You are fired!

This blog entry will be about something I don’t like in my organization managers… well… Honestly, it is hard to find what I do like in them.

Anyway…

This week one of my colleague came to me and complained about his boss. He said, that the boss told him, that: “you can’t do programming well enough so there will no place for you anymore”. Which is, of course, natural when You hire a coder. Except that this colleague wasn’t hired as a coder. He was hired as an electronic designer who might do some minor coding job. Plus he was never told by this boss to even try to learn coding and gather the missing skills.

Not mentioning that the company never ever attempted to provide any training. Absolutely any, and not only in the coding area, in which he really needs it, but also in other matters. The company also refused to gain profits from his experience in production automation, PCB design using top level tools and etc.

So, maybe, he will be fired.

Very alike, some months ago, I did mention to the company director that some guy involved in quality critical operations at the production floor is not performing as well as he should. He simply has just a year or so before he can retire and he is no longer ambitious to be the best.

Note: from reading of all my blog posts You might have already notice that if I am saying: “he isn’t doing good job” this may mean, that he is keeping quite a high standard. My expectations are set, You know, absurdly high.

This director said: “Let’s fire him”. Which I opposed and decided never to say anything anymore to that director about personnel engagement in work. That old guy is practically the only person who knows how to tune that problematic product and how to fix production problems. Even I, who designed it, am not that capable. And certainly not that quick.

Firing them is a good solution

In an ideal world, when Your company is ideal and there are ideal workers waiting in front of the factory for hiring it is a good idea. You do replace broken tool with a new one, and You are happy.

Tools do keep breaking

I do own a small Chinese milling machine. It is made of cast steel, cast alloys and in generic is looking quite robust. Of course, being Chinese and within my household budget for “toys for big boys”, its quality and design are inferior.

It is however advertised as capable of milling steel, so this is what I am using it for.

Note: After buying this machine I will never ever again believe in absolutely any word written in Chinese product specification.

Anyway, I did mill the steel.

Until the milling bit broke at first pass.

So I got next one and after few passes later it also broke.

So I got next one, reduced milling parameters from 1 mm deep 2mm high cut to 0.5 x 2mm… and it broke again.

Note: A small clunky communist made milling machine form about 1970 can mill without a problem 5 x 10mm cut in one pass using 12mm milling bit.

I did not got next one because I was out of spare ones.

Now please think a bit about following question: Were my tools bad?

Bad tools, bad!

Those tools surely broke well below their declared milling parameters.

So I went to a colleague at production floor and asked about higher class milling bits. He told me that if HSS steel chipped off at those milling parameters then some better, harder, higher class milling bits will just explode and scatter around. HSS steel (HSS stands from “High Speed Hardened Steel”) is relatively soft while better tools are crazy brittle.

Close inspection and testing of the machine have shown that “stiff & rigid” are words which never were even in the vicinity of it. Even tough it looks like quite a stiff chunk of steel it is in fact so badly designed, that it is flexing and bending at numerous critical points. And with machine which bends You can’t do any serious job. It will vibrate, bounce off from milled stock and hit it hard when bouncing back. The overall stiffness of this machine is close to what I can hold in my hand. Yep, I tried to get a grip on how large milling forces are by holding a stock in hand during 0.2 x 2mm milling which was the practical limit of this machine.

Note: Throwing away this machine is out of budget.

What did I do later? Did I thrown away my bits and got better?

Fixing the machine

What I did it was to buy a 30kg block of concrete, the bag of M50 cement, the 1kg bag of small steel nails with large heads. I did bent those nails into Z shape and mixed the concrete with them to get it “reinforced”. Then used it to fill absolutely every empty space in the machine body. Almost everywhere I could get. Then I bolted this machine to the slab of concrete through some vibration dampeners tightening everything through the wet concrete.

The result isn’t the best, but machine certainly vibrates less and is visibly stiffer. Adding mass to some moving parts (even through dampers) softens resonances and moves them towards low frequencies. As with 5000…15000 rmp four blades milling bit any resonance between 300….1000Hz is a killer moving it towards 100 Hz or lower makes things much better. On the downside adding concrete made it also stiffer what moved resonant frequency up, but due to greater stiffness lowered the amplitude of oscillations.

In simple terms: I did fix the machine.

And tools did stop breaking.

So… fire them?

Neither that boss nor director stopped to think why those employee do not perform at their best.

The electronic designer needs to be moved into electronics design. The company needs to provide him with better tools (we use PADs which is a total crap when compared with Altium). The company needs to let him do his job and needs to realize that his experience is not ours experience. The company needs to realize that that guy was hired because he was bringing experience from other companies, and not because he was a blank piece of paper which awaits to be filled with our experience.

Instead there are expectations that he will guess what he needs to learn, that he will learn it without being paid using own resources and that he will not share his unique expertise.

With that approach You will end up equally good with hiring cooks and cleaners as designers and coders.

The production floor employee on the other hand was under a growing pressure for deadlines and amount of production he had to make. There was zero promotion for quality, zero positive stimulus for reporting problems and zero stimulus for self development. Even more, the more problems You reported, the worse You looked. If this guy would like to keep up with my expectations of quality and engagement he would be yelled at.

He was also seeing that even tough he will soon retire the management did not care to make him to pass his unique experience to anyone. This is especially emotionally painful message. It is like if they would simply slap him in the face and said: “Your entire life (he spend more than 30 years at this factory) is worth a crap and we are happy to throw it away”

Summary

The God (or a Satan in my case) gave You the brain. Use that gift. Think.

I won’t say, that there are no cases when employees are lazy, dumb, dangerous idiots.

Notice, I did not say: incompetent. Nor slow. Incompetence means lack of training. Slowness means lack of training, experience and tools. Lack of engagement means that You have some de-motivating procedures in action. Lack of creativity means that…. and this… and that…. and….

Think about it. In my case my milling tools were good. It was the machine what was broken and needed and modifications. Event tough it looked good.

What about Your machine?.