Do Standards Ruin Your Job? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: David
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 12, 2012, 08:50:55 pm
content: Hi all, I have a rant.Why are standards so complicated, expensive and time-consuming?On a daily basis I have to work with European/British Standards and they are really becoming the bane of my life. It's getting to the point where the electronics is the easy part but 99% of my time is spent trying to show compliance and understanding what the standards want in the first place. I get the feeling that these standards are written by people with English Degrees and not engineering ones! They have a very annoying "legal" speech and are a nightmare to read. There are hardly ever any examples and are so open to interpretation that I have no idea how any two people come up with the same understanding.In my opinion they are so confusing that it completely detracts from the point of them in the first place?What are your experiences?Dave

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 12, 2012, 09:12:16 pm
content: Sounds like they are written by failed politicians

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 12, 2012, 10:49:30 pm
content: Quote from: David on August 12, 2012, 08:50:55 pmI deal with standards most of the time and find them well defined most of the time. I would agree that they are not necessarily "cookbook" type clear and concise but this is, in most cases, to give the maximum possible freedom to the designer.One thing must be understood up front of course, standards are legal documents first and foremost. They are not scientific papers and they are not design documentation.

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 12, 2012, 11:02:08 pm
content: Standards are made by committees. You can be a member of such a committee, too. I recommend you at least once follow the making of a standard or better yet take part in ons . It is interesting in a twisted way.Standards from many of the more reputable organizations are indeed written in a special language. The goal is to remove redundancy and to specify a particular aspect of the standard once, and only once. If you miss the definition of an aspect while reading, you are in trouble. The goal is also to avoid forward-references, if possible. I.e. at any point when reading a standard it should not be necessary to know what comes on the following pages to understand what is on the current page.That in turn requires you read the standard from the beginning, page by page and pay attention to details. No, wait, for many standards a prerequisite is knowing other standards. So you at least first refresh your knowledge about those. Reading standards is not something for kids with a short attention span.Typically you need to read a standard multiple times from front to back, checking and refining your notes at every pass.If you read a standard and think there is something subject to interpretation, then that might be. You might read a bad standard. Or you might think a standard does cover an aspect it simply doesn't. But it could well be you missed a definition and think you can now make things up.

author: olsenn
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 12:34:04 am
content: I have no standards!

author: IanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 12:50:11 am
content: I suppose one must be more specific about what standards are being talked about?In the mechanical engineering and control engineering industries various standards may also be known as design codes. Sometimes they may be very complicated (e.g. the design codes for pressure vessels), but generally they are written by engineers and they do provide a very detailed and exact design procedure. Far from ruining your job, they may make your job safer and more predictable. For instance, if you have a design that can be verified as conforming to a recognized design code then you have a large degree of legal protection should anything go wrong.So in the right circumstances standards can be very helpful.

author: PbFoot
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 01:15:57 am
content: Well, standards are certainly necessary for safe and effective outcomes. What irks me is ill defined standards, or standards that still include provisions for situations that no longer apply due to advances in technology. Standards bodies need to keep up with things.-PbFoot

author: T4P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 03:03:47 am
content: Usually many electronics standards are written by dickheads - i thinkIs RoHS a standard? If it is, you get what i mean

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 04:49:30 am
content: RoHS is not a standard, it is a EU directive. The EU's kind of law template for member state laws. But funny that you know that standards are written by dickheads, but don't now what a standard is.

author: AlfBaz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 05:17:02 am
content: The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them!

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 07:18:17 am
content: QuoteThey are not legal documents - they are specifications, which are sometimes referred to by legislation as a way to demonstrate a product meets legal requirements.In fact a major headache can often be not the standard itself, but figuring out which standards are applicable.A problem is that standards have to be fairly generic, but as every product is different, there are often areas where they may not be entirely applicable or relevant, and a lot of effort can go into figuring out how to apply some aspects, or how to argue that some aspects are not applicable to a particular application.

author: T4P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 02:10:54 pm
content: Quote from: Bored@Work on August 13, 2012, 04:49:30 amI wasn't sure if it's a directive or a standardI know standards are something that are to be followed if they want to "stamp" this badge aka ISO

author: grumpydoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 02:36:47 pm
content: The thing about standards, though, is - a bit like democracy - they suck but the alternatives are worse.Imagine there were truly no standards in the electrical/electronics industries. It would probably be back to the 1920's for power distribution. Each town had it's own power station but also it's own sockets and voltage levels perhaps even more than one if there were competing suppliers. Imagine every phone company having it's own modulation/encoding scheme, every logic IC having a unique supply voltage, every TV station doing its own thing on the airwaves, every piece of audio equipment having a different input sensitivity which didn't match the outputs from other manufacturer's kit.It would be 100x harder to get anything done, there would be no global phone network, there would be no Internet.In fact a lot of the time standards have emerged from the chaos of everyone doing their own thing precisely because thatischaos.But, yes, I've often had the thought in my head "I know it has to be standard, but does it have tobe so complicated?" as well. I don't think htat's anything new.

