Walked into the shop where I started 15 years ago and I barely recognized the control panels

Back in '09 we were running these old Haas machines with CRT screens and manual tool setters, everything was slower but you really had to know your offsets by feel. Now they've got touchscreens and probes that do half the setup work for you, and I swear the new guys I trained don't even know what a tramp oil skimmer looks like. Is it just me or has the job gotten easier to start but harder to actually master?

2 comments

2 Comments

cora_perez1mo agoProlific Poster

You're making it sound like the sky is falling, but honestly every generation complains about the new guys. Back when I started driving, we had to read paper maps and now GPS does all that for us, doesn't mean nobody can find their way home when the signal drops. The real question is whether those guys actually want to learn the old school stuff or if they're happy letting the machine do the heavy lifting. Maybe the problem isn't the tech, its that shops stopped teaching the fundamentals alongside the new gear.

richard_west51mo ago

The old Haas CRT machines forced you to develop a SIXTH sense for chatter and deflection. Now these touchscreen systems mask all that feedback. The REAL problem is that digital readouts and auto-probing make a guy FEEL like he knows what he's doing when he actually has no clue about the physics underneath. What happens when the probe fails or the screen glitches out and you have to cut by ear again? That's a skill that's getting LOST.