
The $8M Replacement for a $20 Dollar Fan (2013) - kilroy123
http://workforcesolutions.stlcc.edu/2013/making-lean-stick-8-million-dollar-fan/
======
pmorici
This is an urban legend or folk tale or whatever you want to call it. I've
seen this exact same story before only it was a soap factory in Japan or
something like that. It's presents a good lesson but isn't a true story at
least this re telling of it isn't.

~~~
zachrose
There's a similar anecdote out there, also involving toothpaste. In this one
the toothpaste company spends millions on a new marketing campaign to sell
more toothpaste and then someone suggests that they make the hole in the tube
bigger so people use more.

~~~
dugditches
A real example of this would be Alka-Seltzer(dissolvable antacid/pain
medicine). An ad showed two tablets in the glass, and they saw a large
increase in sales. Nowadays they simply come in packets of two.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alka-
Seltzer#Marketing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alka-Seltzer#Marketing)
[http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/alka-
seltzer.asp](http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/alka-seltzer.asp)

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pmarreck
Apparently it needed the $8M replacement for a $20 webserver

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IncRnd
The maintenance guy already spent $20 and fixed the issue. Why spend $20 more
to fix something that isn't broken? You'll take on webserver maintenance with
that, so a webserver doesn't really cost $20.

Anytime you want to replace a simple analog solution with a complex digital
solution, your costs aren't 1to1.

~~~
jtbayly
I think the point the parent was making was that the website was down. ;)

~~~
IncRnd
HA! Thank you. That had gone right over my head :)

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yoyocynic
See, if they would have spent $10Mil and also had a swivel arm that pushes the
box off and restarts the machine, Bart would never have had to selfishly
innovate and you'd have the architecture at most companies.

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DrScump
Snopes calls this a "Legend."

[http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/innovate.asp](http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/innovate.asp)

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jacquesm
See also, the space pen:

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-
fiction-n...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-
spen/)

Which in fact did happen and is (in my opinion) a far more interesting story
in this vein.

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codingmyway
I used to work with a consultant who was a bit of a maverick and would
regularly get dismissed from his clients after he ignored all the top brass
and immediately went to talk to the people on the floor to find out what was
really going on. Nearly every time his radical solutions and reports, which
made sense, would just get filed in a drawer because they got rid of middle
management. He didn't care if they implemented his ideas. He'd just move on to
the next.

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tomahunt
In "Surly you're joking my Feynman" there is the story of RF talking to the
painter who teaches him to mix paints, and the colours you need to get make
yellow. Turns out you should talk to the person who's been mixing paints all
their working life.

Isn't there a similar story after the challenger accident where he talks to
the maintenance people on the ground?

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ninju
Shouldn't the title be the other way around... $20 Fan replaces a $8M process

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masonic
"The service is unavailable."

~~~
deanCommie
Google Cache version:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://workforcesolutions.stlcc.edu/2013/making-
lean-stick-8-million-dollar-fan/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

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quickthrower2
The fan doesn't ensure quality. It is possible for an empty tube not to get
blown off.

