Strange Company rules and manipulations

[coppice]

But soldering has nothing to do with colour blindness.

Not so much these days, but it used to be annoying working next to someone colour blind. Every few minutes a resistor appeared under your nose with the words "what does that say?". 

[krish2487]

Not so much these days, but it used to be annoying working next to someone colour blind. Every few minutes a resistor appeared under your nose with the words "what does that say?". 

Resistors... Capacitors... pretty much anything that has color coded identification...

[EEEnthusiast]

I really forgot those through hole resistor days. Haven't used them for many years. That would be tricky for a colour blind guy...

[schmitt trigger]

I remember, back in the good 'ol thru hole days, a common mistake was confusing the 15 ohm brown-green-black resistor with a 1 Meg one brown-black-green.

Following the above rule, dyslexia impaired people should also not solder boards? 

[Ranayna]

Nowadays, those blue bodied metal film resistors are not really readable anyway. The contrast on those is so poor that if I use them, I measure them anyways.
Regarding other through-hole components, the only other still color coded component that I am aware of, are inductors...

I suspect in our case, that the rule comes from making cabling looms. We make custom cabling looms with 20 or more wires...
Those are of course tested, but when someone produces too many errors...

[T3sl4co1l]

Well, I do not support any immoral behaviour or acts by men or women. I was just trying to put a scientific explanation to the behaviour. If the posts seem offensive or in bad light, just grab a beer and chill...

Learn your history.  The same, ill-informed pseudo-scientific explanations have been used throughout history to justify raping, enslaving and killing entire classes of people, even for such wholly superficial attributes as skin color.

Churchill for example had some interesting things to say about your people (things that are unfit to quote here, I might add).  Would you be so careless as to prove him right?

Tim

[tooki]

Trying to get this back on topic

Recently a, in my opinion, very odd rule is being enforced in the office...

I should preface this with the information that I am in IT. Electronics is only a very (very) small niche of what we are doing. Mainly it is using Arduinos and similar to build cheap environment sensors and stuff like that. But also noteworthy is, that my company has also a large electronics department including pick and place machines and the whole shebang...

Anyway, the new rule is: If you are colorblind, you are not allowed to solder anymore. At all. As far as I know, this is a company-wide rule. This does not affect anyone in the IT department, but I have to wonder what blew up due to a soldering error 

Are such colorblind rules still common? Are they even allowed anymore?

I would think that the disability authorities would take a very negative view of such a rule. My hunch is that in most developed countries, that’d be illegal, since it’s a disability that can be overcome with reasonable effort (i.e. you can measure a resistor, or use SMD or those fancy Vishay ones with printed values, and tag cables; or you can have someone else do the color-sensitive part of the task). Barring soldering altogether seems kinda nutso to me.

Not so much these days, but it used to be annoying working next to someone colour blind. Every few minutes a resistor appeared under your nose with the words "what does that say?". 

Resistors... Capacitors... pretty much anything that has color coded identification...

Capacitors?!? Ummm, I don’t think they’ve made color-coded capacitors since something like the 1960s. Resistors and inductors are the only holdouts, and frankly I wish they’d quit it. As much as I enjoy the colorful bands from an aesthetic standpoint, they’re a PITA to use, especially on the dark body colors they use today, as Ranayna said.

Of course, one will encounter them in antiques, but that’s not what we are talking about in a production environment.

[ajb]

Trying to get this back on topic

Recently a, in my opinion, very odd rule is being enforced in the office...

I should preface this with the information that I am in IT. Electronics is only a very (very) small niche of what we are doing. Mainly it is using Arduinos and similar to build cheap environment sensors and stuff like that. But also noteworthy is, that my company has also a large electronics department including pick and place machines and the whole shebang...

Anyway, the new rule is: If you are colorblind, you are not allowed to solder anymore. At all. As far as I know, this is a company-wide rule. This does not affect anyone in the IT department, but I have to wonder what blew up due to a soldering error 

Are such colorblind rules still common? Are they even allowed anymore?

