31 ms·

The Engineer’s Lament

248 points by nate 11y ago

angersock 11y ago
This is a great example of the difference in mindset between software developers in modern companies doing non-embedded work, and folks in more traditional mechanical or chemical engineering roles. Very, very different calculus. EDIT: Interestingly, we've got potentially much better instrumentation and analytics on our side...note how long it took to get those accidents reported, and then think how long it takes to do that kind of analysis on your production systems of what users have had problems when.
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
> Only the engineer tries to solve the problem. Wrong! The Ophthalmologist, and Priest were also trying to solve the problem. That joke, which is old because it is so good, has a deeper message.
- nmyk 11y ago
  In fact, the three of them don't even agree on what the problem is. Priest: We're frustrated. Ophthalmologist: The firefighters are blind. Engineer: The golf course is running inefficiently.
  - exelius 11y ago
    Which is exactly why the first rule of good problem solving is to re-state the problem. :)
- mhurron 11y ago
  Well, I would say that the Doctor offered to explore a solution to the firefighters issue, the engineer offered a work-around that would make his life easier at the expense of others. "Have you turned it off and on again?"
  - Arcsech 11y ago
    The point is that it wouldn't really be at the expense of others - it doesn't matter if it's dark if the players are blind. (Yes, restricting them to only playing at night may cause scheduling conflicts but it's a joke and of course omits such details.)
    - mhurron 11y ago
      Scheduling conflicts? Requiring others to flop their lives by 180 degrees so you can play a round of golf is a scheduling conflict? And the joke here is being used to illustrate a point (that the engineer thought of a solution when no one else did), I'm using it to point out that the engineer offered no solution while keeping to the general disregard for others in their simple work-arounds. Just hold it differently.
    - Retra 11y ago
      He could have also just offered to play at a different golf course. That would be inconvenient. But maybe the golf course isn't open at night? Why should it be? Or maybe the firefighters don't have the time to do it at night? It's an idea, but it's not an example of "solving the problem." It solves his problem, but probably creates problems for others.
douche 11y ago
Yep. The exceptional error gets the grease, even though its a one-in-a-million event. Invoke the feels, and the majority of people lose their shit. Give them data, and their brains turn off. BUT THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!
- tat45 11y ago
  "BUT EMOTE ABOUT THE CHILDREN!" FTFY. =)
chiph 11y ago
The Pinto wasn't an engineering failure ("it was a two-thousand-pound car on the road with four-thousand-pound cars. It got hit. It lit up. What do you expect?") but a Public Relations failure. Jason Vines was the PR guy for Ford during the Firestone/Explorer disaster. And he had one guiding principle: Don't blame the customer. Which is what Toyota did with the unintended-acceleration problem. http://www.amazon.com/What-Did-Jesus-Drive-Christianity-ebook/dp/B00O70IM1I http://www.amazon.com/What-Did-Jesus-Drive-Christianity-eboo... "PR in a crisis cannot be cleaning up after the elephants in a parade. The PR team needs to have a seat at the table before, during, and after a crisis."
- stephengillie 11y ago
  The engineering failure (as told to me by a college case study) was that there were exposed bolts directly in front of the gas tank, so a collision would almost always lead to a puncture, especially in a rear-end collision. The fix was a 2-ounce, $2 piece of square plastic - it would cover the bolts, providing a flat face for the gas tank to impact the support beam. But Ford's leadership (Iacocca?) were too sold on the "sub-2000 pound car" and didn't allow this plastic piece, along with a ton of other features that were removed from the design.
  - scarmig 11y ago
    The article suggests, though, that other compact cars had a similar bumper and fuel tank design, including sharp objects near the tank. The issue wasn't unique or exceptional. The one cherry-picked metric that came out of it was that the Pinto experienced puncture for rear end collisions at a marginally lower speed than other cars, and, after regulations were put in place to increase that minimum, fatality rates were not affected at all. Any fatality effect is noise compared to the other causal factors in fatal accidents: highway design, speed, weight of the objects of collision, level of alcohol intoxication. And even factors within Ford's control trumped the Pinto gas tank design in importance. It's just that one particularly grisly and tragic death makes for some really bad PR. Disclaimer: I've got no knowledge of the Pinto case besides hearsay and what's in this article.
tailrecursion 11y ago
There's a crucial decision the Toyota engineers made, as described by the article, which was that if the stuck accelerator was not preventing the driver from using the brake and slowing the vehicle, then the stuck accelerator is acceptable (we're talking about a small number of reports) and no fix should be made. It's not easy to understand why they would make that decision. I imagine a stuck pedal is likely to cause confusion in a driver. It would take some time before a driver will process what is happening, and realize that the accel pedal is indeed stuck. It seems like surely it would cause accidents. Furthermore, it's not a tough problem to design a pedal that moves back and forth in high humidity or high temperatures that a car interior is going to see. And it's not expensive. But we're seeing this fault in isolation. The engineers are likely thinking, "Suppose we fix this problem. That's fixed, and it cost $2 per car. Now, what are the 1000 other items that could fail and cause a similar moment of confusion, of the kind that might contribute, or seem to contribute to an accident? What will it cost to fix all of them, because fixing just one doesn't solve the problem."
- eridius 11y ago
  But they did fix the problem. They just didn't recall the existing cars. According to the article, they fixed the pedal for subsequent models of the car. > Furthermore, it's not a tough problem to design a pedal that moves back and forth in high humidity or high temperatures that a car interior is going to see. And it's not expensive. According to the article, the problem was that the material of the pedal was unexpectedly degrading in that environment, causing it to become stuck. This isn't a matter of it being expensive to produce a better pedal, it's simply a matter of an unforeseen interaction (which would argue that it is in fact hard to design a pedal that works flawlessly in that environment). And so they fixed it on subsequent models. But fixing it on all the existing cars out there would amount to an expensive recall that seemed to be rather unnecessary. > I imagine a stuck pedal is likely to cause confusion in a driver. It would take some time before a driver will process what is happening, and realize that the accel pedal is indeed stuck. It seems like surely it would cause accidents. According to the article, at the time when the issue first cropped up, there were no known cases of