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Heard a kid at a job fair say CAM software is 'old school' and it got me thinking
I was at a workshop in Cleveland last month and this guy maybe 22 years old called Mastercam 'old school' like it was a bad thing. Made me laugh because I remember when we just had a punch tape reader and a dial indicator. Now I run 5-axis mills with probing cycles that practically run themselves. But honestly, that kid was right in a way. The trade has changed so fast since I started in 1998, I had to learn collision detection and simulation just to keep up. Has anyone else had to totally retrain themselves after 10 or 15 years in the game?
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ivan_perez1mo ago
I mean the collision detection stuff is newer than people think, I started in the late 90s too and we didn't really have that on the floor back then. It's more like the machines got smarter so we had to get smarter with them, not really a total retrain.
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rowank691mo ago
Oh man, been there. Honestly the trick I found was just getting ahead of it by running through the machine's diagnostics before every shift. Took maybe five minutes extra but saved me from having to figure out a fresh collision setup mid-job. Ngl though, the thing that really threw me was how the newer machines log different error codes for the same basic jam. I just started keeping a little notebook with the machine's specific quirks written down, saved my ass more than once when a brand new alert popped up that the manual didn't cover.
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