[snip]
> Oh...and no of course I am not angry.  I suppose I am defending the engineer
> in that alot of us are painfully aware of the real world and that it does
> take a certain number of nanoseconds for data to move from one end of the
> board to the other, and sometimes, even that is too much.  I've yet to see a
> tech solve that problem, not saying they cannot, but its just not part of
> the job description.

As a customer engineer of IBM for 19 years, I was a plain mainframe and
all technician, fixing problems created by the plant real engineers, by
the customers, and also by the environment.  During all those years, I
submitted (to this IBM specific department) several suggestions of
circuit changes, via the regular IBM "Suggestion Plan"... some of those
suggestions were already implemented (by me) for months or years and
solved those problems definitively.  Some of them were approved and
implemented, some don't (mostly because the machine was old and do not
compensate to produce "Engineering Change paperwork").  The IBM
technical support groups, a high skilled technicians, called product
specialists, have also a job responsibility to be the interface between
the plant engineers and the field (technicians).  I never saw an IBM
machine that never suffered "Engineering Changes" in the field, just
like a software, all of them needs post production corrections.  Those
corrections could be developed by the plant engineering, or suggested by
the support group technicians or the field technicians. Here what counts
is just experience, not title or position.  Even that is not difficult
to see a plant engineer climbing his heels when receiving a simple field
technician suggestion... :)

Wagner