an accident caused by the stuck accelerator (note: I don't know if any happened later). Furthermore, the natural reaction to "my car is unexpectedly accelerating" is to slam on the brakes. I could easily see someone panicking, but a panicking person doesn't forget that the brake pedal exists, especially since all drivers have been conditioned to understand that pressing the brake pedal is how you stop the car. Based on this, their response seems pretty straightforward. Yes, there's a relatively rare issue with a stuck accelerator, but (at least at the time) there's no known cases of this leading to an accident, and the natural response by a driver upon encountering the problem, which is to hit the brakes, is sufficient to neutralize the issue. Therefore, no expensive recall is necessary. That said, they obviously had a PR problem. And it was magnified by the media's propensity to hype up situations like this, turning it into a newsworthy story (because that gets more viewers). It seems the vast majority of incidences of unexpected acceleration were not even caused by the stuck accelerator, they were either caused by poorly-fitting third-party floor mats, or by people inadvertently pressing the accelerator when they meant to press the brake, both of which are issues that are not unique to Toyota cars (in point of fact, to the best of my knowledge, every incidence of someone unable to stop the car by pressing the brake pedal was in fact pedal confusion, where they were pressing the accelerator thinking it was the brake, and therefore not caused by this defect at all). Ultimately, I think Toyota had the right engineering response, they just needed to fix their PR response. Don't let the engineers dictate communication to the customers. Understand that reality and public perception are often at odds with each other, and that public perception is just as important as reality. That's not to say that they should have issued a recall, because they shouldn't (if anything, that would have reinforced public perception that the cars were dangerous). But they should have realized that they needed to communicate with the public in a different fashion.
scarmig 11y ago
An interesting paper. "The Myth of the Ford Pinto Case": http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pint...
- nilved 11y ago
  PDF warning
stillsut 11y ago
My 'Bait & Switch' light turned on half way through: The author tries to move between mech-eng analysis (under controlled experimental conditions) - "what happens to this piece of metal in a 25 mph crash? how about 30?" vs. social-science analysis - "what happens to crashes when the state changes the excise tax on alcohol?" It's not like there could be any confounding variables between states Oregon vs. Kentucky, the 1970's vs. the 1990's etc. It's all just data and engineers, right?
- eric_h 11y ago
  This article was written by Malcolm Gladwell. He frequently does that sort of thing in his books/essays.
- hnnewguy 11y ago
  The essay covered lots of things about the subject matter. Do you not think social scientists understand confounding variables, or do you assume they are idiots?
d4rkph1b3r 11y ago
I'm actually shocked at this article's underlying message, which seems to be implying that since engineering perfection is unobtainable, good enough within the given time and material constraints is acceptable and these recall issues were more of a PR problem. Ford and Toyota are companies that generates billions of dollars in profit. Think about that. It in no way realistically ran into any constraints that were not arbitrary. You can hire more engineers. You can hire better engineers. This is not a question of a scrappy start up needing to release something or go bust. I'm not anti-capitalism. I understand companies run into actual, real constraints that prevent perfection. But do we care that the defects and safety issues are dwarfed by poor driving? How are these self imposed 'constraints' on engineering anything but maximizing shareholder value at the expense of public safety?
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  Profit per car for car manufacturers is often under $1000 per car. That's not even close to enough money for perfection.
  - bronson 11y ago
    Are profit and perfection correlated? Seems unlikely.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      Inversely correlated. Perfection costs.
      - bronson 11y ago
        Apple is an obvious counterexample (high perfection and high profit). Sure, perfection costs more, but does that directly affect profit?
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  It in no way realistically ran into any constraints that were not arbitrary. You seem to think that every constraint in the world can be removed by more money.
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
Every Engineer's Solemn Duty http://www.warplife.com/ethics/duty.html http://www.warplife.com/ethics/duty.html
- sanderjd 11y ago
  I think this is like a lot of things; the theory is sound, but the hard part is figuring out when it applies. It can be misapplied at both the low and high ends, and there's a vast murky middle.
  - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
    "vast murky middle". I eagerly enrolled in Ethics my first term at UCSC, in hopes of learning The Answers To All Of Life's Great Questions. Instead I learned how to make tedious, hair-splitting arguments. While I readily agreed that the philosophy prof who taught the class had valid arguments, they were so complex that I didn't think they would do anyone any real good. The one thing I took away from the class was the concept of "The Minimally-Sufficient Samaritan". A Good Samaritan will risk their life for that of another; a bad Samaritan won't. A Minimally-Sufficient Samaritan will only do enough that they are regarded as ethical.
    - mcguire 11y ago
      I took a class called "Contemporary Moral Problems" from a professor who suspiciously resembled Captain Kangaroo. In it, I found my favorite statement from philosophy: "I find it plausible to believe that I have a moral duty not to wantonly slaughter my neighbors." (How many wishy-washy terms can you find in it?) The Minimally-Sufficient Samaritan is entering my lexicon. Thanks!
baddox 11y ago
There is an entertaining video of Milton Friedman discussing the same issues with an audience member: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltnBOrCB7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltnBOrCB7I
- BoardsOfCanada 11y ago
  Very interesting. I was amazed that the video seemed to be uploaded with the intent of showing what a disgusting human being Friedman is, when in fact his points (in this particular discussion) are quite uncontroversial.
  - tim333 11y ago
    Yeah though his point that if consumers want to pay $13 less for a Pinto without the plastic block they should be free to do so is impractical from the point of view of consumers being able to analyse that stuff. (4m55)
  - baddox 11y ago
    Yeah. You can also find the same clip uploaded with the opposite intent.
tbrownaw 11y ago
He argues for overturning the deeply held—and, in his view, irrational—proscription against two-foot driving. If drivers used one foot for the accelerator and the other foot for the brake, he says, they would be far less likely to mistake one pedal for the other. ...? I've always driven that way, except when I was practicing on a stick shift (which I did not like, because it had more pedals than I have feet). Do people seriously not like doing this for some reason?
