
What it is like being the only engineer in a meeting [video] - nate_martin
http://laughingsquid.com/the-expert-a-hilarious-sketch-about-the-pain-of-being-the-only-engineer-in-a-business-meeting/
======
kabdib
At 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
Love 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
Someone 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
Alternatively, your pay could have been docked for not caring about wasting
company resources.

------
chavesn
Some 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.

~~~
grey-area
_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._

That's not true. Almost every role is a specialty, and almost every role
requires translating requirements from others who do not understand the
solution space into solutions which meet that requirement, and explaining just
what is possible and what is not. Just as one example, designers translate
things like 'I need this text to read better' to adjusting the leading,
measure, weight, size and font to something appropriate while meeting the
other existing constraints. You could think of examples like that for almost
every specialty, including designers, business people and accountants, who do
things the developers don't understand (but might think must be trivial,
because they don't understand them) which are just as vital for the company.
There are also plenty of examples outside the fields developers interact with
(engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers etc).

The meeting in the video wasn't funny as a caricature because it portrays
everyone around the developer as idiots, though I suppose it is a brilliant
unintentional caricature of the way an ignorant specialist might see the
world. In real life, the clients are not idiots, they just have conflicting
requirements, and don't understand the solution space, but they _usually
understand the problem space better than the developer_ and should be seen as
a mine of information and gently guided away from making decisions they don't
understand. A developer (or any other specialty) seeing the world this way is
a bad developer IMO, and someone facing something approaching this situation
in real life should just get another job, as clearly working for idiots is a
losing proposition.

Back in real life, both design and development require very similar skills -
refining requirements, proposing solutions which will work, persuading clients
as to the best solutions, taking on board their ideas and adjustments
gracefully without compromising the technical constraints. The issue of
dealing with clients who don't know exactly what they want or what is possible
is probably similar in a lot of other domains, and the laziest solution is to
call them idiots and dismiss their concerns.

What I'd do in this situation is ask the client to rewind and state the
problem (our lines clash and we can't change the colour or make them see-
through), not a proposed solution (7 perpendicular red lines, one of which is
green and transparent).

~~~
thwarted
_The meeting in the video wasn 't funny as a caricature because it portrays
everyone around the developer as idiots, though I suppose it is a brilliant
unintentional caricature of the way an ignorant specialist might see the
world. In real life, the clients are not idiots, they just have conflicting
requirements, and don't understand the solution space, but they usually
understand the problem space better than the developer and should be seen as a
mine of information and gently guided away from making decisions they don't
understand._

The topic of the video isn't that everyone else is an idiot, it's that they
are not deferring to the person they themselves acknowledge to be the expert
to provide expert insight, perspective, knowledge, and requirements gathering.
The expert says "you can't have seven lines that are all perpendicular to each
other", those outlining the requirements challenge the expert on that, as if
the expert is lying or making the service provider look bad by saying
something is impossible. "You're the expert, figure it out". "Are you saying
that, as an expert, you can't do this?". "Ignore geometry". Trying to get to
the bottom of what the requirements actually are (which is often, in my
experience, a misapplication, misunderstanding, or misdefinition of terms) is
considered being difficult or not being a team player.

