10 ms·
A Short Story for Engineers
- rational_indian 6y agoApocryphal?
- 101008 6y agoWhere does it say it is real?
- rational_indian 6y agoWhere does it say it's not?
- Finnucane 6y agoIt’s certainly hard to imagine any real system being designed to stop the production line instead of just diverting the empties into a bin.
- Nextgrid 6y agoI think stopping the line would be the correct thing to do as having an empty box is a thing that should never happen (of course, the upstream issue should be fixed first) and if it does happen chances are something is very wrong and it's better to be safe than sorry.
- setr 6y agoin the story, they've accepted the empty box as a fact of life -- fixing the upstream problem was not cost-viable. So this is a scenario where empty boxes are known & expected, but they stop the line anyways
- vidanay 6y agoStopping the production line is almost never the first choice. Continuous production takes priority. There are second-order metrics that can be applied on top of the individual rejects (N in a row, N out of M rate, etc) and THOSE metrics can be used to determine if production should be shut down. Source: Have worked in industrial process control (specifically automated QA inspection equipment) for 20 years.
- Finnucane 6y agoBut there will always be some empty boxes no matter how tightly you calibrate the line. You're never going to have perfect tolerances in a mass production line like that. In fact, in this case, the scale is still a better solution than the blower, because not only do you need to not send out empties, but also incorrectly filled tubes.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoAnd unsurprisingly, in real companies where this matters, they use scales. The urban legend, like many, proves the opposite of the truly good lesson.
- adrianmonk 6y agoI assume it's meant as a parable.
- hkeide 6y agoEvery time I hear this story the alleged budget increases
- Frost1x 6y agoI'm sure they spent well over $10k doing it which shows you one of the problems with over-engineered solutions.
- lostlogin 6y agoIt’s being inflation adjusted.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoTo be completely honest, I like to think I would go down to where the problem is and have the people dealing with the problem look for a solution first. If you approach a third party as "a big company" looking for a "solution", you'll just get "a big solution at a bigger price"
- StavrosK 6y agoNo it doesn't, it's always been $9M (or, at least, 10M was how I've always heard it). What did you hear that was more than $11M?
- mcculley 6y agoWhen replicating a meme, change something. That way you can track how your version propagates.
- adrianmonk 6y agoI used to work at a company that also does "material handling" (fancy way of saying "conveyor belts, etc.") for factory automation. I wasn't in that department, but I got a general sense of the budgets, and $8 million sounds orders of magnitude too high for a project like this.
- ZeKK14 6y ago2017 thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15375056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15375056
- radicalbyte 6y agoAfter reading the problem definition, my reaction was: you'd either weigh it and use a solenoid to kick it into a defect box, or you'd use air to knock the empty boxes from the line. I've seen both methods in use on production lines; so I assume that this story is something made up by someone trying to sell some kind of consultancy service?
- Aperocky 6y agoIt's not just made up, the story is almost a word for word translation of a story that's been circulating for years in Chinese. Of course people have called bullshit on it before. If you can read Chinese, you can check the thorough debunking of this myth right here, from someone that actually works in a soap factory: https://www.zhihu.com/question/27132006 https://www.zhihu.com/question/27132006 And that was from 2014.
- yorwba 6y agoAnd here it is in a comment on a Siemens blog from 2009: https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/embedded-software/2009/06/18/how-to-sell-more-toothpaste/#comment-29 https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/embedded-software/2009/06/18/ho...
- shard 6y agoIn this age of the internet, memes get translated pretty quickly. I'm curious whether you found some definitive source that tracked this meme to its origin in a Chinese story.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoObviously an urban legend, and one of a series of legends in which a menial worker comes up with a simple solution to an apparently complex problem. Snopes has details on some of the others: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blue-collar-innovation/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blue-collar-innovation/
- raldi 6y agoOf course it’s a parable. That doesn’t make it any less pithy. See also: The Russians Used a Pencil
- newyankee 6y agoThey literally used it in a Blockbuster Hindi movie called '3 idiots' as if it was a real story. A huge section of the population takes these urban legends seriously. But i guess as long as the message is decent , no harm done ?
