I have to disagree strongly here.
Experience has taught me that there is great value in being surrounded by
the most skilled and knowlegeable people that can be found. Wanting to keep
'em *stoopid*  (thanks for the great word Dwayne!) is a trait of many
managers who either feel challenged by intelligent people, or who only know
how to motivate people of lesser intelligence. (I guess there is also the
military - where "need to know' and stupidity are inexplicably combined.)
Managers with up to date management skills know how to prevent each one from
overstepping their bounds in potentially harmful ways while helping them
expand their horizons and enhancing the value of the organization.

The Gallup organization recently released the results of a 25 year survey
that included profiling of > 2 million people. I was originally trained and
worked as an Industrial Engineer  - during those years I learned to question
the many theories that were developed on this subject many were based on the
author's desires to succed or on emotional or shock appeal - but Gallup has
compiled their results into a huge unbiased set of observation based facts.
Overwhelmingly, the record shows the import of developing employees skills
as one of the most common traits of successful managers....

I want production people who understand more than they 'need to'. Many, many
times I have seen the poor slob who presses pins into boards or loads
pallets into solder machines all day long discover the real reason for some
inexplicable intermittent failure problem while a team of EE's ponders over
the same. Likewise, many production people have become either initiated
patent apps or become patent holders because they observed something with
more understanding than they were 'supposed to' have. What a shame it would
be to not have this kind of exchange in any organization....

C
> Personally, I don't really want a production person to know much, if
> anything about electronics. That will just encourage them to think
> about things they don't need to, like whether it's OK to substitute a
> part or not. That's the engineer's job. I want them to know how to
> follow documentation, build things per the documentation, question the
> documentation if it does look suspect and reject anything not built to
> spec. That doesn't require any electronics knowledge at all, but it
> does require common sense and good judgment.
>

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic:
[PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads