[albrewer]

In mechanical design, you typically target an order of magnitude of stress cycling for product design. In a pump, everything stress cycles, so it all needs to be simulated. If this was a pump you were going to make ten million of, then suddenly every fractional 10th of a cent you save becomes the difference between, e.g., having another coworker or not. So to balance that with offering a reasonable warranty such that there's actually demand for this product makes sense.

Before anyone brings it up: sure, a lot of companies just pocket this savings or whatever, but a lot don't; you just don't hear about them because they're typically midsize companies that nobody complains about.

[mort96]

I'm sorry, but I feel like you're reading my message extremely uncharitably. I'm obviously onboard with the idea that nothing lasts forever, and time spent figuring out how to increase something's lifespan to "at least X years" is obviously valuable, as is time spent figuring out how to cut costs without making a product break "before X years". But none of that is the same as spending time to figure out how to ensure that something breaks at the right time.

It matters whether the focus is on reducing costs while keeping track of the impact on the product's lifetime, or the focus is on reducing the product's lifetime. What I'm calling a waste of talent and human life is spending time on the latter, and that's what it sounds like my parent comment describes their engineer friend doing.

[albrewer]

> none of that is the same as spending time to figure out how to ensure that something breaks at the right time

Yes it is. At the absolute limit, balancing cost and reliability is this exact optimization exercise; we are talking about the exact same thing taken to different extremes. The difference between your ideal scenario and the practice outlined in the OP is the difference between 97% BOM efficiency and 99.99% BOM efficiency. At extreme scales, that gap can mean the difference between a company laying people off vs. surviving.

Side note - this same discipline is what ensures your widgets fail in a safe, controlled manner and not in a catastrophic way.

> I feel like you're reading my message extremely uncharitably

I saw an naive take on how mechanical design for failure works in practice and wanted to educate. I mean no disrespect, it's just seemed like it might be an unknown unknown for you. Your comment had at least a few upvotes, so there are others out there who may also lack the same information.

To your charitability point, though, my first take on the OP above is probably the most charitable take. The least charitable scenario for the OP is that the company wants to make sure they have higher annually recurring revenue from replacing their widgets breaking down but need to _barely_ beat or match the other guys in a warranty. Reality is probably somewhere in between.

[eschaton]

Amen, intent matters. And it sounds like in both of the cases the OP cited, the intent was to force otherwise-unnecessary replacement, which is bad.