7 ms·

I like the values that jokes like this reinforce (simplicity, creativity, and proactivity versus complexity, expense, and bureaucracy) but I wonder if they serv

by dkarl 13y ago

I like the values that jokes like this reinforce (simplicity, creativity, and proactivity versus complexity, expense, and bureaucracy) but I wonder if they serve a positive purpose in engineering culture. Do we tell these jokes to keep ourselves on our toes, to make ourselves better? Are we really in danger of forgetting which is better, simplicity or complexity? When we create complex and over-engineered systems, is it because we forget that simplicity is better? I don't think we do. I think we tell ourselves these jokes to contrast good engineering with bad engineering and to congratulate ourselves for being on the right side. A good joke would lead you down the garden path, encourage a bit of smugness and then rip the rug out from under you. This joke telegraphs the punch line from the start: it encourages smugness and then vindicates it. A healthy joke would make us uncomfortable about whether we would have been on the right side, whether we are doing a good job of living up to our values. This joke reassures us that the problem is other people's values, and by doing so, it promotes exactly the kind of complacency that it makes fun of.

kelvin0 13y ago
I definitely feel we have not read the same text. It is clear to me that a problem that can be addressed by a 8M$ or by a 20$ solution, the 8M$ can be ruled as 'over-engineered' and very inefficient in this particular context. I don't see how this inefficiency is promoted by such a story?
- HCIdivision17 13y ago
  But the eight million dollar project is more efficient than waiting for a random twenty dollar fix. And as it seemed to be meeting the goals set for it, it was also likely more efficient than allowing bad product out the door, which is what this is really gauged against. Honestly, I was expecting the punch line to be that they found it cost more in the end because it shut the blasted line down for each bad box. I'm an engineer in a plant, and frankly that just seems insane, even if localized (accumulators are never big enough!)
  - gknoy 13y ago
    I think it might have been more efficient to hold a company meeting that said, "Hey guys, we are having a problem with empty boxes getting shipped. If you have an idea of how to make sure empty boxes get removed from the line, let us know!" Note that the simplest and most cost effective solution will be used, and offer a thousand dollar bonus to whoever suggests it. (The bonus might motivate people who otherwise might not care.) That is orders of magnitude more efficient than commissioning an $8M consultation, and is likely to find any low-hanging fruit such as fans-on-conveyor belts. If no one has any ideas in the first month, it's possible that such insights are not commonplace, and then you can go commission your million dollar consultation.
    - HCIdivision17 13y ago
      I'm going to pretend that you didn't suggest holding a plant-wide meeting as a form of efficiency ;) But the idea of setting up bounties is controversial. The arguments for and against it quickly get remarkably tortuous. I've never seen it implemented, but I can definitely say the idea is attractive. I had a coworker who would offer a hundred bucks (of his own money) to the operators who maintained stable production on a weekend run; it looks like it works, but he couldn't afford that too much. It's often easier to spend giant sums of cash than to be clever, as cleverness is unreliable, but giant stacks of cash are accountable. (TL;DR: industry is often penny wise, pound foolish.)
  - kelvin0 13y ago
    I wouldn't call a solution gathered without consulting everyone's feedback 'efficient'. Obviously the 'fan solution' might have come up earlier (or at least some derivative)
michaelwww 13y ago
You've clearly never worked in a factory as a low level person who is usually asked last, if at all, how to solve a problem concerning their job. I've forwarded this to my father, who will love it as a person who rose from the shop floor to the highest levels of management and never lost his distrust of "college boys."
- dkarl 13y ago
  I don't think your father will like the joke, either. According to the story, the line workers had the ability to fix the problem all along, but they didn't bother until the $8 million system made it personally inconvenient for them when an empty box reached the scales. It makes them sound clever but also rather lazy and selfish.
  - Xdes 13y ago
    >the line workers had the ability to fix the problem all along Yes they had the ability, but did the line workers know that empty boxes being shipped was a problem? There is no solution without a problem.
    - michaelwww 13y ago
      They most likely didn't. My father used to be sent around as a trouble shooter and would tell stories of managers never setting foot on the factory floor to talk to the workers.
    - ars_technician 13y ago
      Are the workers so stupid that they think shipping empty boxes is normal?
      - cema 13y ago
        Common sense is not always wrong.
  - CodeMage 13y ago
VLM 13y ago