- solarkraft 6y ago> But i guess as long as the message is decent, no harm done? I'm not sure the message is decent and no harm is done, since it seems to be designed to weaken trust in complicated engineering processes with its underlying "look at these idiots".
- raldi 6y agoTo be fair, often that trust is misplaced. To the extent that it’s also often not, there are also modern parables about the dangers of corner-cutting. (NASA has three rather famous true-story ones.) As a result, good engineers have a mental framework to identify both situations.
- lostcolony 6y agoRight, but the concern isn't its serving as a parable for engineers. The concern is it serving as a parable for uneducated people about why they should rely on 'common sense' rather than experts in a given field. We just have to look at the modern US political landscape to see why that's a problem.
- raldi 6y agoThis is an important counterpoint.
- abeppu 6y agoEven as an apocryphal parable to illustrate something about the extravagance of the solutions found by extravagant processes, doesn't this kinda fall short? The $20 solution is only found as a response to the $8M solution, which introduced a measurement and an incentive. I read this as suggesting that (a) workers closest to the situation can offer solutions if (b) measurements are in place and incentives are aligned and (c) they're given enough freedom to deviate from top-down processes.
- edoceo 6y agoYour a,b,c stuff was outlined in Wealth of Nations about 200 years ago. Modern capitalist is designed to make HIPPOs feel good - empowered workers highlight that managers don't deserve their outsized pay.
- young_unixer 6y agoI think that's the main point to take away from the parable, and not the "engineers dumb, random worker smart" idea.
- perlpimp 6y agoWhen looking for a solution, instead should look for a right question to ask.
- draw_down 6y agoBusiness people love these kind of stories that “prove” it’s not necessary to spend money to fix problems.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y agoI love it, as soon as I read first part, I started over engineering solution. And at the end I was wow, so simple ... someone told me long time ago truly genius things are simple.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoYes, the story is an urban legend, the budget goes up every time it's told, etc. But I think the important lesson here is not really "line worker outsmarts expensive consultants", its really about incentives. The consultants are incentivized to do good work (they want to keep a good reputation and potentially get more work) BUT they are also incentivized to charge as much as possible ("value-based pricing" is the term the industry loves) which means they will often try to convince you your problem is more complicated than it actually is Similarly, the line worker is likely (correctly) to believe he won't be paid much more if he works harder, so his primary incentive is to just reduce his overall workload as much as possible and still get paid. The best solution (and I believe a bunch of research backs this up) is to better incentivize your line workers and reward them appropriately. I know one study in particular that showed broad-based stock option ownership among employees was correlated with stronger company results, while options concentrated just among senior execs was not correlated with business success.
- rpastuszak 6y agoThat's one of the reasons that as an engineer I find Design Thinking and (especially) Human-centred Design so valuable—if done well it forces to you look at the problem from the perspective of human motivations, incentives and there's so much low hanging fruit there. The story of the Good Kitchen comes to my mind: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/uva-darden-design-thinking-innovation/the-good-kitchen-story-4VvFN https://www.coursera.org/lecture/uva-darden-design-thinking-... Digression: another valuable aspects of DT/HCD include: working as a natural extension to Agile/XP, deriving solutions to problems in a data-driven way, ability to find low-hanging fruit more easily due to the application of divergent and convergent modes of thinking, being cheaper in the long term, and finally—giving designers and engineers tools to shut down any pet/vanity projects coming from senior management, by cheaply proving them to be wasteful.
- spottybanana 6y ago> The best solution (and I believe a bunch of research backs this up) is to better incentivize your line workers and reward them appropriately. I know one study in particular that showed broad-based stock option ownership among employees was correlated with stronger company results, while options concentrated just among senior execs was not correlated with business success. It can be also quite easy to make mistakes with these incentivisation schemes, fe in finance I've understood they can quite commonly cause problems.
