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Being an engineer means mastering your production tool. For everything to do with physical production, you need to be close to the means of production to gather essential information on quality, capacity, operator feedback (machine and quality operators are invaluable sources of information.), etc.

Most information is not digital or hardly digitizable.

I don't completely agree with the article's classification of ARM as a hardware company. ARM produces VHDL and resells licenses, but does not produce any chips. It's closer to a software company than a TSMC.

I'd go one further and say you have to be at least a journeyman in whatever tools your process is using.

The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day.

We could discuss this at length, but I completely share your point of view. Anyone can design a part that's impossible to produce.

The real added value is knowing how something is actually going to be made, in how many stages, with what tools, what controls will be carried out, with what tools, what the acceptance and rejection criteria are, and how these criteria have been determined, are essential points.

> The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day.

I remember, in a CNC programming class, the instructor calling out one of the students on a lathe program: "One millimeter increments?! What material do you think you are using? Styrofoam?!".

That class is where I feel in love with the ASR-33 teletype and its cadenced hum. It was punching the tapes we feed into the CNC machines. I wish I could have bought that machine when it was retired not too long after my class.

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For a while, we had the "maker movement" and "maker spaces", and people were learning that stuff. But that all tanked when TechShop went bankrupt.

There are still maker spaces around, but most of them are now more into sewing, paper folding, and hot glue than CNC machining. Few go beyond a 3D printer. The ones that do tend to have some kind of subsidy from a larger educational institution.

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What about using simulation(or estimation using software) to understand the manufacturing process well enough to design for it, without being in the factory?
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