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What it is like being the only engineer in a meeting [video]
- xarien 13y agoWhy is the engineer Asian and male? While it's an amusing skit, it's horribly typecasting. How about a black woman for a change?
- evilrevolution 13y agoFeel free to make your own skit using whatever typecasts you need to make yourself feel better.
- xarien 13y agoI'm actually both Asian and male; the protagonist typecast in the skit if you will. The insensitivity and frank hostility exhibited by your remark alone shows how much more work we have to do in order to make the tech sector more hospitable and diverse.
- croggle 13y agoIf it's an asian male we'll get people like you noticing it's an asian male... if we make it a black women we'll get people noticing it's a black women. It honestly doesn't matter. I've personally never seen anyone in IT of east asian descent anyway. Get over yourself.
- LnxPrgr3 13y agoI noticed this, but even without race and gender the characters are profoundly stereotyped—intentionally exaggerated for effect. At least, I hope there aren't real-life Certified Red Line Experts running around, nor designers hoping to draw red lines in green ink… Taken too literally, this sketch could be offensive to all of women, portrayed as clueless; male executives, portrayed as willfully ignorant and over-demanding; Asians, portrayed as obviously engineers; non-Asians, portrayed as obviously not engineers; engineers, portrayed as incapable of working backwards from impossible requirements to find a solution that actually works; and probably other groups I've forgotten.
- rapala 13y agoUm, because the stereotype of an engineer is a male, Japan is often associated with engineering and having the engineer be the only one of visually different nationality emphasizes the divide between techinal and non technical. Yes, it is horrible typecasting like every character in that clip and that is the point.
- dewarrn1 13y agoI've been in this meeting myself. The situation is nicely rendered in a scene[0] from Cryptonomicon in which a main character feels like a dwarf among hobbits. [0] http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide8.html http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide8.html
- sikhnerd 13y agoI think the best way I've found to combat these types of meetings and cut through the talk is simply to ask "Why" Find out pretty quickly (generally) what they are actually wanting and nobody needs to print things in transparent ink... (usually)
- mbillie1 13y agoAgreed. Many times when you are approached with nonsensical requirements it is wise to try to figure out what problem the asker is trying to solve. This is doubly true when you receive technical requirements from non-technical people.
- cpeterso 13y agoAlso clarify at the beginning of the meeting (or preferably before), who owns this meeting and what is the agenda or decision to be made.
- dredmorbius 13y ago"Why", or "what do you want to do" are two of the most useful questions in my arsenal. Often a client (or user you're trying to assist) is 2-3 steps past their initial requirement when they ask for some technical solution. Backtracking to the base problem often suggests a far more useful and viable approach. The video sketch shown here isn't so much an illustration of what it's like to be the only technical person in a meeting as it is one of what happens when you put technical and nontechnical types together with no way of establishing a common language and understanding. The project leads and/or engineer are incompetent.
- carrotleads 13y agoThis is true for any meeting where a specialist is outnumbered and the other folks have already made up their mind.
- dredmorbius 13y agoYou can't avoid the initial state problem. What you can do is recognize and either 1) correct it or 2) realize you're working with incompetents (e.g., everyone in the video sketch, engineer included).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Karunamon 13y agoIf that is the message you received from this comedy sketch, I daresay you're not in a position to be lecturing on other people's mentalities. The ability to recognize, see through, and deal with bullshit in all its various forms is a highly necessary skill regardless of your occupation. *edit The now deleted comment was someone snarking about how Engineers need to stop thinking they're above everyone else.
- dstroot 13y agoOversimplified? Yes. Hilarious? Yes. Why? Because "impossible feature request" can and does happen... frequently.
- peter_l_downs 13y agoI got frustrated just listening to this. Excellent acting.
- vayarajesh 13y agoI agree :)
- smtddr 13y agoNow here's another vid showing what everyone else feels like dealing with techies... http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x557tg_nick-burns-your-company-s-computer_fun http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x557tg_nick-burns-your-comp... What's the commonality between both vids? Just enforcing negative stereotypes & emphasizing the weakness found in the worse case scenarios of each group.
- binaryqueen 13y agoJust watched this and it was hilarious. (engineer here) I guess people can be smart enough to take things light-heartedly and be open about laughing at yourself or the situations we face.
- gk1 13y agoIt's satire, not derision.
- Karunamon 13y agoTextual version of the story - but I highly recommend you watch the video. Dare you not to get that creeping feeling of frustration... http://www.morna.nl/post/4185018780/a-business-meeting http://www.morna.nl/post/4185018780/a-business-meeting
- teemo_cute 13y agoI think it's like being a man in an all-girls gathering. You can either be awkward or the center of attention. It depends on your perception and how you would present yourself.