- ktal 6y agoAnd then everyone clapped
- crazygringo 6y agoI always wonder... where does this faith in "blue collar thinking" over fancy-pants engineers come from? Why do people think the engineer wouldn't suggest a fan? Obviously it's an urban legend... but it just makes me wonder what makes it so repeatable, similar to how everyone's heard the similarly apocryphal story about how NASA invented a million-dollar pen while Russia got away with pencils just fine. The reason I wonder, is because sometimes I worry that this supposed "faith in common sense" is really just an "anti-expert" bias that is precisely the kind of thing that leads to disbelieving climate change, antivaxxers, not wearing masks, and anti-intellectual populism generally. Especially in 2020, I wonder if this is a kind of thinking that shouldn't be particularly encouraged... :S
- alexchamberlain 6y agoYou've never tested a dev script to the nth degree and run it once? Or designed a maintenance tool when an SQL statement will do? I think the fable to teach engineers to consider ROI and simple solutions rather than to belittle the process, though I recognise it has that danger.
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y agoI read comments and many are saying "is it urban legend" I do not think so, we underestimate people ability to complicate things and make mistakes. Does anyone remember story how NASA lost 125 million orbiter because measuring unit mistake> https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/ https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbi...
- jondubois 6y agoThis is so relevant today. Especially in our corporation-dominated industry where profits will continue to grow no matter what the corporation does.
- krammer 6y agoThis reminds me about one of the topics that has been bothering me along my career as a technical pm: when is the diverge part of the design process is finished? per my experience, many orgs underestimate the benefits of “people thinking” and overestimate the benefits of being able to forecast when the solution will be available. And this, imho, is key when talking about startups vs corps... corps worry about the process because they can afford a subpar (8m) solution. Ofc i’m being pedantic here and things are always more complex but... I have one question. How do you say in a safe way: We need more time because I FEEL that maybe, there is a 2$ solution for this problem.
- eigilsagafos 6y agoAgree with you there. I have seen so many times that people leave meetings without understanding what was concluded and what to do next. I try to be the person that ask questions if I don't understand what is agreed upon or if I "feel" that others don't understand. In the startup I'm in right now we try to build a culture where asking questions and taking a moment to think and talk if someone "feels" something is off is appreciated.
- Kosirich 6y agoFrom other comments I get it's a "urban legend" and it's meant to prove a point, but I guarantee anyone who has worked in a bigger manufacturing facility involving people has heard a similar story or has experienced one. Working as a production engineer I heard and experienced several, even though the sums in question were not nearly as big. When I read the story, my initial thought was that there would be a link pointing to Toyota or Kaizen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen Point Kaizen - It is one of the most commonly implemented types of kaizen. It happens very quickly and usually without much planning. As soon as something is found broken or incorrect, quick and immediate measures are taken to correct the issues
- app4soft 6y ago> A Short Story for Engineers JFTR, Every time I see such titles it curios me: which type of Engineers it directed for: Software, Civil, Social, etc.? It should be clarified in the title, because all of them are different.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWhich do you think?
- zwieback 6y agoIt's a great anecdote but good manufacturing organizations have long realized that you need engineers, managers and the workforce on the floor to constantly communicate and get everyone to pull together. One big problem is the culture clash between white and blue collar, unfortunately. And every once in a while outside consultants aren't the bloodsuckers they are made out to be.
- ncmncm 6y agoTopically, the presumed explosion danger from hydrogen fueled aviation is also eliminated by installation of electric fans. But they do need battery backup.
- pdkl95 6y ago"How a plan becomes policy" https://web.archive.org/web/20160531101830/http://ogun.stanford.edu/~bnayfeh/plan.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160531101830/http://ogun.stanf... In the beginning was the plan. And then came the assumptions. And the assumptions were without form. And the plan was without substance. [...]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- projectileboy 6y agoIn this parable, I’ll let you guess which is the server-rendered HTML form and which is the Javascript single-page app.
