[mkipper]

This can be a pretty blurry line.

If the engineer took some existing product and did nothing for 2 years other than design in additional failures that show up after the warranty has expired, I agree that's awful. However, I'm very skeptical of that. I've worked in some manufacturing orgs who try to pinch every possible penny they can, and I've never seen anything resembling that level of mustache-twirling villainy in engineering. Also, 2 years seems like an incredibly long time for someone to spend doing this and nothing else.

It's much more likely that the company asked the engineer to reduce the cost of the pump while still hitting the product's requirements (e.g. no failures during warranty period plus some margin), and while doing that, the engineer found the design was overspeced for those requirements and made some changes which reduced the pump's expected lifespan while still meeting that requirement.

Unlike what the OP is suggesting, this happens constantly...it's what engineering is.

Obviously I'm not OP and I'm reading between the lines here, but it's very easy to imagine someone hearing this story second-hand and completely misrepresenting it.

[K0balt]

I think it’s something in between. The new pump actually cost more to make than the old one it replaced. The old pump would 90 percent make it through warranty, but sometimes failed early.

If the old pump failed, it often did so in a way that caused additional warranty expenses and reduced reliability perception. The problem was that a seal failure could cause catastrophic bearing failure.

So, the new pump was designed so that a seal failure would not cause bearing damage. Good sealed Bearings properly specced are very reliable these days, and seals on a true shaft wear very little. The problem was that the new pump would invariably make it to EOL.

So after spending a few weeks designing a no-fail pump, they had him redesign it so there was criticality in one of the bearings, so that one was effectively overloaded and would develop enough play to cause seal wear, (and dripping) while the other bearings would prevent the shaft from actually failing. The thing is, it’s hard to spec a bearing for “will wear a little out of tolerance but won’t fail” so it took two years and a lot of testing to get it right.

In all, there was a considerable amount of moustache twirling going on. But not as much as in those damnable disintegrating plastics or the unneeded battery in the thermostat.