Ahhh, you assume doing it better than Good-Enough takes longer... :)

I find that it takes only the right crew and the right knowledge.

Back to the topic of Contractors versus the Customers. A company I worked with brought me in to help them manage some of their many outsource contractors - they were having lots of problems. They were an oil company that didn't know anything about electronics and were truely at the mercy of their contractors. They introduced several of their project objectives and showed me what their various contractors had done on each job...

This was probably the worst example on the planet... or typical - I couldn't say. :)

They showed me a design that did [something] and needed to run on minimal battery power. The contractor used a 16 bit PIC and all the associated 16 bit data busses. His justification was that the calculations required the 16 bit micro to support the math-lib that he needed. WRONG!

Another project that did [something] was shown to me. The consultant had submitted 3 pages of schematics for approval. I drew a big "X" over page two and said the designer is an analog guy and wants to experiment doing his own IR interface - you don't need to fund his egotistical research... use this CHIP instead. Page 1 and 3 were picked in halves and the and they came back with a one page version.

I asked what the contract deal was because it appeared unusual to me that any contractor should include so much unnecessary and wasteful circuitry. They informed me that this contractor had negotiated a production run contract and expected to make his money on the manufacturing rather than the design. Since the Oil company didn't know how to price chips, the production was quoted at component prices barely lower than Radio Shack over-the-counter prices. So the problem was, the more chips the contractor put on the board, the more money he could make. ARGGG!!

I'll leave it there... I'm gone for the holidays.

aka j