CAD And Mouse

I’m midway in my career as an engineer and am the manager for a design and drafting department of about twenty engineers, designers, and drafters. I came up in the drafting board era and my drafters still work on drafting boards, but it is the mid-1980s when PCs and Computer Aided Design are emerging. I have enough budget authority that I can purchase a couple of PCs and basic CAD software without my boss’s approval. I can’t afford to send any of my people to formal training, but I’ve got some very sharp and motivated designers and drafters who are able to get the basics from tutorials — hard copy books back in those days.

Everything is going well until my boss finds out about what we are doing. He is a generation before me and is very skeptical of computers and CAD. He demands that I keep the drafters “on the boards” and have the designers and engineers share two PCs.

We play a cat and mouse game over the next couple of years of me building up my group’s CAD capability while having my boss still think the drafters are doing most of their work at drafting tables. In reality, we have gone almost exclusively to CAD. A couple of the older drafters still prefer pencils and drafting machines. This actually works to my advantage as my boss sees drafters doing manual drafting and he thinks he has won.

Then, my boss’s grandson starts engineering school. Manual drafting is not even offered as a subject. Everything is computers and CAD. Suddenly, CAD is the best thing since sliced bread. My boss authorizes PCs for everybody, CAD training for everybody, and a demand that we phase out manual drafting as soon as possible.

I never met the grandson, but it was fine with me. He accomplished in one year more than I was able to demonstrate by actual example in over three years. We put the drafting tables in storage, rearranged the work area so everyone had a dedicated PC, sent every designer and drafter to formal CAD training, and sent productivity through the roof.

My boss took credit for “pushing the designers and drafters into the modern age.” Whatever works.