Johnson & Johnson medical device manufacturing defect

Generic reference to Tom's consulting role advising J&J on manufacturing-hiccup waivers — whether half-million-dollar lots could be saved or had to be scrapped. Used to illustrate the engineer-as-judgment-arbiter point.

This is where engineering is a lot different than just being a research scientist at MIT. They teach you how to be a research scientist as if that's what people do. Ninety or ninety-five percent of engineers are not what I call the wannabe scientists — they're people who actually go out trying to make something work and solve the problem, and trying to decide when something goes wrong what to do about it. I used to work for a division of Johnson & Johnson that made medical instruments. They'd have a manufacturing hiccup and they'd come to me and say, "Do we have to throw out all this half-million dollars worth of parts we made, or can we do a fix?" I'd have to help decide whether there was a fix or whether they had to throw it out. Sometimes I said, "Sorry, you've got a half million dollars worth of scrap." Sometimes I said, "No, they can do this, but you have to get into the details." You can't always write down equations for this, but you've got to be able to justify it.