Also in my experience, the problem arises when the engineer is brought in the
last and final stages after everyone else has already spent significant time
on "the problem", and are married to their unworkable solution. The solution
isn't necessarily unworkable because it's actually impossible, but often it's
because what's been requested and sold to everyone else (read: upper
management) is actually too expensive to implement. This is also where
undoable aggressive schedules come from. Make no mistake, just about everyone
is bad at estimating time and effort when it comes to software projects (this
is well documented, at least in the lore), but if only two weeks of time/money
are budgeted for what the engineer thinks is a four week project (even if it's
actually an eight week project), no one wants to hear it. And it's easy to
blame the person who was last to the party.

~~~
grey-area
_Trying to get to the bottom of what the requirements actually are (which is
often, in my experience, a misapplication, misunderstanding, or misdefinition
of terms) is considered being difficult or not being a team player._

There are usually ways of dealing with this situation without confrontation or
hostility though, and the distinction between requirements and solutions is an
important one - in this case the client tried to present a solution when they
should be stating the problem. I find most clients are happy to rewind and
state the problem, and it helps a lot in presenting an alternative solution if
you can then say - well this other solution solves your problem (and is not
impossible given other constraints!).

I'm not defending the clients in this video, who are made to act as idiots
parroting obviously absurd lines, what I'm questioning is whether this is even
a caricature of reality. I think it's more an accurate representation of the
world view that some people retreat to when faced with difficult clients who
don't understand solutions and want impossible things (and we've all met
them).

Sure there are political considerations and sometimes companies are completely
dysfunctional - in that case it's best to fire the client or job and move on,
but it's very rare in my experience as a developer or designer to come across
that. If you can't do your job in a given setup, and can't push back, the best
option is to leave, because you can't fix that and it is an unhealthy
situation for all parties.

------
7Figures2Commas
Moving 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.

~~~
canadev
I think your claim requires some elaboration. How about some concrete
examples?

~~~
fleitz
I'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.

~~~
einhverfr
Indeed. And in fact, here, a realistic question might be:

"Would you like me to draw a kitten using only 7 red lines that, where they
cross, are perpendicular?"

~~~
coconutrandom
Exactly my thought with the 7 lines, but I didn't think to make look like a
kitten.

~~~
kazagistar
I think the idea here is that in the non-mathematical world, a curved line is
still a line. You can draw a pretty dang good anything with curved lines. The
problem might just be this sort of simple misunderstanding.

------
aspensmonster
Glad 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
I 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
Though 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.

------
sikhnerd
I 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)

~~~
dredmorbius
"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
This is true for any meeting where a specialist is outnumbered and the other
folks have already made up their mind.

~~~
dredmorbius
You 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).

------
Karunamon
Textual 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)

------
lam
Stupid 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.

~~~
GeneralMayhem
Perhaps I'm not thinking clearly - it's late here - but wouldn't 8-space
suffice?

~~~
ivan_ah
A 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
Also, throw in some velocity dimensions so that we can make the red lines
drawn in green ink appear to be red.

------
peter_l_downs
I got frustrated just listening to this. Excellent acting.

~~~
vayarajesh
I agree :)

------
jdubs
"The lines should pop"

------
dstroot
Oversimplified? Yes. Hilarious? Yes.

Why? Because "impossible feature request" can and does happen... frequently.

------
morkfromork
Please implement line sharing & gifting to Facebook & Twitter.

------
malandrew
You 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
... or on a globe..

------
MonsieurHoho
There 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
This 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
I'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!

------
dennisgorelik
Both 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
True, 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
Awesome.. 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
I'm in a team with exactly one developer and two project managers... Guess who
I am?

~~~
vayarajesh
You are frustrated :)

------
dewarrn1
I'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)

------
einhverfr
This 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
(note, the budget for such a proposition might not far exceed a few trillion
dollars.)

------
jonathanmoore
I 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.

------
vayarajesh
I 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

------
carrotleads
Loved the bit about scope creep at the end.

and yes I am the "expert"

------
teemo_cute
I 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
> 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
Or 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.

~~~
mbillie1
Accepting 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
I'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...

------
thejosh
gotta love blog spam

------
smtddr
Now here's another vid showing what everyone else feels like dealing with
techies... [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x557tg_nick-burns-your-
comp...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x557tg_nick-burns-your-company-s-
computer_fun)

What's the commonality between both vids? Just enforcing negative stereotypes
& emphasizing the weakness found in the worse case scenarios of each group.

~~~
binaryqueen
Just 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.

------
xarien
Why 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
Feel free to make your own skit using whatever typecasts you need to make
yourself feel better.

~~~
xarien
I'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
If 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.

