
A Short Story for Engineers - shawndumas
http://cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.htm
======
dkarl
I like the values that jokes like this reinforce (simplicity, creativity, and
proactivity versus complexity, expense, and bureaucracy) but I wonder if they
serve a positive purpose in engineering culture. Do we tell these jokes to
keep ourselves on our toes, to make ourselves better? Are we really in danger
of forgetting which is better, simplicity or complexity? When we create
complex and over-engineered systems, is it because we forget that simplicity
is better?

I don't think we do. I think we tell ourselves these jokes to contrast good
engineering with bad engineering and to congratulate ourselves for being on
the right side. A good joke would lead you down the garden path, encourage a
bit of smugness and then rip the rug out from under you. This joke telegraphs
the punch line from the start: it encourages smugness and then vindicates it.
A healthy joke would make us uncomfortable about whether we would have been on
the right side, whether we are doing a good job of living up to our values.
This joke reassures us that the problem is other people's values, and by doing
so, it promotes exactly the kind of complacency that it makes fun of.

~~~
michaelwww
You've clearly never worked in a factory as a low level person who is usually
asked last, if at all, how to solve a problem concerning their job. I've
forwarded this to my father, who will love it as a person who rose from the
shop floor to the highest levels of management and never lost his distrust of
"college boys."

~~~
dkarl
I don't think your father will like the joke, either. According to the story,
the line workers had the ability to fix the problem all along, but they didn't
bother until the $8 million system made it personally inconvenient for them
when an empty box reached the scales. It makes them sound clever but also
rather lazy and selfish.

~~~
Xdes
>the line workers had the ability to fix the problem all along

Yes they had the ability, but did the line workers know that empty boxes being
shipped was a problem?

There is no solution without a problem.

~~~
ars_technician
Are the workers so stupid that they think shipping empty boxes is normal?

~~~
cema
Common sense is not always wrong.

------
HCIdivision17
My opinion has shifted over the last few years working in plants, and I've now
settled on the idea that the fan solution probably needed the eight million
dollar project. Without the project, the operator would not have been
inconvenienced, nor would they have achieved their goals as soon.

Also remember that the project was _worth_ it - it was returning on the
investment. Ideally the simple solution would have been found first for a
massive windfall of savings, but industry runs on constant, small, incremental
changes over many years. And it takes a very special mindset to invent awesome
hacks like the fan trick!

The operator should instead be applauded for making it so no other plant needs
to buy such an expensive system!

Edit: also, never underestimate the utility of inconveniencing operators. They
will find the most brilliant, clever, and cheap hacks to solve problems.
Watching operators is the best diagnostic tool available. When you see a
c-clamp or duct tape on the machine, you know exactly what needs workin' on
next!

~~~
antjanus
One thing that people forget is that the $8 million system works as constant
quality assurance. The $20 fan is all good but what if the weight of the boxes
increases due to extra packaging? What about if the fan slowly dies over time?

The back up system will always make sure that only the correct boxes pass. I
think people should realize that.

~~~
enraged_camel
The point is not that the $8 million system did not work. The point is that it
was overly expensive for what it accomplished, _and_ it slowed down the
production line significantly enough that some worker went out of his way to
implement his own solution. Without his solution, product quality may still
have gone up, but production numbers would have gone down since the production
line would stop every time there was an empty box on the belt. In contrast,
the fan not only increased product quality, but it also had no impact on
number of units produced and it cost $20 to boot. Sure, it's not a perfect
solution, but in this case it's "perfect enough." (And making it more perfect
would still have been several orders of magnitude cheaper than the $8 million
system.)

------
wikwocket
This is a cute story about over-engineering and thinking outside the box to
find the simplest solution, but anyone with manufacturing experience can tell
you that many factories have compressed air lines at each machine, and
frequently use it to blow bad parts off off of a conveyor/feed rail.

American manufacturing factories are actually homes to tremendous ingenuity
and practicality. To an outsider they may seem loud, dirty, and disorganized,
but the engineers inside routinely deal with issues like "how can we catch bad
parts before they roll off the line, using spare parts, scrap metal, and a $20
budget?" I have seen some amazing Rube Goldberg feeding systems that can
outperform expensive laser/optical/diverter gate packages.

