Posts by Anonymous Custard 2797 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008
Arguably though, when they're ready to fly solo, they are no longer trainees...
The key point is enough supervision to understand properly when they reach that point, and not rushing it.
That latter one of course being an alien concept to the beancounters and general manglement sometimes, who only see headcount and not knowledge or experience (let alone capability and competence).
95% I agree with you (and 100% if the manglement are also self-aggrandizing and/or a moron).
But you do get the occasional gem of a manager who knows what they don't know, are comfortable that you know more than them on the subject and will support and facilitate you doing your work.
I had a boss a while back who fitted that category, and was happy for me to use him as a sounding board to think things through by explaining it to him, which often helped me sort things in my mind too (there's no better way to be sure you know and understand something fully than to have to explain it to someone else).
Plus he may not have had deep technical skills, but he did have decent common sense and a logical way of thinking, meaning he'd often ask not-so-technical questions that again made you stop and think or reconsider how you'd approached the problem. Often got over the old "not seeing the wood for the trees" scenarios, or when you'd got too focussed on a given possible solution and had missed something else or a test that should be done.
If you luck onto one of them, hang onto them for dear life...
Read the life story of Wally Funk on that subject.
It's right up there with any of the men for heroism and pioneer spirit. And was wonderful that she finally got to space (albeit suborbital via Blue Origin) a few years back.
Perhaps they could one-up the others by claiming that Brains was named after them...
Therein lies a whole other story...
I recently digitised my old copies of Thunderbirds (plus Stingray and Captain Scarlet) and am currently working through them and enjoying it very much.
Must also rewatch The Right Stuff, haven't seen that in years. Great film, if a bit long to fit into daily life.
I would say reviving my youth, but both those series, and indeed all the space launches bar the final two Apollo missions were before I was born (for Apollo 16, I was a whole 2 days old when it launched).
I always thought it was a nice touch that they also got subtly honoured by their names being used in Thunderbirds.
At least for 5 of them anyway, maybe Wally and Deke aren't quite heroic enough sounding names, despite the achievements of their real-life counterparts...
(and to forestall the question, Gus Grissom's actual first name was Virgil, Gus was his nickname).
@I ain't Spartacus - be careful what you wish for. Not singing, but asking, which in Shatner's case is probably close enough.
https://twitter.com/williamshatner/status/1181940779826106368
Although if you search "william shatner singing never gonna give you up" on Google, the first video suggestion is ironically appropriate...
I had something along similar lines, but more mechanical.
Coming out of uni, did the usual milk round which included an interview with Rolls Royce in Derby (aerospace engines).
Turned up and the morning was a tour followed by an "engineering test" due to last an hour. So I sits down and looks at this, and it's stuff like here is a train of gears, if i turn the first one clockwise, which way will various others in the sequence turn? They did try to throw a curve-ball or two in there (for example 3 gears meshed together in a triangle - the answer being none of them can turn).
So I'm there thinking "these guys make the engines that keep planes flying and they give tests like this?", but I look around at my fellow candidates and they all seem to be struggling or just looking dazed and confused. it was the weirdest experience I've had in such a situation. Especially given I think I finished the test in 20 minutes, then had the invigilator sit there looking at me and wondering what to do with me for the next half hour or so.
Anyway I finish the day up and a few days later I get a letter starting "Congratulations. When you start with Rolls Royce...".
As in I've passed the interview, and they seem to be just assuming I'm going to take the job because they'd offered it to me.
In fact they were one of four possibilities I had, and that letter combined with that test immediately put them at the bottom of the heap.
I ended up with offers from all four, and the chosen one is still my employer to this day, over a quarter century later...
In my quarter-century here I've seen at least 3 HR managers/directors depart, and at least two of those were during rounds of redundancy (the third being announced around 3 days after she departed, with no prior warning or announcement to the rest of us).
Make of these what you will...
The end of Air Force One also springs to mind, for those who prefer aircraft to boats...
Yup, as I often say when I'm teaching some of our new recruits on troubleshooting, there's never been an investigative tool or procedure produced which is better than the mk 1 eyeball.
It's amazing how often we get called in by customers to downed machines that have been that way for days (or even weeks) and they've done all their meetings, model based problem solving, devising of tests to run and analysis of data etc in nice cosy meeting rooms and have never actually ventured into the cleanroom (for background, I work for a semiconductor equipment maker) and looked at the damn thing.
Then you walk in there, take one look and have a "there's your problem" moment (to quote Adam Savage) when you see something on the floor or hanging off that shouldn't be...
We have something very similar here, although in our case with travel.
Before there were a couple of part time ladies who handled it all for us, we just told them what we want and they valiantly fought with Concur and various travel sites and got it done.
Both more than worth their weight in gold for what they did, but certainly not paid that much or indeed anywhere near what they were worth.
Then bean-counter central (who never travel anywhere) decided it would be a good idea to get rid of them and make us all do our own travel arrangements etc.
So now we all have to spend 3-5x as long as our former travel gurus did as we don't know the systems as well as they did (and we're really getting to loath them as well), not to mention our hourly pay rate is probably also somewhere between 2-10x what they were originally on I would estimate (given this rule applies all the way up to director and VP level for self-booking).
Now quite where is the economy or the job satisfaction here again, especially given I spent more time travelling and out of the country last year than in it?
Not only the lowest common denominator of hardware, but also in the range of common usage scenarios.
We had something recently here which when rolled out royally screwed up everyone working in the field.
Everything had been "tested" of course before roll-out, but always from the comfort and safety of the company LAN when sat in a cosy office.
But when run on-site with the customer breathing down your neck and access only via VPN into the mothership network, the less than optimal speed and other under-the-hood differences between the connection methods were enough to completely screw up the remote users.
And given all this was actually aimed primarily at field usage, there were some interesting questions asked at the post mortem as to why it hadn't actually been field-tried before release...
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