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

101–110 of 128 posts

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#101

Post by tuatoru »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #55
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…

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…

But sometimes...

My anecdote: a close friend's brother was working as a laborer on a pipeline dig. One day work halted for a couple of hours, during which the construction supervisor and engineer were huddled over some plans.

My friend's brother saunters past, looks over, and says "there's your problem," placing a finger on the plan. Then he walks on.

He had seen a triangle with angles not adding up to 180 degrees. He was right - that's where the problem was.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#102

Post by riantogo »

dharmab wrote: post #33
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 ?

Did you miss the dramatic scene near the end where the dad tearfully clarifies to the protagonist why they couldn’t use a pencil? (I swear it makes sense in context)

Yup. The said movie actually shows the right thing. How this is a popular myth and clarifies it.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#103

Post by ghaff »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #81
ghaff wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one time in my career that I worked with management consultants, I wasn't all that impressed. The partner and one of the associates were sharp enough. The other associate was not. That said, they created a big fancy spreadsheet that kept the business planning people happy and basically validated what we had been telling senior management. I'm not sure that's bad though. Having been, at a later time, an IT industr…

2/3 of staff being competent is a great batting average for a business. 3rd party validation of a biased party's proposal is a valuable product. Less good is when the "validation" is just for show, like hiring Ivy League grad consulting just because of the aura of the name.

I think this case was a little bit of both. Senior management had made up their mind to spend money with McKinsey and we (I was the product manager) rolled our eyes a bit. But they got some fancy spreadsheets out of it and, in all fairness, they did get a trusted outside partner who basically said that our pricing etc. strategy was reasonable.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#104

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

There's a ton of these stories around. I think they're great. I don't get all insulted by them; even if they are meant as such.

In my experience, robust is simple. The best code is the code I don't write. The eraser is my best friend.

If I want to write code that has the fewest bugs, I need to write the code with the fewest lines possible.

Every line of code is what I call a "trouble node." That's a place where a bug can happen.

I also need to take the simplest, most straightforward approach possible. Horse sense is valuable, and a lot of my horse sense comes from painful lessons.

When I'm writing code, and I find myself starting to rabbithole one kludge over another, I often have to stop and just wipe the slate clean.

Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

When I was working for corporations, this was never an option, and I (and my team) always paid the price. Since working on my own, I've done exactly this a dozen times over.

It's great.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#105

Post by quickthrower2 »

I think there are a lot of lessons here. Here is what I got:

One is that the simple $20 solution was discovered, but it may never have been. There was an element of luck in that. How often has that been the case in software? I see it all the time.

Given there is an element of luck, to maximise luck you want to pull in ideas from many places. Line workers are a great source of ideas. You can then apply a filtering process to decide which idea to try out. The fan idea would be tried out due to it being a low hanging fruit sort of fix.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#106

Post by ThrustVectoring »

mdifrgechd wrote: post #93
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> line workers have valuable and inexpensive insights to offer I saw it more as just a lesson about not overthinking things. Another version of the "During the space age Americans spent money developed a special compressed ink pen that could write in space, the Russians used a pencil". I think looking for a simple solution first is always good advice.

I heard that's another myth. The pen was developed privately, NASA and the Russians just bought them at extremely reasonable prices, and they worked better and safer than pencils.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#107

Post by nullsense »

mdifrgechd wrote: post #99
mseo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That story seems more or less to be a myth, too. And there seems to be a good reason why they used from pencils, which they used in the beginning to pens: "Pencils may not have been the best choice anyway. The tips flaked and broke off, drifting in microgravity where they could potentially harm an astronaut or equipment. And pencils are flammable--a quality NASA wanted to avoid in onboard objects after the Apollo 1 f…

Interesting, I had meant to point out that I had no evidence one way or the other if it was actually true, the point is just the idea of keeping it simple. And your counterpoint about the graphite floating around is a good parable for why seemingly obvious, "clever" solutions often don't actually work, and that armchair critics should not assume the solution team was not smart enough to consider the obvious ideas :)

Never considered the compressed ink pens that could write in space were an example of Chesterton's Fence. Damn. The fence strikes again.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#108

Post by jedimastert »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #105

I think there are a lot of lessons here. Here is what I got: One is that the simple $20 solution was discovered, but it may never have been. There was an element of luck in that. How often has that been the case in software? I see it all the time. Given there is an element of luck, to maximise luck you want to pull in ideas from many places. Line workers are a great source of ideas. You can then apply a filtering pro…

I would actually posit that it would be less luck than you may think. Using air to blow lighter objects off line is a fairly common tool, even going as far back as separating wheat from chaff, and if you have a guy on the floor with a little experience it probably would have been somewhat obvious to them

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#109

Post by the_arun »

We undermine line workers in Software Engineering world as well. We tag them as "hackers" or "folks who take short cuts" or "don't do good job" when we see an unconventional solution. We need to understand the perfect solution differs from case to case.

Re: A Short Story for Engineers

#110

Post by ajarmst »

"The worker who'd placed the unapproved fan on the production floor was finally identified. They were counselled and sent to three days of mandatory retraining to ensure they understood that no further incidents of changing procedures outside of the formal change-approval process would be tolerated, and the installation of unapproved equipment was grounds for dismissal. The note on their file blocked any promotion, but the economy meant they couldn't change jobs. Eventually the learned helplessness and bitterness set in and they started amusing themselves by adding things from the break-room fridge to packages being shipped internationally. Five years later, they and everyone else were laid-off when a competitor figured out how to get otherwise unemployed people with cars and phones to deliver things for less than minimum wage."
Post reply on HN