~~~
VLM
A good analogy for the HN community to "To an outsider they may seem loud,
dirty, and disorganized" is a LAN party. Are those still a "thing" or am I
getting old?

~~~
lmm
They're still a thing, but I don't see the relevance. Many LAN parties _are_
that loud, dirty and disorganized; I've seen enough PCs destroyed by coke
spills or similar to believe that the LAN party atmosphere really is as bad as
it seems.

------
mathattack
Great story, and widely applicable.

I worked on a very large process and technology improvement program for a
Fortune 50 company. One critical piece of the project was a scheduling system
for field technicians. After 100+ effort years (don't ask!) we got it
developed and tested, and it achieved the 15 minutes per technician
productivity improvement, justifying the massive expense. We then found that
we could double the benefit by having them reboot their laptops weekly instead
of nightly. (Though the technology architects screamed bloody murder)

~~~
Aloha
I feel this - I'm stuck with the worlds worst scheduling system. Explaining to
senior management (who have never worked in the field) is to give the tech a
workload for N days, and let them schedule their own schedule is more
efficient is useless. I probably waste more time with the 2 rather fussy VPN's
I have to deal with than any other computing related task.

------
WalterBright
The engineers should be working alongside the factory line. That this often
doesn't happen isn't always the fault of the engineers or management.

Back when I worked on the stab trim gearbox at Boeing, it came time to put it
on the test rig and load it up. The test engineers gleefully told me they were
going to bust my design. So joy for me, I got to go to the shop and get my
hands dirty testing it!

By the time I got there, they had my baby all mounted in the custom test rig,
with a giant hydraulic ram all set to torture it. There was some adjustment
needed, and I lept forward to make it. The union shop steward physically
blocked me, and said I was not allowed to touch anything. I was only allowed
to give directions to the union machinist there, and he would turn a wrench at
my direction.

Jeez, what a killjoy moment for me.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, when they loaded up the gearbox with the
ram, the test rig bent and broke, and that lovely gearbox just sat there.
Nyah, nyah, nyah to the test engineers and back to the office building for me.

------
southpawgirl
> and six months (and $8 million) later a fantastic solution was delivered

In real life the solution applied wouldn't be this one, nor the cheap fan, but
some dude being paid peanuts to shake each box by hand.

~~~
VLM
More likely you'd use the expensive scales to measure over/under fills (or
tampering?) not just missing tubes.

If toothpaste was your primary cost (LOL, I'm sure its advertising, just like
cars and videogames and movies) then if you sell 4 oz +/\- 10% and the new
scale lets you run continuously at exactly 3.61 oz rather than "around four or
so" then you make almost 10% profit by selling exactly 3.61 oz as "about four
plus or minus ten percent packages".

You can change it from a cheesy engineering / management joke into a CS
discussion, so you're trying to copy one array into another, but sometimes you
have an empty value and you want the output to be contiguous. Solutions?

Or a RTOS type question where you're wanting to squirt out exactly one value
44100 times per second... Solutions?

~~~
southpawgirl
> so you're trying to copy one array into another, but sometimes you have an
> empty value and you want the output to be contiguous.

This made me giggle. Thank you Sir.

------
SilasX
A cheesy, apocryphal story written like a forward from Grandma on a site that
looks like it was stolen from 1996? How did it make the front page?

------
pmorici
This is like an engineering urban legend. I've seen it on here before but the
circumstances were different. Last time this was posted it was a Japanese soap
factory instead of a toothpaste factory.

------
juddlyon
Similar to the "Knowing where to put the X" story:
[http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArti...](http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/4536/The-
Hero-Work-of-an-Engineer-is-Knowing-Where-to-Put-the-X.aspx)

Also, the NASA vs Russian space pen vs pencil.

~~~
jlcx
I thought of the space pen/pencil anecdote as well, but that story isn't
accurate, so I like this one better (even if it didn't actually happen).

~~~
mcguire
The pen/pencil thing has the weakness that pencils release small particles and
are thus kind of sketchy in low-gravity environments.

~~~
xyzzy123
Yeah. You _could_ just use a grease pencil or thin crayon though.

------
ausjke
old story, it used to be a USA solution(high-tech, expensive) vs a Chinese
factory solution(the fan added by a worker)

~~~
BlackDeath3
No wonder so many jobs are being outsourced!

