Ah well, I'm not going to deliberately put things  on the forum that identify people places or events., but yes having users, either real ones, or dummy ones who you ask to  press the buttons in the wrong order, switch kit off by unplugging it suddenly or drop the small non captive parts into the long grass at A model or design review saves  a lot of expense later. It is cheaper to fix stuff on the drawings than it  is to modify it in production, than it is to do a recall after there are problems in service.
In that sense my inability to follow instructions in any given sequence more than a few times before boredom means I do not, is a very useful debugging skill. (' how do we get back from here ? How on earth did you get it into this state? I almost followed the instructions but I was thinking of something else ...)

I also think that part of any would be engineer's education should include some sort of field work, of the kind where it all goes horribly wrong. The reason I walk into meetings with pockets full of useful stuff like I'm about to do a Paul Daniels magic trick comes from lessons learnt  walking back the full length of the airtstrip to get a pen, or climbing back down something tall to get a pair of pliers or a cable tie or something. Designing assuming a single track to success is easy, planning to gracefully handle all the alternatives is generally not.

Actually my 'neurotypical' jibe also can be applied to some managerial types as well as the users !

And yes, almost nothing can be fixed in the manual, except perhaps liability, and even then only to a limited extent.

Mike

Ah well, I'm not going to deliberately put things  on the forum that identify people places or events., but yes having users, either real ones, or dummy ones who you ask to  press the buttons in the wrong order, switch kit off by unplugging it suddenly or drop the small non captive parts into the long grass at A model or design review saves  a lot of expense later. It is cheaper to fix stuff on the drawings than it  is to modify it in production, than it is to do a recall after there are problems in service.
In that sense my inability to follow instructions in any given sequence more than a few times before boredom means I do not, is a very useful debugging skill. (' how do we get back from here ? How on earth did you get it into this state? I almost followed the instructions but I was thinking of something else ...)

I also think that part of any would be engineer's education should include some sort of field work, of the kind where it all goes horribly wrong. The reason I walk into meetings with pockets full of useful stuff like I'm about to do a Paul Daniels magic trick comes from lessons learnt  walking back the full length of the airtstrip to get a pen, or climbing back down something tall to get a pair of pliers or a cable tie or something. Designing assuming a single track to success is easy, planning to gracefully handle all the alternatives is generally not.

Actually my 'neurotypical' jibe also can be applied to some managerial types as well as the users !

And yes, almost nothing can be fixed in the manual, except perhaps liability, and even then only to a limited extent.

Mike