- jotux 11y ago
  Often people end up resting their feet on the brake pedal just enough to turn on the brake lights which makes them useless as indicators to the people behind you.
- hsod 11y ago
  I was explicitly taught not to do this, both in Driver's Ed and by my father. The explanation I was given was that it's bad for the car, since you'll tend to apply light brake pressure while accelerating which wears out the drive train and the brakes. Also it turns on your brake lights, potentially confusing other drivers.
  - arprocter 11y ago
    Newer 3 pedal VWs apparently don't allow you to use the brake and the accelerator at the same time, which annoys people who heel and toe (left foot using clutch, heel of right foot pressing the brake and right toe blipping the gas to rev match on a downshift). Edit: after doing some reading it seems this only happens when you aren't using the clutch, which means it makes left foot braking impossible.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  Historically people who drive with one foot on each pedal go through brake pads faster as a function of overlap between the application of throttle and brake. When I was taking Drivers Education (way back when) my teach asserted that from a neurological perspective it was faster for the brain to use one foot than two, because using two introduced an additional step in the process of deciding which part of the body to active. His claim (and I don't recall him providing direct evidence of this) that having go/stop be a choice of two movements of a single limb, allowed you to react faster than picking which of two limbs to activate for the desired behavior.
sgt101 11y ago
In physical engineering two principle tools are used to control projects : specifications and tolerances. I software we have a kind of specification (generally dimensioned and rather fuzzy) but no concept of tolerance. But also software quality seems to me to be more fundamentally about perception than anything else.
- learc83 11y ago
  The problem with software is that the software is the specification. Any sufficiently detailed software spec will need to be written in a formal language that might as well be code.
  - mtVessel 11y ago
    I know that's received wisdom in some parts, but is it actually true? Is it true for other engineering disciplines? Is it true for hardware design? If not, what makes software special? I think it only seems true because of the amount of money people are willing to invest in software development, relative to other ventures.
    - learc83 11y ago
      It's just a property of the artifact you're building. You're designing a process instead of a product. The artifact you produce is a description of that process--code. The closet thing I can think of is anyone who works on processes instead of products. If you look at disciplines that design processes, the larger the scope of the process, the less exact the methods to design them (mainly because the number of variables grows too large). At one end, industrial engineers who design assembly lines have very rigorous design methodologies backed by math and empirical data. At the other extreme you have politicians designing the process of running a country, and their methodologies are almost never based on math or empirical evidence. One way I've heard it described is kind of midway between an industrial engineer and a politician--When designing a large scale software system, you should be like an urban planner. You decide what kind of zoning you need--residential over here, commercial over there. Then you build the roads and other infrastructure that connects the various districts.
markbnj 11y ago
Absolutely fascinating and very insightful into the differences in perspective between engineering and other disciplines.
josu 11y ago
This is the whole idea behind the article: >“The Toyota guy explained this to the panel,” Martin went on. “He said, ‘Here’s our process.’ So I said to him, ‘What do you imagine the people are thinking? They’re shaking like a leaf at the side of the road and after that whole experience they are told, “The car’s fine. Chill out. Don’t make mistakes anymore.” Of course they are not going to be happy. These people are scared. What if instead you sent people out who could be genuinely empathetic? What if you said, “We’re sorry this happened. What we’re worried about is your comfort and your confidence and your safety. We’re going to check your car. If you’re just scared of this car, we’ll take it back and give you another, because your feeling of confidence matters more than anything else.” ’ It was a sort of revelation. He wasn’t a dumb guy. He was an engineer. He only thought about doing things from an engineer’s standpoint. They changed what those teams did, and they started getting love letters from people.”
- apalmer 11y ago
  Thats a double edged sword. The thing is, it was not their job to make people feel better, it was their job to evaluate the situation. There is a good and a bad side of that trade off...
ableal 11y ago
I find it strange that the shadow, or wake, of the 1960s Ralph Nader case ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed ) is not mentioned. Rather large elephant.
patio11 11y ago
There's a very strongly held opinion in certain places in central Japan that the Toyota sudden acceleration issue has at no time ever actually been a true statement about engineering reality, and that it has been at all times an outright fabrication on the part of the American government to protect the domestic auto industry which is presently owned by the American government. I would be more skeptical of this but for the reports coming out from the NHTS confirming "Yep, there is no there there" combined with the multi-billion dollar fines. It has the appearance of it just not mattering whether there were any faults in the vehicles.
- sjg007 11y ago
  There was a court case later that investigated the firmware of the drive by wire throttle control system software. Basically, design choices in the software implementation couldn't rule out the software as the source of unintended acceleration. All bets are off after stack overflow and continued execution. Also the "brake override" wasn't a feature included at all which one could argue should have been part of the design. In fact, software for car control systems should go through the same rigorous testing, documentation, control etc... (similar to what is required for FDA medical devices). More: http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    It's hard to say whether it should or not. Something like that, sure. Perhaps not exactly the same thing.
  - vilhelm_s 11y ago
    The court case showed that the throttle control programming was shoddy in various ways, but I don't think they demonstrated any observably buggy behavior, let alone any proof that software faults were behind any particular accident. I think it's also quite possible that there never were any abnormal unintended accelerations, but the media debacle caused people to carefully investigate the cars, at which point they discovered that the programming was bad.
tunesmith 11y ago