- kemiller2002 6y agoThis reminds me of a true story (yes, true not "true" I was there). I was a manager and representing my development area and my boss was there to greet the new client. We were a consulting firm, so of course we were paid to build things. The director of architecture was there, and he comes up with this plan to charge 100k for a solution of various needs. Surprisingly the client said no; they can't afford it, and we didn't get the business. The business was kind of shocked the company said no, then my boss sarcastically pointed out that everything they needed could be solved with Google Drive and 15 minutes on their phones to set it up.
- dasani08 6y agoIt's fun. Break a butterfly on wheel.
- koonsolo 6y agoThese are the stories that non-engineers like to tell themselves to feel smarter. Especially managers like to think they have more common sense than engineers. But reality is that engineers are the ones who know most about the subject, they know the details how everything interacts with each other. I had meetings with managers that thought their common sense could help me, only ending up me explaining the most basic of concepts to them. Same with the NASA pen story vs pencil. Most projects fail because of stupid managers that don't trust their experts. Not because engineers can't see the forest through the trees.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoYou certainly sound like the sort of person who is chronically surrounded by a surprisingly large number of idiots.
- koonsolo 6y agoNot anymore, I quit such jobs ;)
- triceratops 6y agoWell you know the saying..."If you met one asshole today, that person was an asshole. If everyone you met was an asshole today..."
- scottmckenzie 6y agoA lot of people of viewing this as a positive story. I’m not sure I do. Empty boxes are still making their way to the end of the process where a hack is being used to fix the outcome. The problem of the empty boxes still exists. In fact, it could be many problems down the line. I saw an interesting comparison of mechanics vs engineers where (no intended slight to mechanics) mechanics will fix the behaviour but engineers will perform Root Cause Analysis. While I agree that the expensive consultants don’t provide much value, and the solution fix is affordable and nicely and lateral, I don’t think this is what you’re really want. I draw comparisons to the endeavours that Tesla is making to more efficient manufacturing lines.
- monkpit 6y agoNot every problem is worth fixing “the right way”. The internal cost of wasting a packaging box (a few cents a day) is probably hugely surpassed by the value of increasing quality. You have to consider the opportunity cost of the Root Cause Analysis and the potential fix, along with shutting down the line to implement it. Compare that to the cost of the fan fix. Just because you could do Root Cause Analysis doesn’t mean you should go through with it. YAGNI
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoThere's a ton of these stories around. I think they're great. I don't get all insulted by them; even if they are meant as such. In my experience, robust is simple. The best code is the code I don't write. The eraser is my best friend. If I want to write code that has the fewest bugs, I need to write the code with the fewest lines possible. Every line of code is what I call a "trouble node." That's a place where a bug can happen. I also need to take the simplest, most straightforward approach possible. Horse sense is valuable, and a lot of my horse sense comes from painful lessons. When I'm writing code, and I find myself starting to rabbithole one kludge over another, I often have to stop and just wipe the slate clean. Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. When I was working for corporations, this was never an option, and I (and my team) always paid the price. Since working on my own, I've done exactly this a dozen times over. It's great.
- quickthrower2 6y agoI think there are a lot of lessons here. Here is what I got: One is that the simple $20 solution was discovered, but it may never have been. There was an element of luck in that. How often has that been the case in software? I see it all the time. Given there is an element of luck, to maximise luck you want to pull in ideas from many places. Line workers are a great source of ideas. You can then apply a filtering process to decide which idea to try out. The fan idea would be tried out due to it being a low hanging fruit sort of fix.
- jedimastert 6y agoI would actually posit that it would be less luck than you may think. Using air to blow lighter objects off line is a fairly common tool, even going as far back as separating wheat from chaff, and if you have a guy on the floor with a little experience it probably would have been somewhat obvious to them
- the_arun 6y agoWe undermine line workers in Software Engineering world as well. We tag them as "hackers" or "folks who take short cuts" or "don't do good job" when we see an unconventional solution. We need to understand the perfect solution differs from case to case.