Its like dancing, the more effortless it looks, the harder it is to do. Sometimes takes a lot of math to design the ideal simplest possible part rather than just hacking some kind of brute force beast together. "Simplicate and add lightness" is a cool aerospace engineering slogan that's been attributed to almost everyone in the biz who is cool, although it actually comes from a Ford engineer named Stout (like the beer), at least as I recall it. I like this slogan, and its the same general topic we're discussing, but I think the joke is more effective because its funny.
- WalterBright 13y ago
  > Its like dancing, the more effortless it looks, the harder it is to do. This is actually not true. It is fairly effortless for the dancers doing it - what was hard was all the training and hard work getting to the point of it being effortless.
bernardom 13y ago
You're right: jokes like this only perpetuate bad attitudes- "oh, let's laugh at management/engineering, they think they're so clever." From my time working in improvement in factories, I'm very confident that the single largest factor that determined whether they would achieve any improvements was the attitude of the team in place. "We've tried it before and it didn't work" is the enemy. Rarely is the enemy "let's spend $8mm on un-necessary consulting help." That's really, really rare. Most people hate spending money on outside help, they see it as a failure (which is also a harmful attitude).
- a_olt 13y ago
  To try balancing the discussion a bit: On the upside, due to the $8M contract, lots of people were able to work and earn a living. The story also mentions how the team had a great time, and probably lots of useful connections between people were made, and tacit knowledge exchanged. Neither of those is traditionally accounted for by the engineering mindset.
  - npsimons 13y ago
    On the upside, due to the $8M contract, lots of people were able to work and earn a living. The story also mentions how the team had a great time, and probably lots of useful connections between people were made, and tacit knowledge exchanged. This sort of reasoning could also justify the TSA.
  - travem 13y ago
    > On the upside, due to the $8M contract, lots of people were able to work and earn a living. Yes but you have to also consider the opportunity cost of that $8M. Were the incidental benefits gained worth the cost?
  - daurnimator 13y ago
    Your fallacy is: "Glazier's fallacy". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Theodores 13y ago
A few things: The box-filling machine was not working properly. This could be due to wear, poor quality boxes, a problem upstream with where the tubes came from. Although a solution was found to the problem of shipping empty boxes, the process in the factory was not resolved in that the source of the problem was not identified. The new scales made it possible to find the empty boxes and pause the conveyor belt so that the offending light box could be removed. However, the operator went ahead and did his own thing with the fan, not asking for authorisation from the site electrician, his line manager, senior management or anyone else. Because of what he did it no longer became possible to have the line stop as soon as a problem was detected. Or to have the scales machine do the accounting for this. This information may be important for the engineering department to know they have to clean/fix/replace parts on the box filling machine. If it was my factory I might not have sacked the operator for being a 'loose cannon' however I would not have rewarded him for his ingenuity. To be fair he did not know of the empty box problem until the scales came along, he was not 'wilfully ignorant' of the problem because he did not know about it. However, his fix did not solve the core problem and it only made it harder for the engineering team to remedy the situation. (The engineering team were not wilfully ignorant either). So this is a silly story that might be a funny anecdote at an after dinner talk but it has no relevance to a real factory and the processes involved. If anything it tells a different story of how out of touch we are with manufacturing.
- jacalata 13y ago
  The engineering team could adjust the scales to automatically tip an empty box off the line, recording when it was found. Win (data to identify the source of the problem)- win (line guy doesn't have to walk over) - win (no empty boxes shipped)!
- ithkuil 13y ago
  From my experience, the key point in this story is that if you bother people enough with useless manual interventions, they will come up with a way to automate themselves out of the job. Furthermore, the solution is often simpler and cheaper than the monitoring infrastructure. And, well, the rest of the anecdote is based on the waste of money caused by the fact that the external company had everything to gain from overengeneering the solution.
caprad 13y ago
> is it because we forget that simplicity is better? Oh yes, all the time. I am busy trying to automate everything in the office, because it is what I know. Whenever someone comes to me with a problem, I think about how it will integrated into our systems, adding tables to the database, adding a page so people can track how it is done. When someone else has already solved it using a simple trick.
smoyer 13y ago
I think it's some of each ... and serves the same purpose that reading Dilbert cartoons do. When you read one that sounds a bit like you, do you pause and wonder whether something needs to change?