This is really weird, I thought it was established that the Toyota acceleration WAS a phenomenon brought on by faulty microprocessor design: http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer... Toyota's problem wasn't that they shouldn't have blamed the customer when it was the customer's fault, their problem was that they shouldn't have blamed the customer when it was Toyota's fault.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lambdaelite 11y ago
  Toyota released an independent analysis of their electronic throttle system through their press website: http://toyotanews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=3593 http://toyotanews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cfm?a... It's a fascinating report that includes a code review with PolySpace and hardware-in-the-loop testing. TL;dr, Exponent didn't find any hardware or software design defects that could cause "uncommanded acceleration". Barr's analysis in the linked article sounds like he found problems that should have been caught by their coding standards and design reviews, but it doesn't sound like he found or could suggest a specific event sequence that could lead to an UA.
  - TwoBit 11y ago
    If Toyota had anything to do with that analysis then it wasn't independent. My recollection of the Barr analysis is that a particular failure case was in fact described which occurs during certain conditions of memory exhaustion: http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyota-and-unintended-acceleration/ http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyo... "the team led by Barr Group found what the NASA team sought but couldn’t find: 'a systematic software malfunction in the Main CPU that opens the throttle without operator action and continues to properly control fuel injection and ignition' that is not reliably detected by any fail-safe."
    - 11y ago
MoOmer 11y ago
The most ridiculous fix to a serious car problem, to me, was that with the GM Cobalt et al. cars: http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-switch-from-hell-gms-barra-and.html http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-switch... Anyone can see that the 'fix' was half-baked. This is a weird analogy, but it popped into my mind to fit the unbelievable situation: It's like designing a traveling laptop-cooling station where the laptop sits on a strainer, which is almost touching a pool of water. The fix was to increase the gap between the strainer and the water by 1cm. Surprisingly, laptops would still get wet after the fix.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  What's more bizarre is that turning the key should completely devastate the car. Faulty switch or not, that sounds pointlessly hazardous. I'm hoping there's a good reason for this, but it sounds really terrible. Do "keyless" cars immediately shut off when you press the stop button while driving?
mcguire 11y ago
This is a brilliant quote: "Surely this is why Jimmy Carter remains the most puzzling American President in recent times. We have too often insisted on trying to understand him using the default modes of identity politics: as a white, Southern born-again Christian. But Carter was by profession and training an engineer—a disciple of the greatest and most influential engineer in the history of the U.S. Navy, Admiral Hyman Rickover. Rickover, Carter once said, had more influence on him than anyone except his parents. In his literalness, his relentless candor, his practicality, Carter was the Toyota engineer by the side of the road doggedly lecturing us on how to drive the car. Carter’s true nature is puzzling only if we remain rooted in the fantasy that the world we inherit somehow matters more than the world that we chose for ourselves—and that surrounds us, from nine to five, every working day of our adult lives."
- clebio 11y ago
  I thought it was abrupt and reaching. It felt like the author has this tidbit about Carter laying around that he'd been holding on to, but wasn't sure where to use it. He thought it could maybe fit here, but it just was jarring. Not to mention that Carter isn't quite recent enough for me to really have any context about the comparison (what policy decisions set Carter apart?). Finally, the injection of race and religion in this otherwise unrelated article was just out of the blue.
  - mod 11y ago
    The "injection of race and religion" was not that at all, rather an observation of the usual "identity" attached to him. I agree with the idea that many or most readers won't have a working knowledge of Carter's policy--I certainly fall into that group.
  - dunmalg 11y ago
    Yeah, the Carter bit made no sense. I remember Carter, and a lot of his bad decisions were very much NOT the result of "engineer thinking". One that comes immediately to mind is his executive order outlawing breeder reactors, which has basically saddled us with being unable to cleanly reprocess reactor waste back into usable fuel. Never mind the fact that only a very specific type of breeder reactor produces weapons-grade plutonium, and never mind that as a nuclear enginner he SHOULD have known this, he still banned them in a bizarre attempt to ingratiate himself with the 70's "disarmament/anti nuke" movement that never seemed to fully grasp the distinction between nuclear WEAPONS and nuclear POWER.
bariumbitmap 11y ago
> Also in part because of that, the F.A.A. has close to fifty thousand > employees—an order of magnitude more employees than we do. We have six hundred. Am I missing something? 50,000 vs 600 is two orders of magnitude difference. Perhaps the person quoted was speaking colloquially, but I would argue such a quotation should have a [sic] in it.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  One thing you're missing is that 25,000 of the FAA employees are Air Traffic Controllers. There is no equivalent function that NHTSA does that would require that many employees. This whole comparison grated on me. Either the NHTSA guy is an idiot or Gladwell is an idiot or both, likely both. Or they're deliberately prevaricating and hoping that most people won't notice. I can't stand sloppy "factoids" like that. Context is essential.
wiggumz 11y ago
It's a little annoying to see the author retell the story of Toyota's prius acceleration problem as if it were a defect with the peddle. We know now that it was a problem with spaghetti code firmware, lack of testing, & poor system design. See here http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...
TwoBit 11y ago
Toyota's problem was real, and the author hot it wrong: http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyota-and-unintended-acceleration/ http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyo...
- tim333 11y ago
  Gladwell doesn't say there was no problem. He says "[in the Pinto case] two dozen of their occupants were killed by fires from rear collisions. The number of deaths linked to the Toyota sudden-acceleration complaints was about the same." And then points out that number is small compared the number of lives that could be saved many other ways.
digi_owl 11y ago
What i find most worrying about this article is the change in thinking once one has been with a organization for some time. That in turn brings to mind the Challanger debacle, and the claim that it happened because the CEO of the company making the o-rings shifted his thinking from engineer to management during the go/no-go conference call. And subsequently changed his stance from a initial no-go (engineering) to a go (management)...

