Re: It doesn't look good for Tina the Tech Writer

["William Sherman" <bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com>]

ROFL.

A friend of mine related a story a few months ago. He works in the mining 
industry and they build multi-million dollar machines. Mining industry has 
safety requirements for everything and one mistake can get a company banned 
from a mine until everyone in the company has re-certified on the safety. 
One document is a commissioning manual that tells how to put it back 
together and get it running after it has been shipped in piece to a 
customer.

Manufacturing engineering decided they were better equipped (smarter) on how 
to do this, so one ME did just that. About 3 weeks before they were to 
deliver this one prototype, they all had a meeting to confirm documentation 
was ready. My friend watched the ME put up his document, a PowerPoint 
presentation full of pictures and little else.

After he was done, friend looked at the ME and told him "You'd better get 
your resume up to date, because if you send that to the customer, and even 
one person gets hurts, we are out of business." He then turned to the PM and 
told him, "You send that out, and you had better just give them the machine 
because it would be cheaper."

He said the PM was expectedly hot and turned to the Product Support manager 
to complain when the PS manager said, "He's right. That load of __ is 
worthless and the lawyers will eat us alive."


Engineers may understand how to design and build something, but they have 
still to learn how to deal with people in the real world and the legal 
ramifications their products incur.

A month later, that ME was gone in a layoff.


I bet Scott Adams doesn't include something like that in Tina's layoff 
story.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Hearn" <rhearn -at- central1 -dot- com>
Cc: "techwr-l" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2016 1:09 PM
Subject: RE: It doesn't look good for Tina the Tech Writer