by dkarl 13y ago

kelvin0 13y ago

I definitely feel we have not read the same text. It is clear to me that a problem that can be addressed by a 8M$ or by a 20$ solution, the 8M$ can be ruled as 'over-engineered' and very inefficient in this particular context. I don't see how this inefficiency is promoted by such a story?

HCIdivision17 13y ago
But the eight million dollar project is more efficient than waiting for a random twenty dollar fix. And as it seemed to be meeting the goals set for it, it was also likely more efficient than allowing bad product out the door, which is what this is really gauged against. Honestly, I was expecting the punch line to be that they found it cost more in the end because it shut the blasted line down for each bad box. I'm an engineer in a plant, and frankly that just seems insane, even if localized (accumulators are never big enough!)
- gknoy 13y ago
  I think it might have been more efficient to hold a company meeting that said, "Hey guys, we are having a problem with empty boxes getting shipped. If you have an idea of how to make sure empty boxes get removed from the line, let us know!" Note that the simplest and most cost effective solution will be used, and offer a thousand dollar bonus to whoever suggests it. (The bonus might motivate people who otherwise might not care.) That is orders of magnitude more efficient than commissioning an $8M consultation, and is likely to find any low-hanging fruit such as fans-on-conveyor belts. If no one has any ideas in the first month, it's possible that such insights are not commonplace, and then you can go commission your million dollar consultation.
  - HCIdivision17 13y ago
    I'm going to pretend that you didn't suggest holding a plant-wide meeting as a form of efficiency ;) But the idea of setting up bounties is controversial. The arguments for and against it quickly get remarkably tortuous. I've never seen it implemented, but I can definitely say the idea is attractive. I had a coworker who would offer a hundred bucks (of his own money) to the operators who maintained stable production on a weekend run; it looks like it works, but he couldn't afford that too much. It's often easier to spend giant sums of cash than to be clever, as cleverness is unreliable, but giant stacks of cash are accountable. (TL;DR: industry is often penny wise, pound foolish.)
- kelvin0 13y ago
  I wouldn't call a solution gathered without consulting everyone's feedback 'efficient'. Obviously the 'fan solution' might have come up earlier (or at least some derivative)

michaelwww 13y ago

You've clearly never worked in a factory as a low level person who is usually asked last, if at all, how to solve a problem concerning their job. I've forwarded this to my father, who will love it as a person who rose from the shop floor to the highest levels of management and never lost his distrust of "college boys."

dkarl 13y ago
I don't think your father will like the joke, either. According to the story, the line workers had the ability to fix the problem all along, but they didn't bother until the $8 million system made it personally inconvenient for them when an empty box reached the scales. It makes them sound clever but also rather lazy and selfish.
- Xdes 13y ago
  >the line workers had the ability to fix the problem all along Yes they had the ability, but did the line workers know that empty boxes being shipped was a problem? There is no solution without a problem.
  - michaelwww 13y ago
    They most likely didn't. My father used to be sent around as a trouble shooter and would tell stories of managers never setting foot on the factory floor to talk to the workers.
  - ars_technician 13y ago
    Are the workers so stupid that they think shipping empty boxes is normal?
    - cema 13y ago
      Common sense is not always wrong.
- CodeMage 13y ago

VLM 13y ago

Its like dancing, the more effortless it looks, the harder it is to do. Sometimes takes a lot of math to design the ideal simplest possible part rather than just hacking some kind of brute force beast together. "Simplicate and add lightness" is a cool aerospace engineering slogan that's been attributed to almost everyone in the biz who is cool, although it actually comes from a Ford engineer named Stout (like the beer), at least as I recall it. I like this slogan, and its the same general topic we're discussing, but I think the joke is more effective because its funny.