248 points by nate 11y ago

This is a great example of the difference in mindset between software developers in modern companies doing non-embedded work, and folks in more traditional mechanical or chemical engineering roles. Very, very different calculus. EDIT: Interestingly, we've got potentially much better instrumentation and analytics on our side...note how long it took to get those accidents reported, and then think how long it takes to do that kind of analysis on your production systems of what users have had problems when.

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago

> Only the engineer tries to solve the problem. Wrong! The Ophthalmologist, and Priest were also trying to solve the problem. That joke, which is old because it is so good, has a deeper message.

nmyk 11y ago
In fact, the three of them don't even agree on what the problem is. Priest: We're frustrated. Ophthalmologist: The firefighters are blind. Engineer: The golf course is running inefficiently.
- exelius 11y ago
  Which is exactly why the first rule of good problem solving is to re-state the problem. :)
mhurron 11y ago
Well, I would say that the Doctor offered to explore a solution to the firefighters issue, the engineer offered a work-around that would make his life easier at the expense of others. "Have you turned it off and on again?"
- Arcsech 11y ago
  The point is that it wouldn't really be at the expense of others - it doesn't matter if it's dark if the players are blind. (Yes, restricting them to only playing at night may cause scheduling conflicts but it's a joke and of course omits such details.)
  - mhurron 11y ago
    Scheduling conflicts? Requiring others to flop their lives by 180 degrees so you can play a round of golf is a scheduling conflict? And the joke here is being used to illustrate a point (that the engineer thought of a solution when no one else did), I'm using it to point out that the engineer offered no solution while keeping to the general disregard for others in their simple work-arounds. Just hold it differently.
  - Retra 11y ago
    He could have also just offered to play at a different golf course. That would be inconvenient. But maybe the golf course isn't open at night? Why should it be? Or maybe the firefighters don't have the time to do it at night? It's an idea, but it's not an example of "solving the problem." It solves his problem, but probably creates problems for others.

douche 11y ago

Yep. The exceptional error gets the grease, even though its a one-in-a-million event. Invoke the feels, and the majority of people lose their shit. Give them data, and their brains turn off. BUT THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!

tat45 11y ago
"BUT EMOTE ABOUT THE CHILDREN!" FTFY. =)

chiph 11y ago

The Pinto wasn't an engineering failure ("it was a two-thousand-pound car on the road with four-thousand-pound cars. It got hit. It lit up. What do you expect?") but a Public Relations failure. Jason Vines was the PR guy for Ford during the Firestone/Explorer disaster. And he had one guiding principle: Don't blame the customer. Which is what Toyota did with the unintended-acceleration problem. http://www.amazon.com/What-Did-Jesus-Drive-Christianity-ebook/dp/B00O70IM1I http://www.amazon.com/What-Did-Jesus-Drive-Christianity-eboo... "PR in a crisis cannot be cleaning up after the elephants in a parade. The PR team needs to have a seat at the table before, during, and after a crisis."

stephengillie 11y ago
The engineering failure (as told to me by a college case study) was that there were exposed bolts directly in front of the gas tank, so a collision would almost always lead to a puncture, especially in a rear-end collision. The fix was a 2-ounce, $2 piece of square plastic - it would cover the bolts, providing a flat face for the gas tank to impact the support beam. But Ford's leadership (Iacocca?) were too sold on the "sub-2000 pound car" and didn't allow this plastic piece, along with a ton of other features that were removed from the design.
- scarmig 11y ago
  The article suggests, though, that other compact cars had a similar bumper and fuel tank design, including sharp objects near the tank. The issue wasn't unique or exceptional. The one cherry-picked metric that came out of it was that the Pinto experienced puncture for rear end collisions at a marginally lower speed than other cars, and, after regulations were put in place to increase that minimum, fatality rates were not affected at all. Any fatality effect is noise compared to the other causal factors in fatal accidents: highway design, speed, weight of the objects of collision, level of alcohol intoxication. And even factors within Ford's control trumped the Pinto gas tank design in importance. It's just that one particularly grisly and tragic death makes for some really bad PR. Disclaimer: I've got no knowledge of the Pinto case besides hearsay and what's in this article.

tailrecursion 11y ago

There's a crucial decision the Toyota engineers made, as described by the article, which was that if the stuck accelerator was not preventing the driver from using the brake and slowing the vehicle, then the stuck accelerator is acceptable (we're talking about a small number of reports) and no fix should be made. It's not easy to understand why they would make that decision. I imagine a stuck pedal is likely to cause confusion in a driver. It would take some time before a driver will process what is happening, and realize that the accel pedal is indeed stuck. It seems like surely it would cause accidents. Furthermore, it's not a tough problem to design a pedal that moves back and forth in high humidity or high temperatures that a car interior is going to see. And it's not expensive. But we're seeing this fault in isolation. The engineers are likely thinking, "Suppose we fix this problem. That's fixed, and it cost $2 per car. Now, what are the 1000 other items that could fail and cause a similar moment of confusion, of the kind that might contribute, or seem to contribute to an accident? What will it cost to fix all of them, because fixing just one doesn't solve the problem."