- ajarmst 6y ago"The worker who'd placed the unapproved fan on the production floor was finally identified. They were counselled and sent to three days of mandatory retraining to ensure they understood that no further incidents of changing procedures outside of the formal change-approval process would be tolerated, and the installation of unapproved equipment was grounds for dismissal. The note on their file blocked any promotion, but the economy meant they couldn't change jobs. Eventually the learned helplessness and bitterness set in and they started amusing themselves by adding things from the break-room fridge to packages being shipped internationally. Five years later, they and everyone else were laid-off when a competitor figured out how to get otherwise unemployed people with cars and phones to deliver things for less than minimum wage."
- spiritplumber 6y agoRealistic.
- teclordphrack2 6y agoSorry but this was stupid to me. Most of the weighing systems out there are going to use the bell alarm to actuate a pneumatic arm to push the offending box off the line to a reject pile. What you actually will find is they will have an over and under bin so you can find out if you are over or under filling. It is a requirement by law that they weigh the product on a "legal for trade" scale if they are claiming it contains a certain amount. The company would already have the weighing equipment in place, maybe farther up the line where the tubes are filled. They would simply have to move them down to the end of the line and change the weight range to add in the weight of a box and any other things added to the box and toothpaste tube. I get that it is a thought exercise but wanted to add my 2 cents.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hyko 6y agoDue to the way the production line was set up, sometimes empty boxes were shipped without the tube inside. Fix the root cause of the issue and you won’t need duck tape and bailing wire everywhere to fix all the proximate problems. Lord knows what the rest of this nightmare environment of “fixes” looks like.
- sidcool 6y agoReminds me of Daryll from the office. Blue collar innovation. There's talent at every level in corporate hierarchy. What it needs is flattening the hierarchy.
- nomercy400 6y agoI misread the problem definition, assuming the problem was that the boxes were partially filled (e.g. 29/30 items shipped). How would you solve that in another way than a scale?
- krisoft 6y agoTo me this is a story about reliability. On two levels. On the technical solution level the weight+discard solution is much more reliable. (let's ignore the stupidity that the expensive solution stops the production line. In the real world it would just blow out the wrong ones using compressed air) They have logs from the machine for auditing purposes. They have a very simple to understand knob (the threshold weight) and they can use that to adjust the system to changes in their product. The fan has none of this. If an empty box goes through nobody will know what to change. Maybe the conveyor was a bit stickier that day? Maybe someone set the fan to the lower speed? How to adjust the fan setup when we are making packs of tiny tubes for a hotel? That's one level of reliability. The other is the organisational reliability. The CEO has the empty box problem. He wants it solved. He can commission an engineering firm who comes up with a solution. It will cost a pretty penny, but if the CEO is worth his salt he can write in performance requirements in the contract. They know they will get a working solution. Alternatively the CEO can go down to the line, he talks with the people there, he tells them about the problem. He offers an incentive for the solution. Let's say $2k. Someone proposes the fan solution, someone proposes to tune the filing machine more, someone proposes to measure the pallet of boxes with the forklift before shipping. How will the CEO know which one to pick? All solutions sounds very reasonable to him. Even after they picked one solution, how does he know it is working as intended? Who does he go to complain when a defect slips through?
- SZJX 6y agoI feel that being practical in the engineering is one thing but an overemphasis on practicality could also be dangerous in that it could build up technical debt down the road to the point of no (easy) return. Therefore a balance has to be struck. Though the top comment's interpretation about the difference between the incentives of consultants and regular workers, and how workers should be rewarded more for good work, is very interesting and definitely rings true to me. The importance of proper incentives/reward mechanism is overlooked in many companies, which is a shame.
- rchase 6y agoCool story. Here's a real one, if anyone's interested... A Tiny Mistake https://pastebin.com/gZa36S0K https://pastebin.com/gZa36S0K
- husamia 6y agothe line worker that came up with the idea probably didn't even know that engineering was spread thin and external firm was hired to find solution. Even if he did, his idea would have been thrown out.