Today I was fortunate to participate with about 70+ other employees in celebrating and wishing the best of retirement to a long time AutoCAD team member and passionate customer advocate for 32 years Dieter Schlaepfer.

Dieter has been involved in many things at Autodesk over 32 years but primarily learning and training then in the 22 years I have known his in the technical publications roles. He was always trying to find out from customers how we can communicate feature and functionality in easy understandable and correct ways. He has seen the documentation go from the big printed books to the current online formats. If you have participated in AutoCAD betas on the Autodesk Feedback Community you certainly know how helpful and active Dieter has been. One of the creative projects of Dieters was the Hitchhikers Guide to AutoCAD series which was a creative way for new users to learn concepts of AutoCAD.

Dieter has long been a key family member of AutoCAD and Autodesk, and longtime employees do indeed consider themselves family. While we wish Dieter all the very best in tinkering while trying to do the retirement thing, we will miss him dearly and hope to catch up on all of his projects in retirement.

Please join me in wishing Dieter all the very best, he deserves it. If you have a nice story of Dieter helping you at some point in the past 32 years, please post a comment to this blog post to share wit with us and Dieter.

-Shaan

Dieter in 1988 when he joined Autodesk during AutoCAD Release 9.

Some of the kind notes and memories of Dieter:

I met Dieter shortly after I joined Autodesk in October 1991. He taught an introduction to AutoCAD course in our Sausalito office for a bunch of new hires for the AutoCAD R12 effort, that training gave me the skills to start understanding the product so I could contribute. We didn’t have Wiki’s back then, we had Dieter.
That training was key to helping me get started on my career at Autodesk. It’s been a pleasure working with Dieter all these years, his sharp eye for details has helped both myself and the product along over all these years.  I was paired with Dieter for an Enterprise answer bar session at AU a couple years ago, I was so lucky to be paired with him, most of the answers came from Dieter!
–Greg Remmert