WalterBright 13y ago
> Its like dancing, the more effortless it looks, the harder it is to do. This is actually not true. It is fairly effortless for the dancers doing it - what was hard was all the training and hard work getting to the point of it being effortless.

bernardom 13y ago

You're right: jokes like this only perpetuate bad attitudes- "oh, let's laugh at management/engineering, they think they're so clever." From my time working in improvement in factories, I'm very confident that the single largest factor that determined whether they would achieve any improvements was the attitude of the team in place. "We've tried it before and it didn't work" is the enemy. Rarely is the enemy "let's spend $8mm on un-necessary consulting help." That's really, really rare. Most people hate spending money on outside help, they see it as a failure (which is also a harmful attitude).

a_olt 13y ago
To try balancing the discussion a bit: On the upside, due to the $8M contract, lots of people were able to work and earn a living. The story also mentions how the team had a great time, and probably lots of useful connections between people were made, and tacit knowledge exchanged. Neither of those is traditionally accounted for by the engineering mindset.
- npsimons 13y ago
  On the upside, due to the $8M contract, lots of people were able to work and earn a living. The story also mentions how the team had a great time, and probably lots of useful connections between people were made, and tacit knowledge exchanged. This sort of reasoning could also justify the TSA.
- travem 13y ago
  > On the upside, due to the $8M contract, lots of people were able to work and earn a living. Yes but you have to also consider the opportunity cost of that $8M. Were the incidental benefits gained worth the cost?
- daurnimator 13y ago
  Your fallacy is: "Glazier's fallacy". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Theodores 13y ago

A few things: The box-filling machine was not working properly. This could be due to wear, poor quality boxes, a problem upstream with where the tubes came from. Although a solution was found to the problem of shipping empty boxes, the process in the factory was not resolved in that the source of the problem was not identified. The new scales made it possible to find the empty boxes and pause the conveyor belt so that the offending light box could be removed. However, the operator went ahead and did his own thing with the fan, not asking for authorisation from the site electrician, his line manager, senior management or anyone else. Because of what he did it no longer became possible to have the line stop as soon as a problem was detected. Or to have the scales machine do the accounting for this. This information may be important for the engineering department to know they have to clean/fix/replace parts on the box filling machine. If it was my factory I might not have sacked the operator for being a 'loose cannon' however I would not have rewarded him for his ingenuity. To be fair he did not know of the empty box problem until the scales came along, he was not 'wilfully ignorant' of the problem because he did not know about it. However, his fix did not solve the core problem and it only made it harder for the engineering team to remedy the situation. (The engineering team were not wilfully ignorant either). So this is a silly story that might be a funny anecdote at an after dinner talk but it has no relevance to a real factory and the processes involved. If anything it tells a different story of how out of touch we are with manufacturing.

jacalata 13y ago
The engineering team could adjust the scales to automatically tip an empty box off the line, recording when it was found. Win (data to identify the source of the problem)- win (line guy doesn't have to walk over) - win (no empty boxes shipped)!
ithkuil 13y ago
From my experience, the key point in this story is that if you bother people enough with useless manual interventions, they will come up with a way to automate themselves out of the job. Furthermore, the solution is often simpler and cheaper than the monitoring infrastructure. And, well, the rest of the anecdote is based on the waste of money caused by the fact that the external company had everything to gain from overengeneering the solution.

caprad 13y ago

> is it because we forget that simplicity is better? Oh yes, all the time. I am busy trying to automate everything in the office, because it is what I know. Whenever someone comes to me with a problem, I think about how it will integrated into our systems, adding tables to the database, adding a page so people can track how it is done. When someone else has already solved it using a simple trick.

smoyer 13y ago

I think it's some of each ... and serves the same purpose that reading Dilbert cartoons do. When you read one that sounds a bit like you, do you pause and wonder whether something needs to change?