Our days are numbered....

So how much of the stuff that I learned in college is needed in my current job?..... not much, except for 450, 395 and such.... those things teach you how to write good engineering reports and how to deal with people. Things are mostly new.

450 in my opinion was the closest thing to work..... I dont know about other groups, but our sponsors sucked and sometimes they don know what they were talking about. For example, they gave a requirement of 1 micron uncertainty for machining.... which looked so stupid, after witnessing how inaccurate the actual fixturing and machining process was.

I am experiencing the same thing currently.... people (aka boss or contractors) giving out wrong info and sometimes false hope. Sometimes the boss can make it sound so simple... oh there should be no problem, you could liase with bla and bla and bla..... contractors and their work ethics are stuff of legends.

Remember Netscape.... I read somewhere that they were pioneers in the internet world and the so called dot com bubble. They are considered geniuses, because they invented the browser, and without the browser, internet is not that groundbreaking and useful as it is today.

I find similarities between Netscape and my company, Komag. We make hard disks, not hard drives. We just make a component of the hard drive, and sell it to Seagate, WD etc. So, I can make sense of the fact that our company is thriving right now, even after filing chapter 11 just like 2 years ago. We could easily end up like Netscape. Microsoft decided to offer its own browser and killed netscape.... and IBM or WD can just decide to make their own hard disks.