Girls in STEM.

[OldBillParticipant]

Anonymous wrote:

We had 4 pairs of blue and 4 pairs of purple among the group and a circuit diagram from the service manual.

Grab your Fluke and start ringing!

Do not date. Do not impregnate. Do not co-habitate. Above all, do not marry. Reclaim and never again surrender your personal sovereignty.

[Anonymous 11]

Yep 😉

We could have replaced the entire harness, but it was too convoluted to remove as a whole so we snagged one connector end from a junker and spliced. It was done on purpose by GM.

[OldBillParticipant]

Anonymous wrote:

It was done on purpose by GM.

Exactly. They purposely design cars so they cannot be repaired easily or without specialized tools.

One of my more recent clients is a major cable/ISP company in the US. (I’ll just say their name rhymes with “bombast”.) The decades of mergers, buy-outs, and bankruptcies that industry went through to end up with a few mega-firms meant that my client ended up with an electronic repair center which had been in operation since the late 1970s.

The people their were sharp. They’d been saving their various corporate owners millions over the years by repairing all sorts of customer and in-house equipment. When I first visited, they were repairing HD video cameras for TV studios plus all sorts of routeing and satellite dish equipment. My client slowly narrowed their efforts down to out of warranty equipment only used by the customers, stuff like set top boxes, remotes, modems, and the like.

They had two shifts, maybe 100 people in total, and had an average throughput of over forty thousand repaired and/or refurbished set top boxes a month. When they’d been handling big ticket equipment, they’d “saved” their owners between 20 and 40 million USD a year. Even after being dialed back to lower cost consumer equipment, they were still saving millions a year thanks to the volume they handled.

Despite that, the cable company closed the repair center’s doors last spring. Why? Because the newer set to boxes weren’t designed to be repaired.

When I first visited, a tech could open a box and point to discrete components saying this is a power supply, this is a tuner, etc. Repairing problems caused by a power supply, tuner, etc., was then a matter of “plug & chug” with the suspect component itself being repaired or refurbished elsewhere at another time.

During my last visits, a tech could open a box and point to nothing that was discrete. There was no “power supply” or “tuner” or anything like that. Instead there were chips and QFNs and lots of other tiny components scattered across a single board which did the power supply, tuner, or other jobs.

The newer boxes were easier and faster to build thanks to fewer sub-assemblies. They were physically smaller too. Sadly, they’re were nearly impossible to repair in any economic sense so a 30+ year electronics repair center and all the people who worked there were no longer needed.

Do not date. Do not impregnate. Do not co-habitate. Above all, do not marry. Reclaim and never again surrender your personal sovereignty.

[narwhalParticipant]

Regarding the comment that Engineers like to tinker. I 100% agree with that. I actually have a mechanical engineering degree, but was never much of a tinker. I got the degree though because I could, and did what I was programmed to do. Once I started working in the field and realized I was the only one that wasn’t reading on the latest magazine article and such, I started looking at a career change.

In regards to women in STEM, I had a few friends over yesterday. Somehow the conversation turned to math and a female friend exclaimed that she hated algebra. “It so stupid, how can you have letters mixed with numbers!?” I couldn’t even respond that. This is why women would still be in grass huts without men.

I do have some women coworkers. Most of them are manageable to a point, however it usually false apart once they are given any management authority.

Ok. Then do it.

[Author]

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