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Comment by havnagiggle | Hacker News Reader

I went to school with a guy that dropped a $100k-200k VNA at Apple during an internship. He didn't get a full-time offer despite their investment :P

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Letting interns carry six figure equipment, which would also be unexpectedly heavy especially if this happened some years ago, would be a weird thing for any lab I’ve worked in. There are too many things that can predictably go wrong in the hands of an inexperienced person, as happened here.

Interns wouldn’t even be allowed to use $100K VNAs without a lot of supervision because so many things can go wrong. Damaging one of those small precision connectors is easy to do and can be a costly repair that brings delays to the lab, and that’s before you even start making measurements.

I wonder if part of the offense was that the intern was breaking protocol by moving the equipment. Alternatively they probably failed to explain the rules and expectations to the intern. Or maybe some lazy engineer tried to pawn off their work on to an intern without thinking about the consequence.

I'm not sure - the level of scrutiny that usage/abusage of expensive equipment gets varies wildly from organisation to organisation. I've worked in some places where very expensive equipment is handled roughly, or even taken home in some cases. In others, there are meticulous procedures for even $1-5k pieces of equipment. It's just a cultural thing.

For this example it’s the delicacy and fragility of the instrument, the price is just a proxy for that.

Expensive VNAs are also precision, calibrated instruments with small connectors that can easily be degraded by even simple misuse. Frontends destroyed or subtly damaged in ways that break measurements by allowing the wrong signal to enter.

It’s easy to damage one in a way that will interfere with measurements for months before someone realizes what’s wrong, which is more costly than the VNA itself.

These instruments require training to handle. It’s not even about the price, it’s absurd that they’d let an intern carry one around at all (if it was allowed)

This is like the hardware equivalent of an intern accidentally dropping the production DB. My first question would be how they got to the point where an intern was in a position to be able to drop the production DB because everyone understands what can go wrong

Fair enough. Fragility is probably more important than price in this scenario.

The obvious answer is because VNAs are heavy and the person who would otherwise have to carry it isn't the person who has to pay for a replacement.

I cannot, of course, speak about this particular incident, but a person inclined to skip procedures expressly implemented to avoid the problem which occurred, or who ignores clear warnings that a problem is developing, is a liability, not a trained asset.

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