eridius 11y ago
But they did fix the problem. They just didn't recall the existing cars. According to the article, they fixed the pedal for subsequent models of the car. > Furthermore, it's not a tough problem to design a pedal that moves back and forth in high humidity or high temperatures that a car interior is going to see. And it's not expensive. According to the article, the problem was that the material of the pedal was unexpectedly degrading in that environment, causing it to become stuck. This isn't a matter of it being expensive to produce a better pedal, it's simply a matter of an unforeseen interaction (which would argue that it is in fact hard to design a pedal that works flawlessly in that environment). And so they fixed it on subsequent models. But fixing it on all the existing cars out there would amount to an expensive recall that seemed to be rather unnecessary. > I imagine a stuck pedal is likely to cause confusion in a driver. It would take some time before a driver will process what is happening, and realize that the accel pedal is indeed stuck. It seems like surely it would cause accidents. According to the article, at the time when the issue first cropped up, there were no known cases of an accident caused by the stuck accelerator (note: I don't know if any happened later). Furthermore, the natural reaction to "my car is unexpectedly accelerating" is to slam on the brakes. I could easily see someone panicking, but a panicking person doesn't forget that the brake pedal exists, especially since all drivers have been conditioned to understand that pressing the brake pedal is how you stop the car. Based on this, their response seems pretty straightforward. Yes, there's a relatively rare issue with a stuck accelerator, but (at least at the time) there's no known cases of this leading to an accident, and the natural response by a driver upon encountering the problem, which is to hit the brakes, is sufficient to neutralize the issue. Therefore, no expensive recall is necessary. That said, they obviously had a PR problem. And it was magnified by the media's propensity to hype up situations like this, turning it into a newsworthy story (because that gets more viewers). It seems the vast majority of incidences of unexpected acceleration were not even caused by the stuck accelerator, they were either caused by poorly-fitting third-party floor mats, or by people inadvertently pressing the accelerator when they meant to press the brake, both of which are issues that are not unique to Toyota cars (in point of fact, to the best of my knowledge, every incidence of someone unable to stop the car by pressing the brake pedal was in fact pedal confusion, where they were pressing the accelerator thinking it was the brake, and therefore not caused by this defect at all). Ultimately, I think Toyota had the right engineering response, they just needed to fix their PR response. Don't let the engineers dictate communication to the customers. Understand that reality and public perception are often at odds with each other, and that public perception is just as important as reality. That's not to say that they should have issued a recall, because they shouldn't (if anything, that would have reinforced public perception that the cars were dangerous). But they should have realized that they needed to communicate with the public in a different fashion.

scarmig 11y ago

An interesting paper. "The Myth of the Ford Pinto Case": http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pint...

nilved 11y ago
PDF warning

stillsut 11y ago

My 'Bait & Switch' light turned on half way through: The author tries to move between mech-eng analysis (under controlled experimental conditions) - "what happens to this piece of metal in a 25 mph crash? how about 30?" vs. social-science analysis - "what happens to crashes when the state changes the excise tax on alcohol?" It's not like there could be any confounding variables between states Oregon vs. Kentucky, the 1970's vs. the 1990's etc. It's all just data and engineers, right?

eric_h 11y ago
This article was written by Malcolm Gladwell. He frequently does that sort of thing in his books/essays.
hnnewguy 11y ago
The essay covered lots of things about the subject matter. Do you not think social scientists understand confounding variables, or do you assume they are idiots?

d4rkph1b3r 11y ago

I'm actually shocked at this article's underlying message, which seems to be implying that since engineering perfection is unobtainable, good enough within the given time and material constraints is acceptable and these recall issues were more of a PR problem. Ford and Toyota are companies that generates billions of dollars in profit. Think about that. It in no way realistically ran into any constraints that were not arbitrary. You can hire more engineers. You can hire better engineers. This is not a question of a scrappy start up needing to release something or go bust. I'm not anti-capitalism. I understand companies run into actual, real constraints that prevent perfection. But do we care that the defects and safety issues are dwarfed by poor driving? How are these self imposed 'constraints' on engineering anything but maximizing shareholder value at the expense of public safety?

bryanlarsen 11y ago
Profit per car for car manufacturers is often under $1000 per car. That's not even close to enough money for perfection.
- bronson 11y ago
  Are profit and perfection correlated? Seems unlikely.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Inversely correlated. Perfection costs.
    - bronson 11y ago
      Apple is an obvious counterexample (high perfection and high profit). Sure, perfection costs more, but does that directly affect profit?
sliverstorm 11y ago
It in no way realistically ran into any constraints that were not arbitrary. You seem to think that every constraint in the world can be removed by more money.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago

Every Engineer's Solemn Duty http://www.warplife.com/ethics/duty.html http://www.warplife.com/ethics/duty.html

sanderjd 11y ago
I think this is like a lot of things; the theory is sound, but the hard part is figuring out when it applies. It can be misapplied at both the low and high ends, and there's a vast murky middle.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  "vast murky middle". I eagerly enrolled in Ethics my first term at UCSC, in hopes of learning The Answers To All Of Life's Great Questions. Instead I learned how to make tedious, hair-splitting arguments. While I readily agreed that the philosophy prof who taught the class had valid arguments, they were so complex that I didn't think they would do anyone any real good. The one thing I took away from the class was the concept of "The Minimally-Sufficient Samaritan". A Good Samaritan will risk their life for that of another; a bad Samaritan won't. A Minimally-Sufficient Samaritan will only do enough that they are regarded as ethical.
  - mcguire 11y ago
    I took a class called "Contemporary Moral Problems" from a professor who suspiciously resembled Captain Kangaroo. In it, I found my favorite statement from philosophy: "I find it plausible to believe that I have a moral duty not to wantonly slaughter my neighbors." (How many wishy-washy terms can you find in it?) The Minimally-Sufficient Samaritan is entering my lexicon. Thanks!

baddox 11y ago

There is an entertaining video of Milton Friedman discussing the same issues with an audience member: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltnBOrCB7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltnBOrCB7I

BoardsOfCanada 11y ago
Very interesting. I was amazed that the video seemed to be uploaded with the intent of showing what a disgusting human being Friedman is, when in fact his points (in this particular discussion) are quite uncontroversial.
- tim333 11y ago
  Yeah though his point that if consumers want to pay $13 less for a Pinto without the plastic block they should be free to do so is impractical from the point of view of consumers being able to analyse that stuff. (4m55)
- baddox 11y ago
  Yeah. You can also find the same clip uploaded with the opposite intent.