- mbillie1 13y ago> You can either be awkward or the center of attention. Or you could, say, not radically alter your behavior based on the genders of the people around you.
- kbenson 13y agoOr you could, say, accept that in most cultures the shared experience of associating with a specific gender while growing up leads to topics and conversations that are easier to have, sustain, and enjoy while talking to people of the same gender. This doesn't require you "radically alter your behavior", just that you understand that different groups of people often accept and find topics interesting at different levels.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mbillie1 13y agoAccepting it is exactly what I don't want to do - the only way common biases (like "it's weird/uncomfortable/etc being the only man speaking in a group of women") change is when they are overcome rather than accepted.
- kbenson 13y agoI'm not sure it's something that can - or event should - be overcome. Being a small minority in any setting, for any reason, whether is be physical characteristics, beliefs or experience can be alienating to some degree, that's a characteristic of being a minority. You are free to let that affect you in whatever way you see fit, and you are also free to use that to your advantage. For an example that plays off the original poster's idea, imagine a group of 6 couples, 5 of which have children, and a single couple that does not. Conversation may drift into parenthood related topics based on the high percentage of parents present. The childless couple can choose their own level of involvement in this conversation, and the two ends of the spectrum are probably awkwardness and center of attention. The center of attention strategy is fairly easy to achieve in this scenario. Profess your ignorance to child rearing strategies, and you will almost instantly be regaled with countless tales from those present...
- kabdib 13y agoAt one marketing-overrun startup, the suits were calling two hour meetings every afternoon and then wondering why I wasn't getting any work done. So I installed a cuckoo clock in that meeting room. The CEO loved it; he even helped wind it. I knew I'd succeeded when one of the marketing types looked at the clock and said, "I hate that thing." I don't remember if the meetings got any shorter or less frequent, but they were a little more enjoyable. [I invested some money in that place. They pulled some shenanigans, and my piece of a billion dollar company got zeroed out. But I still have the clock.]
- zorpner 13y agoLove it. A few years ago at a place I was helping out in, one of the devs had built a clock for the conference room that, at the start of a meeting, you punched the number of people in the meeting into. It knew the average company salary (this was a ~15 person software house) and would count up the "money spent" given the number of people in the room and the time on the clock. Very motivating.
- jrockway 13y agoSomeone I worked with at a previous job tried the average salary clock thing. I mentioned to him that if he really cared, he could just work late to make up for the loss. The clock didn't come to any more meetings.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoAlternatively, your pay could have been docked for not caring about wasting company resources.
- ehsanu1 13y agoI'm not sure I catch your drift.. I hope you weren't serious about your suggestion, or that you honestly think it was a helpful suggestion.
- vacri 13y agoDid the clock also total up all the days spent down rabbit-holes resulting in worthless work because there wasn't adequate communication? :) It does remind me though of a guy I once knew (late 90s) who was a senior manager at the national arm of a large, well-known international investment bank. He'd be in a meeting with the CEO and the rest of the senior managers, and the CEO wouldn't let the meeting commence if there were any computer cords visible, sometimes taking up to 15 minutes to personally clear away cords...
- jdubs 13y ago"The lines should pop"
- morkfromork 13y agoPlease implement line sharing & gifting to Facebook & Twitter.
- 7Figures2Commas 13y agoMoving beyond the exaggeration of the sketch, the irony here is that being the only engineer in a business meeting puts you in an incredibly powerful position - if you see the opportunity and know how to take advantage of it. Learning to interact with non-technical stakeholders and finding ways to deliver solutions perceived as adding value to a business is one of the best ways to make real money in this industry. For the average person, it is quite literally the difference between making $150,000/year as an employee "engineer" and practically as much as you'd like on your own terms/as your own boss.
- harlanlewis 13y agoAbsolutely. And it's not just a powerful position, it's an extremely important one. Some engineering teams so effectively resist meetings that they worm their way right out of any decision making beyond "how do we deal with the mess we've been handed THIS time?"
- canadev 13y agoI think your claim requires some elaboration. How about some concrete examples?
- fleitz 13y agoI've been on business calls where I've literally been offered a job in front of my boss. This happened to be because I had debugged a vendors' appliance and had the opportunity to say to their CTO something like: "You're product is such a piece of crap because it always crashes randomly, I narrowed it down to X and I had to break into the device and recompile the kernel with these flags to make it stop", turns out many other customers had 'random' crashes as well and they can been trying to pin it down for a few months. Fundamentally you have a seat at the table, and you're the only person in the room who can actually solve the problem. Since you're an engineer and your brain has already weeded out all the things that won't work because of technical reasons you can quickly zero in on and propose a solution, also you're the 'expert' so you have the opportunity to not say anything and actually hear what everyone else is saying. To paraphrase the video if you can say something like "I propose we put together a triangle with two red lines and a blue line" and then draw that on the board, you're a hero.
