Got told my electrical symbols were lazy - 3 years of bad habits gone in one review

Senior drafter at my company called me out for using generic blocks instead of custom symbols on a commercial project last fall. He was right. I was just dragging in the same stuff without checking scale or match to the spec sheet. Spent a weekend rebuilding my whole symbol library. Cleaned up my error rate by a lot. Anyone else had an old timer break down your workflow like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

drew_patel5717d ago

Gotta push back a little here. Those generic blocks are a solid starting point for most projects, especially when the spec sheet is still getting finalized three weeks in. I've had senior guys yell at me for not using custom symbols and then the client changes the entire panel layout two days before submission, making all that custom work pointless. Scale checking is fine, sure, but spending a whole weekend rebuilding a library feels like overkill when half of those symbols probably got swapped out anyway during revisions. Sometimes "lazy" is just being smart about where you put your time.

abby3083d ago

That's not quite right about the weekend being overkill though. A proper symbol library saves way more time than it costs because you're not rechecking the same mistakes against the spec sheet over and over. You're right that clients change stuff a lot, but having solid basics means your adjustments are smaller and cleaner from the start.