tbrownaw 11y ago

He argues for overturning the deeply held—and, in his view, irrational—proscription against two-foot driving. If drivers used one foot for the accelerator and the other foot for the brake, he says, they would be far less likely to mistake one pedal for the other. ...? I've always driven that way, except when I was practicing on a stick shift (which I did not like, because it had more pedals than I have feet). Do people seriously not like doing this for some reason?

jotux 11y ago
Often people end up resting their feet on the brake pedal just enough to turn on the brake lights which makes them useless as indicators to the people behind you.
hsod 11y ago
I was explicitly taught not to do this, both in Driver's Ed and by my father. The explanation I was given was that it's bad for the car, since you'll tend to apply light brake pressure while accelerating which wears out the drive train and the brakes. Also it turns on your brake lights, potentially confusing other drivers.
- arprocter 11y ago
  Newer 3 pedal VWs apparently don't allow you to use the brake and the accelerator at the same time, which annoys people who heel and toe (left foot using clutch, heel of right foot pressing the brake and right toe blipping the gas to rev match on a downshift). Edit: after doing some reading it seems this only happens when you aren't using the clutch, which means it makes left foot braking impossible.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Historically people who drive with one foot on each pedal go through brake pads faster as a function of overlap between the application of throttle and brake. When I was taking Drivers Education (way back when) my teach asserted that from a neurological perspective it was faster for the brain to use one foot than two, because using two introduced an additional step in the process of deciding which part of the body to active. His claim (and I don't recall him providing direct evidence of this) that having go/stop be a choice of two movements of a single limb, allowed you to react faster than picking which of two limbs to activate for the desired behavior.

sgt101 11y ago

In physical engineering two principle tools are used to control projects : specifications and tolerances. I software we have a kind of specification (generally dimensioned and rather fuzzy) but no concept of tolerance. But also software quality seems to me to be more fundamentally about perception than anything else.

learc83 11y ago
The problem with software is that the software is the specification. Any sufficiently detailed software spec will need to be written in a formal language that might as well be code.
- mtVessel 11y ago
  I know that's received wisdom in some parts, but is it actually true? Is it true for other engineering disciplines? Is it true for hardware design? If not, what makes software special? I think it only seems true because of the amount of money people are willing to invest in software development, relative to other ventures.
  - learc83 11y ago
    It's just a property of the artifact you're building. You're designing a process instead of a product. The artifact you produce is a description of that process--code. The closet thing I can think of is anyone who works on processes instead of products. If you look at disciplines that design processes, the larger the scope of the process, the less exact the methods to design them (mainly because the number of variables grows too large). At one end, industrial engineers who design assembly lines have very rigorous design methodologies backed by math and empirical data. At the other extreme you have politicians designing the process of running a country, and their methodologies are almost never based on math or empirical evidence. One way I've heard it described is kind of midway between an industrial engineer and a politician--When designing a large scale software system, you should be like an urban planner. You decide what kind of zoning you need--residential over here, commercial over there. Then you build the roads and other infrastructure that connects the various districts.

markbnj 11y ago

Absolutely fascinating and very insightful into the differences in perspective between engineering and other disciplines.

josu 11y ago

This is the whole idea behind the article: >“The Toyota guy explained this to the panel,” Martin went on. “He said, ‘Here’s our process.’ So I said to him, ‘What do you imagine the people are thinking? They’re shaking like a leaf at the side of the road and after that whole experience they are told, “The car’s fine. Chill out. Don’t make mistakes anymore.” Of course they are not going to be happy. These people are scared. What if instead you sent people out who could be genuinely empathetic? What if you said, “We’re sorry this happened. What we’re worried about is your comfort and your confidence and your safety. We’re going to check your car. If you’re just scared of this car, we’ll take it back and give you another, because your feeling of confidence matters more than anything else.” ’ It was a sort of revelation. He wasn’t a dumb guy. He was an engineer. He only thought about doing things from an engineer’s standpoint. They changed what those teams did, and they started getting love letters from people.”

apalmer 11y ago
Thats a double edged sword. The thing is, it was not their job to make people feel better, it was their job to evaluate the situation. There is a good and a bad side of that trade off...

ableal 11y ago

I find it strange that the shadow, or wake, of the 1960s Ralph Nader case ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed ) is not mentioned. Rather large elephant.

patio11 11y ago

There's a very strongly held opinion in certain places in central Japan that the Toyota sudden acceleration issue has at no time ever actually been a true statement about engineering reality, and that it has been at all times an outright fabrication on the part of the American government to protect the domestic auto industry which is presently owned by the American government. I would be more skeptical of this but for the reports coming out from the NHTS confirming "Yep, there is no there there" combined with the multi-billion dollar fines. It has the appearance of it just not mattering whether there were any faults in the vehicles.

sjg007 11y ago
There was a court case later that investigated the firmware of the drive by wire throttle control system software. Basically, design choices in the software implementation couldn't rule out the software as the source of unintended acceleration. All bets are off after stack overflow and continued execution. Also the "brake override" wasn't a feature included at all which one could argue should have been part of the design. In fact, software for car control systems should go through the same rigorous testing, documentation, control etc... (similar to what is required for FDA medical devices). More: http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  It's hard to say whether it should or not. Something like that, sure. Perhaps not exactly the same thing.
- vilhelm_s 11y ago
  The court case showed that the throttle control programming was shoddy in various ways, but I don't think they demonstrated any observably buggy behavior, let alone any proof that software faults were behind any particular accident. I think it's also quite possible that there never were any abnormal unintended accelerations, but the media debacle caused people to carefully investigate the cars, at which point they discovered that the programming was bad.

