Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Short Story for Engineers

userweb.cs.txstate.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 128 posts

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#41

Post by young_unixer »

abeppu wrote: post #15

Even as an apocryphal parable to illustrate something about the extravagance of the solutions found by extravagant processes, doesn't this kinda fall short? The $20 solution is only found as a response to the $8M solution, which introduced a measurement and an incentive. I read this as suggesting that (a) workers closest to the situation can offer solutions if (b) measurements are in place and incentives are aligned…

I think that's the main point to take away from the parable, and not the "engineers dumb, random worker smart" idea.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#42

Post by yorwba »

Aperocky wrote: post #18
radicalbyte wrote: post #9

After reading the problem definition, my reaction was: you'd either weigh it and use a solenoid to kick it into a defect box, or you'd use air to knock the empty boxes from the line. I've seen both methods in use on production lines; so I assume that this story is something made up by someone trying to sell some kind of consultancy service?

It's not just made up, the story is almost a word for word translation of a story that's been circulating for years in Chinese. Of course people have called bullshit on it before. If you can read Chinese, you can check the thorough debunking of this myth right here, from someone that actually works in a soap factory: https://www.zhihu.com/question/27132006 And that was from 2014.

And here it is in a comment on a Siemens blog from 2009: https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/embedded-software/2009/06/18/ho...

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#43

Post by shard »

Aperocky wrote: post #18
radicalbyte wrote: post #9

After reading the problem definition, my reaction was: you'd either weigh it and use a solenoid to kick it into a defect box, or you'd use air to knock the empty boxes from the line. I've seen both methods in use on production lines; so I assume that this story is something made up by someone trying to sell some kind of consultancy service?

It's not just made up, the story is almost a word for word translation of a story that's been circulating for years in Chinese. Of course people have called bullshit on it before. If you can read Chinese, you can check the thorough debunking of this myth right here, from someone that actually works in a soap factory: https://www.zhihu.com/question/27132006 And that was from 2014.

In this age of the internet, memes get translated pretty quickly. I'm curious whether you found some definitive source that tracked this meme to its origin in a Chinese story.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#44

Post by rpastuszak »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29

Yes, the story is an urban legend, the budget goes up every time it's told, etc. But I think the important lesson here is not really "line worker outsmarts expensive consultants", its really about incentives . The consultants are incentivized to do good work (they want to keep a good reputation and potentially get more work) BUT they are also incentivized to charge as much as possible ("value-based pricing" is the te…

That's one of the reasons that as an engineer I find Design Thinking and (especially) Human-centred Design so valuable—if done well it forces to you look at the problem from the perspective of human motivations, incentives and there's so much low hanging fruit there.

The story of the Good Kitchen comes to my mind: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/uva-darden-design-thinking-...

Digression: another valuable aspects of DT/HCD include: working as a natural extension to Agile/XP, deriving solutions to problems in a data-driven way, ability to find low-hanging fruit more easily due to the application of divergent and convergent modes of thinking, being cheaper in the long term, and finally—giving designers and engineers tools to shut down any pet/vanity projects coming from senior management, by cheaply proving them to be wasteful.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#45

Post by lostcolony »

raldi wrote: post #35
solarkraft wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But i guess as long as the message is decent, no harm done? I'm not sure the message is decent and no harm is done, since it seems to be designed to weaken trust in complicated engineering processes with its underlying "look at these idiots".

To be fair, often that trust is misplaced. To the extent that it’s also often not, there are also modern parables about the dangers of corner-cutting. (NASA has three rather famous true-story ones.) As a result, good engineers have a mental framework to identify both situations.

Right, but the concern isn't its serving as a parable for engineers. The concern is it serving as a parable for uneducated people about why they should rely on 'common sense' rather than experts in a given field. We just have to look at the modern US political landscape to see why that's a problem.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#46

Post by coldtea »

solarkraft wrote: post #30
newyankee wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally used it in a Blockbuster Hindi movie called '3 idiots' as if it was a real story. A huge section of the population takes these urban legends seriously. But i guess as long as the message is decent , no harm done ?

> But i guess as long as the message is decent, no harm done? I'm not sure the message is decent and no harm is done, since it seems to be designed to weaken trust in complicated engineering processes with its underlying "look at these idiots".

>since it seems to be designed to weaken trust in complicated engineering processes with its underlying "look at these idiots".

Which makes total sense as those shouldn't be trusted, a lot of them are over-engineered and over-budget.

Like using an expensive processing setup for your 1GB "big data" when a small Python script would do the job -- and similar crap tons of companies do.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#47

Post by raldi »

lostcolony wrote: post #45
raldi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, often that trust is misplaced. To the extent that it’s also often not, there are also modern parables about the dangers of corner-cutting. (NASA has three rather famous true-story ones.) As a result, good engineers have a mental framework to identify both situations.

Right, but the concern isn't its serving as a parable for engineers. The concern is it serving as a parable for uneducated people about why they should rely on 'common sense' rather than experts in a given field. We just have to look at the modern US political landscape to see why that's a problem.

This is an important counterpoint.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#48

Post by coldtea »

lostcolony wrote: post #45
raldi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, often that trust is misplaced. To the extent that it’s also often not, there are also modern parables about the dangers of corner-cutting. (NASA has three rather famous true-story ones.) As a result, good engineers have a mental framework to identify both situations.

Right, but the concern isn't its serving as a parable for engineers. The concern is it serving as a parable for uneducated people about why they should rely on 'common sense' rather than experts in a given field. We just have to look at the modern US political landscape to see why that's a problem.

>The concern is it serving as a parable for uneducated people about why they should rely on 'common sense' rather than experts in a given field.

Well, often people should rely on common sense, rather than experts -- which more often than not are mere consultants with expensive solutions to non-problems to sell.

"Trust" is only good in an era of honest experts that don't look for a quick buck over science and rigor -- or that when they do there are functioning mechanisms in play to punish them. And our era has been increasingly getting less that (regressing to pre-50s levels of quackery), with many experts and policy advisors being nothing less than glorified lobbyists and salesmen (and that's despite their good qualifications)...

Like how tons of medical procedures are not needed and dangerous/expensive, but still recommended by clinics for the bucks...

https://www.propublica.org/article/unnecessary-medical-care-...

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#49

Post by spottybanana »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29

Yes, the story is an urban legend, the budget goes up every time it's told, etc. But I think the important lesson here is not really "line worker outsmarts expensive consultants", its really about incentives . The consultants are incentivized to do good work (they want to keep a good reputation and potentially get more work) BUT they are also incentivized to charge as much as possible ("value-based pricing" is the te…

> The best solution (and I believe a bunch of research backs this up) is to better incentivize your line workers and reward them appropriately. I know one study in particular that showed broad-based stock option ownership among employees was correlated with stronger company results, while options concentrated just among senior execs was not correlated with business success.

It can be also quite easy to make mistakes with these incentivisation schemes, fe in finance I've understood they can quite commonly cause problems.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#50

Post by krammer »

This reminds me about one of the topics that has been bothering me along my career as a technical pm: when is the diverge part of the design process is finished? per my experience, many orgs underestimate the benefits of “people thinking” and overestimate the benefits of being able to forecast when the solution will be available. And this, imho, is key when talking about startups vs corps... corps worry about the process because they can afford a subpar (8m) solution.

Ofc i’m being pedantic here and things are always more complex but... I have one question. How do you say in a safe way: We need more time because I FEEL that maybe, there is a 2$ solution for this problem.

Post reply on HN