job thing, maybe

I like that attitude, John. I wrote test procedures at Microdyne, as well as built test fixtures. I wrote test software for the few automated test fixtures. I worked with Purchasing, Design, Assembly, our in house Cal Lab, or whoever was involved with the problem area to fix the problem, TODAY. I qualified new components and removed some long time OEMs from the supply chain. My official title was "Production Test tech" but that didn't stop me from doing whatever was needed to make sure our products were built right, and shipped on time. I faced down the new head of "Quality control" when the newest power supply vendor had severe quality problems. What they shipped looked nothing like the samples that were qualified for production. He wanted to wait from six months, to a full year to see "If it was a real problem". I told him to stay in his office, and dragged the head of production, the manufacturing engineers and the division president into the fight and got an immediate decision to return the badly built supplies to the OEM.

He didn't like me after that, but his plan to wait could have put us out of business. They fired him a few months later, after it became obvious that he was only concerned with the paperwork, and that it wqas ISO 9001 compliant.

We had already taken a quality hit from a high failure rate on Vicor dual output supplies built with their VI-260-IY modules for dual 5 VDC

I really miss that kind of work. 99% of the time it was a simple fix, and everyone was happy, but there is always that 1% where someone refuses to fix a problem.

Smile when you make those "Mikey" comments! There ARE things "Mickey" won't do. :)

A good test engineer doesn't have to BREAK anything. He just documents the problems as they happen. If he's REALLY good, he hands the engieer a list of fixes (with part numbers), instead of a list of bugs.

Sorreee! I know, Mikey doesn't do donkeys. ;-)

I wonder what a M-72 would do to a donkey? It was made to blow the tread off of a tank...

You have that right. And when the company/division finds one they will do damn well to hang onto her/him. (and break anyone who stands in the way)

Michael, I asked you a question about this in a new thread, "problems with Vicor VI-200 dc-dc modules?"

Sorry, I haven't been on line every day lately.