tunesmith 11y ago

This is really weird, I thought it was established that the Toyota acceleration WAS a phenomenon brought on by faulty microprocessor design: http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer... Toyota's problem wasn't that they shouldn't have blamed the customer when it was the customer's fault, their problem was that they shouldn't have blamed the customer when it was Toyota's fault.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lambdaelite 11y ago
Toyota released an independent analysis of their electronic throttle system through their press website: http://toyotanews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=3593 http://toyotanews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cfm?a... It's a fascinating report that includes a code review with PolySpace and hardware-in-the-loop testing. TL;dr, Exponent didn't find any hardware or software design defects that could cause "uncommanded acceleration". Barr's analysis in the linked article sounds like he found problems that should have been caught by their coding standards and design reviews, but it doesn't sound like he found or could suggest a specific event sequence that could lead to an UA.
- TwoBit 11y ago
  If Toyota had anything to do with that analysis then it wasn't independent. My recollection of the Barr analysis is that a particular failure case was in fact described which occurs during certain conditions of memory exhaustion: http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyota-and-unintended-acceleration/ http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyo... "the team led by Barr Group found what the NASA team sought but couldn’t find: 'a systematic software malfunction in the Main CPU that opens the throttle without operator action and continues to properly control fuel injection and ignition' that is not reliably detected by any fail-safe."
  - 11y ago

MoOmer 11y ago

The most ridiculous fix to a serious car problem, to me, was that with the GM Cobalt et al. cars: http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-switch-from-hell-gms-barra-and.html http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-switch... Anyone can see that the 'fix' was half-baked. This is a weird analogy, but it popped into my mind to fit the unbelievable situation: It's like designing a traveling laptop-cooling station where the laptop sits on a strainer, which is almost touching a pool of water. The fix was to increase the gap between the strainer and the water by 1cm. Surprisingly, laptops would still get wet after the fix.

MichaelGG 11y ago
What's more bizarre is that turning the key should completely devastate the car. Faulty switch or not, that sounds pointlessly hazardous. I'm hoping there's a good reason for this, but it sounds really terrible. Do "keyless" cars immediately shut off when you press the stop button while driving?

mcguire 11y ago

This is a brilliant quote: "Surely this is why Jimmy Carter remains the most puzzling American President in recent times. We have too often insisted on trying to understand him using the default modes of identity politics: as a white, Southern born-again Christian. But Carter was by profession and training an engineer—a disciple of the greatest and most influential engineer in the history of the U.S. Navy, Admiral Hyman Rickover. Rickover, Carter once said, had more influence on him than anyone except his parents. In his literalness, his relentless candor, his practicality, Carter was the Toyota engineer by the side of the road doggedly lecturing us on how to drive the car. Carter’s true nature is puzzling only if we remain rooted in the fantasy that the world we inherit somehow matters more than the world that we chose for ourselves—and that surrounds us, from nine to five, every working day of our adult lives."

clebio 11y ago
I thought it was abrupt and reaching. It felt like the author has this tidbit about Carter laying around that he'd been holding on to, but wasn't sure where to use it. He thought it could maybe fit here, but it just was jarring. Not to mention that Carter isn't quite recent enough for me to really have any context about the comparison (what policy decisions set Carter apart?). Finally, the injection of race and religion in this otherwise unrelated article was just out of the blue.
- mod 11y ago
  The "injection of race and religion" was not that at all, rather an observation of the usual "identity" attached to him. I agree with the idea that many or most readers won't have a working knowledge of Carter's policy--I certainly fall into that group.
- dunmalg 11y ago
  Yeah, the Carter bit made no sense. I remember Carter, and a lot of his bad decisions were very much NOT the result of "engineer thinking". One that comes immediately to mind is his executive order outlawing breeder reactors, which has basically saddled us with being unable to cleanly reprocess reactor waste back into usable fuel. Never mind the fact that only a very specific type of breeder reactor produces weapons-grade plutonium, and never mind that as a nuclear enginner he SHOULD have known this, he still banned them in a bizarre attempt to ingratiate himself with the 70's "disarmament/anti nuke" movement that never seemed to fully grasp the distinction between nuclear WEAPONS and nuclear POWER.

bariumbitmap 11y ago

> Also in part because of that, the F.A.A. has close to fifty thousand > employees—an order of magnitude more employees than we do. We have six hundred. Am I missing something? 50,000 vs 600 is two orders of magnitude difference. Perhaps the person quoted was speaking colloquially, but I would argue such a quotation should have a [sic] in it.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
One thing you're missing is that 25,000 of the FAA employees are Air Traffic Controllers. There is no equivalent function that NHTSA does that would require that many employees. This whole comparison grated on me. Either the NHTSA guy is an idiot or Gladwell is an idiot or both, likely both. Or they're deliberately prevaricating and hoping that most people won't notice. I can't stand sloppy "factoids" like that. Context is essential.

wiggumz 11y ago

It's a little annoying to see the author retell the story of Toyota's prius acceleration problem as if it were a defect with the peddle. We know now that it was a problem with spaghetti code firmware, lack of testing, & poor system design. See here http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...

TwoBit 11y ago

Toyota's problem was real, and the author hot it wrong: http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyota-and-unintended-acceleration/ http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyo...

tim333 11y ago
Gladwell doesn't say there was no problem. He says "[in the Pinto case] two dozen of their occupants were killed by fires from rear collisions. The number of deaths linked to the Toyota sudden-acceleration complaints was about the same." And then points out that number is small compared the number of lives that could be saved many other ways.

digi_owl 11y ago

What i find most worrying about this article is the change in thinking once one has been with a organization for some time. That in turn brings to mind the Challanger debacle, and the claim that it happened because the CEO of the company making the o-rings shifted his thinking from engineer to management during the go/no-go conference call. And subsequently changed his stance from a initial no-go (engineering) to a go (management)...