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 04:57:23 pm
content: Quote from: T4P on August 13, 2012, 02:10:54 pmWell, when speaking about technology, a standard is effectively a technical (not legal) contract. The idea is that if you make an ethernet device, a DIN connector, or a web browser that conforms to the standard, it will (ideally) mate with and operate properly with another device made to the same standard within the domain of the standard. If the standard is at all ambiguous, incomplete, or self-contradictory, it may be possible to make two implementations that both appear to meet the standard but fail to work together. This would be a failure of the standard.One high profile case of a defective standard was fast ethernet auto-negotiation. I don't understand the details, but there were evidentially two possible ways to interpret the standard. Cisco did one and everyone else did another. The net result was that if you connected a Cisco switch to a non-cisco switch and they had auto-negotiation enabled, the link would work intermittently or at dramatically reduced performance. All told this cost almost an incalculable sum of money -- not just in the unexpected downtime caused and the manpower necessary to manage all of those ports that had to be manually configured, but it then trained a whole generation of network admins to disable auto-negotiation even with hardware that can do it safely, which still continues to cause trouble today.This is the reason that standards documents are highly technical and not at all written like colloquial english. Ambiguity is a pervasive and important component of ordinary language, and we couldn't function on a day to day basis without it. However, it is poison to a standard, and if some sneaks in it can have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.Since you bring up "ISO" (which publishes thousands of standards on everything from the geometry of power outlets to the numbering of weeks), I assume you mean ISO9000. This is indeed a standard (although not a technology standard) that is held in low esteem by a lot of people here. But the real thing to realize is that most people who talk about it don't actually know what it is. It is a standard for documentation. If you implement ISO9000 and expect to get anything out of it other than better (or at least more!) documentation, the fault is really with yourself for expecting something silly. This is like installing an ethernet card and then being upset that it doesn't automatically make a single player game multi-player.

author: Neilm
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2012, 06:19:42 pm
content: After you have designed a couple of designs to a particular standard you quickly get used to it. I work designing test and measurement stuff so I am used to IEC61010. The most annoying part is having to do the checklist it requires. It means I have a whole lot of rubbish to to do, heat tests, component test, flash tests as well has having to do "foreseeable misuse". That bit is hard - you try to guess all the things a complete id10t would do.Having been working in this area for 7 years, it becomes a case of routine. The company is set up to work out the requirements as part of the general philosophy so the final qualification is just a matter of routine.YoursNeil

author: DeanA
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 14, 2012, 12:25:37 pm
content: I work with standards a lot mostly related to products for government departments and tenders. They can be annoying but I think they are a necessary evil. When multi million dollar tenders are up for grabs a concise standard is required so that all the tender submissions are on a level playing field. One very annoying aspect is that one standard will normally reference dozens of other standards which in turn will reference other standards and so on.Another thing I hate [begin rant] is when someone starts bleating that they can design a product much cheaper than the competitors but they don't even come close to meeting the standard. Case in point is July 2012 Silicone Chip magazine with a 4 page article ranting on about how much cheaper a school zone sign can be manufactured. The publisher even gets in on the bleating in the publishers letter. We designed a type approved product which needed to go through environmental testing, optical testing, emc testing among other things that cost thousands of dollars. This money obviously needs to be recovered in the final product price. This all needed to be done to prove that it met the RTA specifications. Then some fool starts bleating on about how much cheaper he could make it but he doesn't even come close to meeting the very detailed specification. [end rant]Regards,Dean.

author: Neilm
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 14, 2012, 06:25:02 pm
content: The best thing with standards is when you find an error in them. Mostly because I work with one of the guys who sits on the standards committee that writes it.Neil

author: johnh
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 14, 2012, 10:25:12 pm
content: Working in the Telco industry I would rather have a standard ( IE. ITU / ETSI), than a RFC with its "May's", "Could's and "Should's". They leave enough ambiguity to drive you insane. When one vendor says we follow this RFC abc and another says we follow this RFC xyz and there is enough wiggle room that they don't work together.Had a case with one well know vendor with gear from 2 different Business units, that had different interpretation of RFC 2833 (DTMF) one said 0-9*# was valid the other said 0-9A-D*#.