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Understanding Engineers
- blogimus 17y agoTitle is incomplete. It's "Understanding Engineers: Feasibility." I do like how he framed out the difficulty of problems into categories.
- ShabbyDoo 17y agoMy wife is annoyed by my reluctance to speak in absolute terms. Expressing an estimate of likelihood seems much more precise to me than rounding a probability to "always" or "never."
- timr 17y agoJust integrate over longer periods of time: "yes dear, that always happens -- just so long as we live forever." ;-)
- iigs 17y agoI mitigate this issue by gambling with myself. I make my best estimate and if it is close enough to never or always I use those words. I benefit from this because more often than not if I'm wrong it's because my mental estimating model is wrong -- not because I got unlucky. My wife's pretty forgiving, so I don't have much to lose by being wrong or getting called on things, but that might not be a good course of action for everyone. :)
- prpon 17y agoReminds me of Richard Feynman. "mathematicians designate any theorem as "trivial" once a proof has been obtained--no matter how difficult the theorem was to prove in the first place. There are therefore exactly two types of true mathematical propositions: trivial ones, and those which have not yet been proven. " http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Trivial.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Trivial.html
- tdavis 17y agoSo there is no necessary relation between a task being trivial, and how long it takes. I wish more non-engineers could grasp this. It's so annoying when people say, "It's not done yet? But you said it would be a trivial feature to add!" I am then forced to explain all that means is I know how to add it and can visualize the general diagram in my head, but since I am not regurgitating the precise implementation from memory it isn't merely a matter of rote data entry. This may be a problem caused partially by us, too; I don't care about implementation time because the implementation is the trivial part; it'll be done whenever it's done and I'm not really bothered by that since the problem itself is already solved. Hell, most of the time I don't even have an interest in fully implementing a solution to a problem I've already mentally solved. I guess I should note this doesn't apply much for me at the moment seeing as how I co-own a company, but it's an annoyance when it comes to dealing with clients.
- jkkramer 17y agoIf you use a word in a way that most people don't, how can you be surprised when they misunderstand you? I use "straightforward" to describe trivial problems, when I can see the implementation path clearly. "Trivial" implies easy and quick to most people. It's not hard for them to grasp, you just have to communicate more clearly.
- jimfl 17y agoThere's trivial to implement, then there's trivial to implement in our product without breaking everything else. Also, they missed a category: Stupid. As in: I could do that, but it would be Stupid.
- known 17y agoEngineers are tuned to think in terms of RIGHT or WRONG and MBAs think in terms of PRIORITIES.