I could see this being the result of having a mixed leaded/lead free workload, if the company has decided to use color coding to identify tools and materials for one versus the other (if you're being really fastidious, you won't mix soldering tips between the two, for example).  That sounds like something that could be accommodated by a better choice of color or a different means of identification entirely, but  . 

[GreyWoolfe]

We also have the 90 day email rule.  My company deals with government entities here in the US, we don't provide goods/services to the regular populace.  There are all kinds of IP protections, HIPAA regulations, data storage rules, ad nauseum.  If there is any info in an email or an attachment I need, I save it either on my encrypted laptop hard drive or encrypted external drive.  We even use Aegis drives that require a password entered on the drive case keyboard to unlock and use. 

[Sal Ammoniac]

It's always some non-technical extrovert who decides the open plans are wonderful. They always buy into the BS buzzword "collaboration" too, I've come to hate that word.

They may say it promotes collaboration, but the real reason, in almost all cases, is to save money. Open plan layouts are cheaper than cubicles, and cubicles are WAY cheaper than real offices.

I hate open plan offices to the extent that I've turned down jobs at places that had them. I find cubicles barely tolerable, but the trend is to make them smaller and smaller and make the height of the partition walls lower and lower. I worked at one place where the cubicles were not much bigger than a phone booth.

[james_s]

It's very short sighted though, it doesn't save money to cheap out on office space if it hurts productivity of expensive engineers. I have met people who love the open layouts but they are artists and admin types who don't need the same sort of focus, I've yet to meet an engineer who likes it.

My hope is that working remotely will continue to gain acceptance. With all the tools we have today for collaborating online there is less and less advantage to being in the office every day. I think it should just be a standard perk for anyone whose job doesn't require that is in the office. It boosts productivity and employee satisfaction while being environmentally beneficial. On days I work from home I get an extra 2 hours of time I don't spend on the bus, I can split the difference and give my employer an extra hour of work while giving myself an extra hour of leisure time.

[EEEnthusiast]

Enclosed spaces provide for more concentration levels as the amount of visual and sound disturbances are minimised. You could set your own lighting levels as well. I think it comes down to the floor space requirement which comes at a premium. One can have an open office space of 6ft x 6ft and still not feel claustrophobic. But for a dedicated office with closed doors, you may need at least 8ft x 8ft of space, if not more. Almost double the floor space..

[AG6QR]

Another strange rule was to not allow female workers to stay beyond 8pm in the office, in order to avoid sexual harassment. However, they also enacted another policy to prevent gender discrimination in the office. These two are self contradictory.

No, there's no contradiction whatsoever.  Taken together, they simply imply that male workers must also be prohibited from staying at the office beyond 8pm.

Sorry boss, I'd love to help you with tomorrow's presentation to the executives, but it's 8 o'clock and rules are rules.

[james_s]

Enclosed spaces provide for more concentration levels as the amount of visual and sound disturbances are minimised. You could set your own lighting levels as well. I think it comes down to the floor space requirement which comes at a premium. One can have an open office space of 6ft x 6ft and still not feel claustrophobic. But for a dedicated office with closed doors, you may need at least 8ft x 8ft of space, if not more. Almost double the floor space..

I don't feel claustrophobic, quite the opposite actually, I feel intense discomfort when I'm out in the open in a big empty space, I'd much prefer to be holed up in a tiny little room. Much the same way cats tend to love those cozy little cubby beds.

[EEEnthusiast]

May be the companies should offer a choice of a dedicated office space vs open office to suit personal needs. After all, the cost to company for the rental space is only a fraction of the salary of engineers.

[Ranayna]

I am sitting in an open space. Our building has several separated floors designed for 30-something people.
Most of the time this works adequately well, even though my team (5, including me) sit at the entrance of the floor.
It works, because by now, many visual and sound "breaks" have been implemented, and we are generally allowed to use headphones with our own music.

