A Carton of advice, part 1
While researching an upcoming article, I ran across Bill Carton, an engineer with over 30 years experience in ATE design and customer support. He’s compiled sixteen pieces of advice on troubleshooting and fixing almost anything. Bill gave me his permission to post them. I’ll start here and post them from time to time, in no particular order.
Never give up, unless forced to by economics
There are no mysteries unless you give up. Everything has a root cause. It may not be economic to run all possible tests to discover the ultimate root cause, but problems can and do have a solution, even if it’s a compromise. Throwing out, discarding, or recycling an item because it can’t be fixed is ultimately an economic decision, not a technical one. A corollary is that designers who design items to not be maintained easily are under orders from management, because engineering school teaches the students to approach projects with open minds, unless outside constraints are imposed.
Economics limits everything, doesn’t it?
Bill Carton commented:
Thanks, Martin - for starting to post these up. I got the idea for a distilled set of "rules" like this from Bob Parsons, founder and CEO of godaddy.com. His list of rules for success in business and life in general is posted on his own blog site at bobparsons-dot-me
As usual, each of the high level points is the result of observing and participating in many incidents, projects, and technical disasters all of us can identify with. Enjoy!