- thejosh 13y agogotta love blog spam
- aspensmonster 13y agoGlad to see this finally making it on the front page. I'm particularly impressed with the actors' ability to capture the subtle facial expressions and other mannerisms that the various characters tend to make in real life under various situations. Direct YT link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg ============================================================ My favorite bit... PHB: "That's it. Now you've confused everyone. So what exactly is stopping us from doing this?" Anderson the Engineer: "Geometry." Client: "Just ignore it." PHB: "We have a task. Seven red lines. It's not 20. It's just seven! Anderson I understand you're a specialist of a narrow field; you don't see the overall picture. But surely it's not a difficult task to draw some seven lines." Walter the PM: "Exactly! Suggest a solution. Now, any fool can criticize --no offense-- but, you're an expert. You should know better."
- zenlikethat 13y agoI agree that this bit is fantastic. Can't count the number of times I've encountered each one of these tropes. The power of positive thinking will allow us to do the impossible and so on.
- dredmorbius 13y agoThough there's considerable competition for the spot, I'm coming to the conclusion that wishful thinking (of the utterly unjustified sort) is quite probably humanity's most crushing weakness.
- jacalata 13y agoHe really should have turned that around. "Did you just criticize my analysis of this problem?"
- chavesn 13y agoSome of the comments here claim this is just showing how engineers think they are the only smart ones, or how there's equal frustration pointed back at engineers. However, this is illustrating a particular problem that only[2] affects engineers -- engineers are the ones at the end of the day who have to make a solution reality. This particular weight doesn't fall on any other role. It's easy for anyone, including engineers, to misjudge a problem when simply talking about it. This makes non-technical meetings about technical problems particularly difficult. But yes, it's true, every role has stereotypical flaws, and it's healthy to be able to laugh at them[1]. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/YiuSeRE.png http://i.imgur.com/YiuSeRE.png [2, edit to address comments]: Only affects engineers, of all the roles in a work pipeline involving engineering.
- gatehouse 13y agoI wouldn't be surprised if accountants are also affected. There's something so excruciating about acting as a hypothesis checker for hours while the people in the room gradually develop the knowledge they need to solve their own problems because they don't trust you enough to delegate.
- rtpg 13y agoIn a very meta twist, your comment reads with a slight undertone of "engineers are the only smart ones." Engineers might end up with the keys to the servers, but many problems (and solutions to them) are not very technical. Things like the copy on landing pages, or customer support workflow, and many other problems businesses can face are only technical in that at one point an engineer will do something. But it's not just engineers that have this problem. Designers can get them, marketers can get them , etc. Any opportunity for there to be cognitive dissonance will be exploited by Murphy's Law to make people's lives like this
- einhverfr 13y agoI thought this was a very funny video, not because of the reasons you are articulating but because it underscores a very real problem, namely that people come in with unrealistic expectations and can't understand why they are unrealistic. This being said, I don't think this is a problem specifically related to engineers. I think it affects nearly every specialist who is tasked with a vital role outside of the general knowledge. Accountants, particularly cost accountants, would be my second thought for a profession that must be in a similar position. Doctors and lawyers also come to mind. In the end, I think it is funny because the problems are framed in a way we specifically can relate to, not because the problems uniquely affect engineers.
- lam 13y agoStupid engineer...just draw the thing in an 11-dimensional space, and he would have gotten transparency and perpendicularity. No wonder he got talked down by management.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoMy comment when someone posted this on Facebook earlier today- "Although... A true engineer would know how to solve the problem of 7 perpendicular lines. And a master corporate engineer would get the budget for developing 7 perpendicular lines. Actually, that more or less explains defense contractors"
- GeneralMayhem 13y agoPerhaps I'm not thinking clearly - it's late here - but wouldn't 8-space suffice?
- ivan_ah 13y agoA 7-dimensional space would suffice to fit 7 orthogonal directions---though we should probably add an extra dimension for the alpha channel ;) BTW, I'm also guessing @lam's comment was referring to the 11 dimensions in string theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory#Extra_dimensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory#Extra_dimensions
- rcfox 13y agoAlso, throw in some velocity dimensions so that we can make the red lines drawn in green ink appear to be red.
- darkmighty 13y ago7 dimensions is the trivial minimum for 7 mutual |_ (the axis) Also, if you ease the restriction to each line perpendicular to every line it intercepts, you can get as many lines as you want in 3d already.