But there are some areas where the workers are not allowed to use headphones, "because it looks bad" 

[tooki]

Enclosed spaces provide for more concentration levels as the amount of visual and sound disturbances are minimised. You could set your own lighting levels as well. I think it comes down to the floor space requirement which comes at a premium. One can have an open office space of 6ft x 6ft and still not feel claustrophobic. But for a dedicated office with closed doors, you may need at least 8ft x 8ft of space, if not more. Almost double the floor space..

Duh, nobody doesn’t understand that open plans are cheaper. Our point is that it’s a false economy to save a few hundred bucks a month on rent, at the expense of a few thousand bucks of productivity (and the employees’ sanity).

[tooki]

May be the companies should offer a choice of a dedicated office space vs open office to suit personal needs. After all, the cost to company for the rental space is only a fraction of the salary of engineers.

What fantasy land did you work in? LOL

Very few people actually want open floor plans for themselves. Heck, you see it all the time that the boss chooses them for everyone — and keeps a private office for themselves, since they “need” it...

[krish2487]

Capacitors?!? Ummm, I don’t think they’ve made color-coded capacitors since something like the 1960s. Resistors and inductors are the only holdouts, and frankly I wish they’d quit it. As much as I enjoy the colorful bands from an aesthetic standpoint, they’re a PITA to use, especially on the dark body colors they use today, as Ranayna said.

Of course, one will encounter them in antiques, but that’s not what we are talking about in a production environment.

I m sorry, I should have been more specific. I was referring to THT polyester and/or film capacitors. It was a fairly common occurrence to see capacitors with color  bands till a decade ago...

[tooki]

They definitely existed, but they most certainly were not common a decade ago. Or even 3 decades ago. They’d pretty much disappeared by the time I was born, and I just turned 40...

[Sal Ammoniac]

Some companies, such as Facebook, take open plan offices to the next level. In those companies, you don't even have a dedicated desk. You take whatever desk is available when you're there. I suppose companies do this because they think it saves even more money than open plan offices with dedicated desks for each employee.

[tooki]

Some companies, such as Facebook, take open plan offices to the next level. In those companies, you don't even have a dedicated desk. You take whatever desk is available when you're there. I suppose companies do this because they think it saves even more money than open plan offices with dedicated desks for each employee.

yyyyyyeah, I brought up hot-desking several days ago in reply #59.

[Someone]

But there are some areas where the workers are not allowed to use headphones, "because it looks bad" 

A rule I encountered at an employer:
No headphones allowed at any time.
Rationale: some people turn up the volume so loud they cannot hear the fire alarms (after someone claimed this was the reason they didn't evacuate)

[Circlotron]

[A rule I encountered at an employer:
No headphones allowed at any time.
Rationale: some people turn up the volume so loud they cannot hear the fire alarms (after someone claimed this was the reason they didn't evacuate)

At a place I worked at once.
They said no headphones for safety reasons, and that safety was the /*most*/ important thing.
Then they found that productivity dropped, so headphones were allowed again. 

[vk6zgo]

Enclosed spaces provide for more concentration levels as the amount of visual and sound disturbances are minimised. You could set your own lighting levels as well. I think it comes down to the floor space requirement which comes at a premium. One can have an open office space of 6ft x 6ft and still not feel claustrophobic. But for a dedicated office with closed doors, you may need at least 8ft x 8ft of space, if not more. Almost double the floor space..

Duh, nobody doesn’t understand that open plans are cheaper. Our point is that it’s a false economy to save a few hundred bucks a month on rent, at the expense of a few thousand bucks of productivity (and the employees’ sanity).

Companies do dumb stuff like this routinely.

When I worked in TV, I could replace 27" Broadcast monitor CRTs at $1200 "a pop", several times a year, without them turning a hair,
& "the biggie", -----------replace the Final tube in an NEC TV Transmitter, at $12,000! *
I had to get permission to spend Petty Cash, though!

*The PA tube price sounds horrendous, & there were cheaper suppliers, but the Boss ruled them out, due to longevity problems.
The ones we used lasted for many thousands of hours.