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Common Complaints of CAD Designers and their Solutions
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Common Complaints of CAD Designers and their Solutions

September 27, 2018

 

Everyone has complaints. Where do I start? I am not paid enough, my working hours are too long, the deadlines have been too tight. Well, lets delve into the world of CAD designing.

I would have referred to a person who prepares technical plans and drawings, while being directed in doing so by an engineer or architect, as a CAD draftsman(from Wikipedia definition). To be more politically correct, you can use ‘CAD draftsperson’, but for convenience, let’s use CAD designer.

A CAD designer has many complaints; some physical, some metaphorical or rhetorical. It all depends on how you view it. Of course a CAD designer has a life outside work and they can have numerous complaints emanating from elsewhere, but this article is mainly addressing workplace complaints.

Complaint #1: About Comfort

chair

Let’s start with the chair. Physical posture is that crucial when drafting with CAD. A CAD designer may sit for as long as 10 hours, and sometimes even more, especially on a busy workweek. This means the chair has to be very comfortable, properly adjusted, supportive to the person’s lower back and good quality if it can survive in such a work place for a reasonable time.

Failure to adhere to all these standards for a chair will definitely lead to severe complaints of discomfort. Obviously, a high quality chair has a high price to pay for. Often the management may decide to buy a quality chair for only that designer who has persistently complained for some long time due to budget constraints.

Yeah, some people are not very effective when it comes to complaining and the management may just assume that everybody else is comfortable except the effective complainer. When the new chair comes, the owner has another new complaint. The seat keeps disappearing!

Everyone wants to use the comfortable seat when the owner is not around. Sometimes the seat owner arrives at work, and spends some time trying to locate the chair, only to find it in another office.

There will be more complaints too by every other designer or worker in the office after comparing what chair they use with the new comfortable chair. Eventually the company will have to procure good quality chairs for all staff,and it makes business sense from many angles like more healthy designers, higher productivity and so forth.

Complaint #2: About Hardware/Software

No piece of software or hardware is ever perfect, and there are so many aspects of quality of different software and hardware depending on the company’s requirements of its CAD projects.

Everybody likes speed. The need for a faster PC or laptop is always a bone of contention for most workers including CAD designers. There is always a faster machine out there and that has been the case since the first computer was brought to the workplace.

The company needs to do a thorough research before embarking on any procurement of PCs, laptop or software. The way these things are marketed is what adds to the contention. Every marketer wants you to feel that there is a better machine or software out there than what you already have and these can lead to catastrophic increase in hardware/software costs for the company.

Complaint #3: About Productivity

Everyone aspires to do better than they are doing. Productivity complaints mostly are directed to the CAD manager, from outside the design team and, surprisingly, can come from the CAD designers themselves. From the CAD designers, the complaint is disguised as an aspiration of some members who are always of the view that the team can be made more productive.

Productivity has a lot of gains to the team and to the organization. There are various ways to increase productivity by motivating team members to encourage individual performance which leads to increase in the team’s productivity.

Conclusion

This article only touches the surface and its possible to get an endless list of complaints. The bottom line is that every complaint should be handled by its merits. Some complaints are very hidden in general talk or behaviour. They may just pass as mere snide comments but resolving them could be very crucial in moving the team forward.

Please share your view (including complaints) about this topic and/or blog in the comment section.

Written by John Macharia.

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