~~~
qmarchi
But then the 8mil solution would catch it.

~~~
quickthrower2
Exactly but it takes the bite out of this anecdote, which is that the $8m
solution is unnecessary because there is a $20 solution.

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m3kw9
Let me guess, it was hard to get to it

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ianamartin
The story is obviously intended to teach a lesson and not a real piece of
truth. But the lesson is real, and we’ve all seen it in action.

Product people want to push products. Management wants to manage. Engineers
want to engineer. Nothing about any of this is inherently bad, but putting
these three motivations together in a vacuum can have this effect.

This is all, in my opinion, an example of resume driven development. Everyone
wants to build themselves up. In a competitive market, you have to. For
product people that means delivering products, for management people that
means managing problems and finding successful solutions, for engineers that
means engineering cool shit that works.

We are strongly motivated to behave this way.

The point of the parable is that these motivations don’t necessarily lead to
the optimal solutions. And that the difference between the highly productized,
well-managed, elegantly engineered solution and the quick fix is often not
large.

But there’s a strong reaction against boring solutions. Boring solutions don’t
get you the next gig. Boring solutions don’t impress anyone. Boring solutions
don’t make your resume pop.

This is a grossly exaggerated example, of course, but that’s how parables
work. I’m kind of surprised by how many of the comments are missing the point.

This tendency to over-engineer, over-productize, and over-manage is everywhere
in the tech industry. We do it everywhere. Not to start a flame war, but I’m
Looking at you, new JavaScript framework flavor of the month. I’m looking at
you, infrastructure platforms and noSQL solutions.

The thing that we don’t seem to be able to accept is that the vast majority of
the problems we solve day in and day out at our startup companies and our big
big companies are very straightforward and boring problems, for which there
already exists a boring solution.

This is more specifically true of web development than native dev work or
embedded systems, and there are obvious places where this is entirely untrue.
Cutting edge research in theoretical comp sci, embedded systems, AI, and
cryptography.

And I say this as a web developer, not one of the other interesting things I
mentioned above: most of what we do is and should be boring. They are simple
interfaces to data. A very few of them—-maybe .01%—have to actually deal with
scale.

I know I sound like a grumpy old man, but that’s increasingly what I feel
like.

One of my most recent projects reflects this so closely that it’s not even
funny. We had a project without enough time, we wanted to bring in a vendor to
deliver a system-wide platform. Vendor couldn’t deliver on time, so we had to
do something else.

My solution took a day to prototype and another few days to deploy. It was
boring as fuck. No one would be even remotely impressed with the
implementation. It was a boring problem with a boring solution. But it solved
the problem, and we were free to move on to something else.

If we want parables like this to go away and stop offending us because they
aren’t literally true, we (especially us web developers) need to stop
pretending that we are so special. Product and Management should also do the
same thing.

Most problems are boring, and they deserve boring solutions. Yeah, I know that
doesn’t help your resume or mine, but you don’t get paid by a company to bump
your resume. You and I get paid to solve mostly boring problems. Until we are
willing to admit that to ourselves and each other, this parable is going to
remain relevant.

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johnking
The core of the article (See full version for the extra commentary):

A toothpaste factory had a problem. They sometimes shipped empty toothpaste
boxes without the tube inside. This challenged their perceived quality with
the buyers and distributors. Understanding how important the relationship with
them was, the CEO of the company assembled his top people. They decided to
hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem. The
project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP,
and third-parties selected. Six months (and $8 million) later they had a
fantastic solution – on time, on budget, and high quality. Everyone in the
project was pleased.

They solved the problem by using a high-tech precision scale that would sound
a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighed less than it should.
The line would stop, someone would walk over, remove the defective box, and
then press another button to re-start the line. As a result of the new package
monitoring process, no empty boxes were being shipped out of the factory.

With no more customer complaints, the CEO felt the $8 million was well spent.
He then reviewed the line statistics report and discovered the number of empty
boxes picked up by the scale in the first week was consistent with
projections, however, the next three weeks were zero! The estimated rate
should have been at least a dozen boxes a day. He had the engineers check the
equipment; they verified the report as accurate.

Puzzled, the CEO traveled down to the factory, viewed the part of the line
where the precision scale was installed, and observed just ahead of the new $8
million dollar solution sat a $20 desk fan blowing the empty boxes off the
belt and into a bin. He asked the line supervisor what that was about.

“Oh, that,” the supervisor replied, “Bert, the kid from maintenance, put it
there because he was tired of walking over to restart the line every time the
bell rang.”

~~~
chrischen
$8M still seems high for a scale.

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rocqua
100 000 for the scale, 7 900 000 for knowing where to put the scale.

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chrischen
100,000 still seems high. Clearly I'm in the wrong industry. I should be
fleecing enterprise businesses instead.

~~~
firethief
Let me introduce you to a thing called Java!

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regulation_d
The $8M Replacement for a 20 Dollar Dollar Fan

