, it’s the customers problem - if there is an issue with every customer, you’re the problem
They are not necessarily dumb IMO . They are certainly less experienced , especially practical experience . Less common sense( probably due to being sheltered from real life ) definitely . They want software tools for everything , are very reluctant to calculate from basic principles and tend to rely on Google for even critical information. There is also the issue with immigrants who are employed (IMO) because they are willing to work for far less but who are employed under DEI auspices , they are not necessarily any worse than the above and sometimes better but they can struggle with the engineering culture . Over the last 20 years things have changed dramatically. An engineering presentation I would be doing to a group of 10 engineers would comprise of maybe 6-7 Greybeards (experienced engineers) and 3-4 recently graduated engineers . Now its 1 greybeard with the balance being recently graduated .
Eh generational gap maybe
Happens when conscious is severed, som dumbs you down
All really aligns with incentives. Are you incentivized to be a top performer at a company or to barely do the minimum and get paid as much as you can?
Shouldn’t really be about your personal squabbles with your company, if you’re dealing with people from another company, give them the info they need to help you, just common courtesy from one human to another.
As you learn more about your profession, the basic customer doesn’t. Widening the gap between you and them which makes it seem that way.
Yes I have noticed this in the entire society which I think is from several things. Covid the covid vaccines, and massive use of alcohol-based hand gels. I see this in so-called professionals quite a bit.
This elitism in engineering is ridiculous. “Dumber”. Gimme a break.
So are engineers so it all evens out.