- 13y ago
- vayarajesh 13y agoAwesome.. I have a similar situation regarding the project manager in the video :) we have a small team of 5 members and i don't think we need a "project manager" considering only 5 members working on a not-so-big project and the team members are efficient enough to self manage. I dont think a small project with a small team even needs a project manager.
- Moru 13y agoI'm in a team with exactly one developer and two project managers... Guess who I am?
- vayarajesh 13y agoYou are frustrated :)
- carrotleads 13y agoWell some companies can work with no managers http://ryancarson.com/post/73639971628/the-negative-side-of-nomanager-companies http://ryancarson.com/post/73639971628/the-negative-side-of-...
- return13 13y agoi think every member of that team should have a manager, and there should be a manager to manage all the managers...
- vayarajesh 13y agoI don't think every person needs manager infact management is only needed to "manage" and managing comes into play where there is a large number of "things"/"people" to manage or look after. Small number of educated ppl doing minor tasks will never need management.
- mncolinlee 13y agoI was shocked when no one drew that lesson from our international corporate hackathon. We were cranking out impressive new products in less than twenty-four hours without a single PM. Granted, it's a sprint requiring downtime afterwards and everyone was doing what they really wanted to do instead of their day jobs.
- einhverfr 13y agoThis shouldn't be too hard. Just draw lines in 7 dimensions and accellerate them away from the viewer such that the color shifts so it is red. in fact, you only need to do three, because the other four can be discussed as being drawn in transparent ink and aligned in higher dimensions.
- einhverfr 13y ago(note, the budget for such a proposition might not far exceed a few trillion dollars.)
- carrotleads 13y agoLoved the bit about scope creep at the end. and yes I am the "expert"
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jonathanmoore 13y agoI can relate to this video. In the mid-2000s I worked as an art director at 2Advanced creating over the top Flash sites. We had a client who insisted that we add a red, invisible hexagon shield on top of the animation to prevent "forces" from attacking the site.
- MonsieurHoho 13y agoThere is no mention of engineering in the original short story. I think it's more general, it's about being the guy who will do the actual job versus all people who manage this guy.
- javajosh 13y agoThis video highlights two separate problems: unacceptable behavior, and ignorance. One should never sneer at one's coworkers, or openly mock them or undermine them. Doesn't matter if it's an engineer or a janitor, in my view. No-one should put up with being treated like that, ever, and I think you'd be better off just quitting, on the spot. The matter of the project ignorance is itself is another matter. When faced with well-meaning but confused stake-holders, the correct solution is not to throw errors like a compiler (which is what the eng in the video does), but rather to probe for more information to understand the context of the request, and work toward a workable solution. Ignoring line ink and geometry, step back and ask: where will these lines be drawn? Who will see them? What information are they trying to convey? Of course, these are the same questions that would ruin the conceit of the sketch, but that's the solution to this riddle.
- todd8 13y agoI've been the only engineer in meetings often. At one company I regularly attended senior staff meetings (President, CFO, VPs, etc.). I observed all the traits and foibles one might expect in a Dilbert cartoon strip. During one heated discussion they were arguing over the implications of some data that one of them had drawn on a graph; I had to walk over to the whiteboard and explain that the reason they couldn't interpret the data was that they had reversed the X and Y axes on the chart!
- sly_g 13y agoOriginal short story is in Russian and was written in 2011. http://alex-aka-jj.livejournal.com/66984.html http://alex-aka-jj.livejournal.com/66984.html Thought that you copyright lovers ought to know this.
- malandrew 13y agoYou can have as many perpendicular lines as you want on a Poincaré disk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_disk_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_disk_model (credit goes to my coworker dmvaldman)
- nolite 13y ago... or on a globe..
- dennisgorelik 13y agoBoth requirements could be solved: 1) In Hollywood they draw red ("blood") lines with transparent inc all the time. 2) There is no problem to draw 7 mutually perpendicular lines as long as lines are not straight. Moreover, clients never asked for mutually perpendicular lines. There are other solutions too, such as 7-dimensional space and imaginary lines. The "expert" looked quite inexperienced when he started his answer with "No".
- sopooneo 13y agoTrue, but to take the silly video, and mix in a real issue with meetings like this, we've got a problem of terminology. In standard geometry, a line, by definition, is straight. Of course we can't assume the way other people are using words agrees with our own technical definitions, so I think you solutions are reasonable.
- vayarajesh 13y agoI have already watched the video multiple times! can't help but notice the dumbest clients i have come across asking the silliest things! And the worse part is they do not and i mean DO NOT EVER understand the tech part