London Banter - View Single Post

Tweed[_2_] · April 17th 21, 07:44 AM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london

Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 20:15:26 on Fri, 16 Apr
2021, remarked:
On 16/04/2021 19:27, Tweed wrote:
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 13:14:11 on Fri, 16 Apr
2021, Tweed remarked:

That looks like a pretty basic flaw that should have been found and fixed
long ago, particularly as it's happened before, in Ireland!

Or similar failure modes on the Comet aircraft. Don't they teach this on
the first week of engineering courses, any more?

It’s what happens as the result of “efficiency”. In days gone
by there
would be a core of long serving engineers in an organisation with the
corporate memory of what not to do again. These days it’s fashionable to
talk up changing jobs every few years and easing out the older experienced
staff because they are expensive. The modern practice is to claim that
everything can be captured in a specification or a standard. Unfortunately
that’s not the case....

Many outfits are doomed to keep on repeating the same mistakes because of
high staff turnover.

I agree that corporate memory is important, but proper engineers
are taught universal memory - which can then be applied to
whatever corporate they are working for this week.
It would make for an extremely long degree course to impart the
knowledge
learnt from a career.

Absolutely.

In technical areas corporate memory can be a judgement which is only
learnt by years of experience which cannot be learnt in the classroom
or from books and only by working with experienced elders can that
experience be retained. Sack those elders and that knowledge is lost
and can only be re-learnt.

I disagree. Those "elders" can be the people teaching in the classroom.

For example, you can teach how to weld aluminium, in the classroom (with
practicals) just as easily as have an older welder show you the ropes on
site.

That'll also help when one day you get a job at a place which requires
some aluminium welding, and they've never done it before (so no elders
with experience).

Corporate memory is fine in some situations (especially when repeating
some exercise where the right way has bee discovered by trial and error
in the past). In the classroom, however, one can be let into the secrets
of what's contained in the massed corporate memory of hundreds of
organisations.

It’s got nothing to do with passing on skills, which as you can say can be
taught. It’s got everything to do with judgments, balancing risks, taking
things into account that the inexperienced have failed to consider. At the
start of a career you don’t even know what you don’t know.

If your job is highly formulaic, eg accountancy, there’s probably not too
much requirement for corporate memory. But if it is engineering,
particularly branches that push the state of the art forwards, you do need
a decent mixture of the old and experienced and the young and enthusiastic,
the latter being needed so new approaches are considered.

The idea that an (decent) engineer is a unit of resource that can be freely
traded across an economy sounds fine to the graduates of MBA courses, but
crashes when faced with reality.