> I tried it here in the States
Yeah. But the people making flashlight parts today will be making nuclear power and aircraft parts in a few years — if they aren’t already doing that.
We know how many ‘counterfeit’ below spec parts are being made, and mostly installed, worldwide.
I’m hoping we learn now to specify — and check — what we want made for us.
My experience is that every person involved has to
— flag anything that looks funny, inside or outside their area of responsibility, and send a note about it to the QC person
— have a checklist of everything spec’ed and a box to initial and date when that person checks that item on that day
— have the QC person collect all those lists, collate them, and make sure whatever item nobody checked today, gets checked
— have a handful of samples, not just one
— be willing to say no.
Being willing to say no is the really big, hard part.
I’ve been the only person at several jobs whose job was to say “No, not good enough.”
You don’t want to be a people person loved by everyone and try to do quality control right.
But in many situations, “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.”
That’s what you have to be willing to hold out for. Not perfection, it’s not on the menu, but confidence it’s a good enough product.
(The folks doing GBs here have done better than that, sometimes much better than “good enough” — that’s why I hope for improvement (grin).)
Look at the fantastic, great products gotten out of the GBs lately. Yeah, imperfect. Yeah, the tricks you mention are how they screw up the product to save a penny when doing production runs.
And likely we’ll see the GB quality start to slip and be substituted — unless we watch it and keep making sure people know it’s happening.
Look at the DealMetic ZeusRay example. They could have owned the zoomie market, and now nobody’s buying their lights because they played the game to screw their customers.
Fast feedback — from a significant group — is the only leverage we have here. I think, sincerely, that better work will benefit everyone, and avoid meltdowns and crashes.
That’s different enough it might get us better results.
— ‘listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go’ — E.E. Cummings
— ‘work as if you live in the early days of a better world’ — Dennis Lee
— “It never hurts to ask nicely.” — mothers, everywhere
