I had dinner with a friend, former co-worker at Boeing. Orexi, a nice little Greek restaurant in downtown Bellevue. Seeing him reminded me of my work as a technical writer at Boeing and that got me to thinking about the software I currently use versus the software that was the mainstay over there.
While I’m not going to give away any company secrets, I can tell you that engineering houses are some of the biggest and most sophisticated users of software on the planet.
You might think that they are big on hardware; and many are. Think Boeing – big monstrous airplanes – all planned out, down to the last rivet with engineering software.
And while companies like Boeing do use office software like Microsoft Office or Visio, etc., the hearts of these companies is in the prowess of their engineering software.
When I worked at Boeing, CAD was huge as was project management software. And while you might think that project management software would be more for the office side rather than the engineering side of things, this was not the case at Boeing.
I think that the main reason for this was that the project management software enabled planning over time; and if you’re putting together anything as massive as an airplane, you need to know that the different pieces of the project are going to be ready at the appropriate times.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Inserting technical drawings into Word documents was a very effective way of archiving the information and attaching meta-data to the drawings.
Now – you’re not going to get the highest end or truly specialty type products on the cheap; at least not usually. But you can find some very serviceable engineering software applications on Craigslist (I just checked it out and saw AutoCAD 2009 selling for under $600, which is pretty darned cheap. If I was going to be working with engineering software, I’d be checking these two sources out. Another source that provides comparison prices is PriceGrabber.com.
