Yep, it was an interesting project, with a somewhat crazy manager. At one point he decided everybody should know everything about everything. The servo-engineer should know how to modify code, the software guys should be able to tune the read channel filter, the read/write designer (my piece of the pie) should be able to modify the mechanics, the tribology engineer… You get the picture… And he set up a series of meetings so we could all “train” our co-workers on all the intricacies.
(Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for learning how all the other stuff works, and love cross-disciplinary projects, but when I’d optimized the phase response of the channel for our range of head pulse widths by selecting a dozen particular 2% inductors and 1% capacitors, I didn’t want someone changing things because they think they can get better servo-tracking on one particular head/platter combination. 
)
So first up were the software guys, who came into the meeting with a two inch thick stack of fan-folded print out and started, page by page, to go over variable declarations, constants, initialization parameters… They got through about 20 pages in the first hour and the manager finally realized that while we all knew a bit about everything, we were all members of a team with various specializations and could easily communicate with each other.
The manager had other strange ideas, as well, like hourly update meetings when there was a particularly nasty problem than needed to be solved. Still, it ended up being an extremely robust disk drive design, which to the best of my knowledge is still storing nuclear launch code data and targeting information on nuclear submarines around the world.
