1) What do you like and dislike the most about working in this field?
2) Would you HONESTLY advise someone to start a career as a CMM Operator/Programmer?
Ill expand on a few things after what Chirs said..... ( not disagreeing with any of it !! )
Where you work is every thing. Having influence is everything. I was able to convince people that I needed to be brought in on new projects from day 1 so we can work thru print and tolerance issues at step 1 and not after the fact to be succesfull. I also had a background as a machinist in " implantable medical " and have a Y14.5 certification. Your just not stumping or bs'ing me on anything dimensional \ print reading \ GD&T. Background experience is everything in my opinion. Not being able to give feedback to manufacturing makes you look like you dont know what your talking about and no one will respect \ believe you. Being at a place where the inmates run the asylum and " thats how we always do it " you will want to jump in front of a train.... I inherited a system at a company that the CMM programming was done so poorly that it took10 years to convince the shop that the CMM can actually measure something correctly. Yeah, unfortunatley movement up the chain is what chris said above. To me its more of a move from technical work to being more of a lawyer \ paperwork shuffler \ document control guy. If thats you great, Im not a spec reader and I want to run from anything " paperwork " related.
Ill expand on a few things after what Chirs said..... ( not disagreeing with any of it !! )
Where you work is every thing. Having influence is everything. I was able to convince people that I needed to be brought in on new projects from day 1 so we can work thru print and tolerance issues at step 1 and not after the fact to be succesfull. I also had a background as a machinist in " implantable medical " and have a Y14.5 certification. Your just not stumping or bs'ing me on anything dimensional \ print reading \ GD&T. Background experience is everything in my opinion. Not being able to give feedback to manufacturing makes you look like you dont know what your talking about and no one will respect \ believe you. Being at a place where the inmates run the asylum and " thats how we always do it " you will want to jump in front of a train.... I inherited a system at a company that the CMM programming was done so poorly that it took10 years to convince the shop that the CMM can actually measure something correctly. Yeah, unfortunatley movement up the chain is what chris said above. To me its more of a move from technical work to being more of a lawyer \ paperwork shuffler \ document control guy. If thats you great, Im not a spec reader and I want to run from anything " paperwork " related.
As someone who is taking over for someone who didn't know how to program I feel you on this one. My boss said " Trust nothing " Great way to start. Its tedious work but for some reason I enjoy it. It's like solving a puzzle when you complete a program.
