[KenWittlief]

mistakes (or the proper engineering term: bugs) is something you will deal with for the rest of your life if you are an engineer.

You have to develop a new way of thinking:

1. the only way you can completely avoid making any mistakes is to do nothing all the time. Unfortunately its hard to find someone to pay you money to do nothing.

2. When you are designing and fabricating a system, mistakes (bugs) are expected! This is why we have test equipment in the lab (lots of expensive test equipment), an acceptance test procedure that makes sure the system does everything it is suppose to do, and a manufacturing test procedure to make sure that each unit built is correctly fabricated and assembled.

3. Trying to create a design and assembly process in which no mistakes EVER make it out the door results in super-high quality AND super-high prices (think $900 AirForce Hammer)

4. when you are in the design phase you try to avoid mistakes (bugs), by having design reviews and checklists for each step of the project.

5. after you assemble a prototype you try to FIND mistakes (bugs) by testing testing and more testing. At this point bugs are golden because finding them keeps defective product from going out the door, and it lets you go back and see where the bug was introduced in the design of the product, so you dont keep making the same mistakes over and over.

With all this said, the idea of making mistakes is very different to engineers than it is with most people. We dont attach our egos to our work. If we make a mistake its not because we are stupid, or not trying hard enough, or we dont know what we are doing

its because we are engineers, and engineers venture into unknown territory BOLDLY, doing things no one has ever done before.

BTW, a good example of this "new way of thinking" is what happens at design reviews. When we review another engineers work we NEVER say anything about the designer, only about the design. If you find a mistake you dont say "whoa, this is stupid, what were you thinking?" we say: this doesnt look right to me, I think you need something more like this......"

Once you contribute something to a design or fabrication, its not 'you' anymore, its the design, its the system. Personal performance reviews are separate, held behind closed doors with your manager, not infront of all your co-workers. An even then, a good engineering manager will never say "you dont seem to know what you are doing", or "you do a lot of stupid things". Performance reviews say focused on the quality of your work, and things you can do (training, etc) to improve your performance.