Bittersweet:
My boss quit last week, leaving one of my co-workers to try to fill his shoes as a temporary liason with upper mgmt. That's fine, I like the guy.
However, my employer has been acting stupidly lately ever since we were purchased by a fortune 500 company.
I am a CNC programmer. I make the program instructions to make industrial robotic mills cut parts out of raw material. Not all industrial robots are created equally. Some have radically better functionality than others.
Recently, my employer has been trying OH so VERY hard to pretend that they are created equally, sending parts to have programs made for them, to run on machines those parts should NOT be made on. They *want* to use a uniform "machine availability" metric to chart their ability to take orders, when there are some things that simply shouldn't be done on certain kinds of machine.
For instance, cutting 3D lofted contoured parts on a leadwell 3-axis machine, with a crippled Fanuc OM controller sporting a "mighty" 49kb of ram. Yes. 49 KILOBYTES. These machines are quite old.
You have to understand: what COULD take 1 or 2 tool paths on a multi-axis mill, will take several dozen to do with a ballnosed tool on a 3 axis mill. Combine that with "teensy weensy allowed program size". I have spent a week and a half on a part that could have been done in less than 2 days, doing nothing but fighting the controller space limit.
The bittersweet: My co-worker who is filling the bigboy shoes until they can be properly filled said he will bring up the issue of inefficient programmer time use vs productivity gain for parts like this.
Maybe-- just maybe-- the insanity will finally stop, and these parts will go on the machines they are supposed to go on.
But I don't have very high hopes. Corporate imbeceils LOVE their metrics, and LOVE simplifying reality into simple numbers for their projections. They aren't terribly fond of gritty realities like these.