Apocryphal?
Where does it say it is real?
Where does it say it's not?
A Short Story for Engineers
51–60 of 128 posts
Re: A Short Story for Engineers
#52Earlier 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".
Imho it's just a part of the insight porn type genre. We innately enjoy simple solutions to complex problems. It give us a massive dopamine boost.
So these will always exist because the meme is strong. I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Re: A Short Story for Engineers
#53Yes, 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…
There's another element where the consultant simply enumerates all of the things that the employees have already been telling management for years. And of course there's an entire spectrum in between.
Some things are only important once a dollar figure is attached to them.
Re: A Short Story for Engineers
#54I always wonder... where does this faith in "blue collar thinking" over fancy-pants engineers come from? Why do people think the engineer wouldn't suggest a fan? Obviously it's an urban legend... but it just makes me wonder what makes it so repeatable, similar to how everyone's heard the similarly apocryphal story about how NASA invented a million-dollar pen while Russia got away with pencils just fine. The reason I…
You've never tested a dev script to the nth degree and run it once? Or designed a maintenance tool when an SQL statement will do?
I think the fable to teach engineers to consider ROI and simple solutions rather than to belittle the process, though I recognise it has that danger.
Re: A Short Story for Engineers
#55Yes, 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…
I think it actually matters that it's an urban legend. If it were a true story the value of its message would be less disputable. But if it's an urban legend that means that the message -- that line workers have valuable and inexpensive insights to offer -- is unsubstantiated and may not be true in the main. (I qualify this with "in the main" because of course there must have been some occasion when a line worker had a big brain idea that saved the company a bunch. The question is how often it happens and whether it's cost effective to detect and implement these cases.)
Parables are dangerous, because they sound good and appeal to common sense, but it turns out that in real life common sense is often not correct. Common sense works best when applied to situations encountered in the ancestral environment and does not necessarily convert over well to systems engineering.
Re: A Short Story for Engineers
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
for what it's worth, I don't think they claimed that it originated in Chinese, merely that it was translated from Chinese at some point. it's possible that it originated not in Chinese, was translated to Chinese at some point, then translated back into English.
Re: A Short Story for Engineers
#57Yes, 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…
I think another take-away from the story is that the domain you work in will dictate the solution you come up with.
If you are a high-level exec, the domain you have, the levers and pulleys available to you, are asking your direct reports to investigate the issue and come up with a report on the problem and generate potential solutions, which will then be discussed and evaluated in meetings–at a very high level. To somebody on the ground level, the domain of the problem is "what do I have around me to save time? oh, I have a fan, let me use that. Done."
I think your point about incentivizing workers is part of it. This story reminds me of the This American Life piece about the NUMMI plant where Toyota worked with GM to teach them the Toyota way of assembling cars. [1] Part of the Toyota Way is to empower the individuals at the ground level to own the process and to improve it. The interviews are surprisingly emotional for something that's "just work", but I think it shows how empowering people to own and improve their everyday gives them agency.
Re: A Short Story for Engineers
#58From other comments I get it's a "urban legend" and it's meant to prove a point, but I guarantee anyone who has worked in a bigger manufacturing facility involving people has heard a similar story or has experienced one. Working as a production engineer I heard and experienced several, even though the sums in question were not nearly as big.
When I read the story, my initial thought was that there would be a link pointing to Toyota or Kaizen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen Point Kaizen - It is one of the most commonly implemented types of kaizen. It happens very quickly and usually without much planning. As soon as something is found broken or incorrect, quick and immediate measures are taken to correct the issues
Re: A Short Story for Engineers
#59Yes, 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 morale of this story is that as a proper consultant, you should be the one to charge that customer $8mio for the $20 fan, because that's what value based pricing is all about.
Re: A Short Story for Engineers
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 -…
> Well, often people should rely on common sense, rather than experts
Sometimes, probably. It's definitely true that large organizations can overlook simple fixes due to the distribution of responsibilities.
However this story and maybe your response seem to fuel a certain "I won't believe what I can't see" attitude, which is extremely harmful (you'll be able to come up with examples yourself).