------
spullara
This is one of the reasons the engineers at Tesla work on the factory floor.
Take the tour if you can, it is great.

------
loomio
For me the lesson here isn't as much about engineering as incentives and
inclusion. If you engage people who are actually on the front lines in solving
the problems, great ideas will emerge. These are the people who understand the
problems best, and can be most motivated to fix them.

But in order to do that you have to effectively align incentives for them to
solve the problems. If companies treat employees as disposable automatons, and
do not allow them to share in the success of the business or benefit from
improving workflows, they have no motivation for doing so.

So many companies shoot themselves in the foot by bringing in "experts" when
the real experts are right there on their payrolls, but no one is asking them
their opinions or creating a situation where they would be inclined to give
them anyway.

------
bowlfeeder
It's a nice story, but anyone familiar with mechanical feeding systems[1]
could tell you air jets have been commonly used to reject parts for decades.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowl_feeder](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowl_feeder)

------
11thEarlOfMar
There are a couple of points that come to mind. First, management needs to be
judicious about how problems get solved. Does it require committee? Or a lone
actor? Which department should own it or should the CEO take it on personally?
Second, there is no doubt that an organizational approach to problem solving
is going to change as a company scales. The path the information took in this
parable likely was from customer service to upper management to engineering. A
CEO that will accept an $8M solution to such a problem is probably running a
multi-billion dollar company. If this had been a $50 million company, no way
he would have felt satisfied that it was money well spent.

------
coloncapitald
The story doesn't suggest that that the CEO or management staff should have
thought of a fan before. It suggests that they should have probably looked
into the problem better which may have involved visiting the production line
and asking the workers how they would fix the issue inexpensively. Then
probably one of them would have come up with this solution, or may be an even
better one.

I see people bringing up points like "What if the fan dies?" or "what if the
weight of the boxes increases due to extra packaging?". IMHO, these arguments
are invalid because of the same reason. Fan is not the solution.

~~~
narsil
It's possible the line workers would have never thought of this solution
without having the inconvenience there to motivate them to. You could try to
introduce a bonus to the worker who comes up with the most cost-effective and
reliable idea though. It is probably very unlikely management staff would do
that, since the engineering team has been "stretched thin" already and they
didn't want to consult them.

------
codegeek
I have read this story before and it reminds of the phrase "Necessity is the
mother of all inventions". What if that $8M project was never implemented ?
The factory worker would then not need to manually go and remove the empty
boxes. So one way to look at it is that the $8M project actually created a
_necessity_ to be more efficient and gave the guy an idea to not manually move
the boxes by installing a fan which in turn solved the overall problem of
empty boxes being shipped. May be he would have thought of all this without
the $8M project but what are the odds ?

------
analog31
Everybody standing on the sidelines with no skin in the game is always proud
to point out the engineer's mistakes after they have been made.

I comfort myself with Teddy Roosevelt's "man in the arena" speech.

------
Aloha
You'd expect the fancy scales to reject the empty boxes, but instead it
appears they just sounded a bell. The workers added the rejection feature once
they had an incentive to do so (the ringing bell).

~~~
devrelm
Right. If a solution like this were implemented in the real world, it would
almost certainly have a "kicker" mechanism to reject the empty boxes without
stopping the whole process.

------
seivan
I think most engineers are familiar with easy quick hack solutions that are
cheap and fast. You want this to have an effect? Tell it to the product monkey
overlords or the design "gurus"

------
JackFr
In 1985 I worked in a factory on a line producing tubes of vitamin A&D
ointment (similar packaging to toothpaste tubes.) The filling of the boxes
with the tubes was actually done manually, I suppose because ointment is
higher margin, lower volume.

We also produced foil packs (like fast food ketchup packets). That machine was
the coolest mechanical device I've ever worked with.

------
ttdan
Alternate take away: Visibility of key metrics/information (bell on expensive
machine) is a strong motivator. Worthwhile when considering spending resources
on things like creating informative dashboards and proper instrumentation to
focus the a team on key metrics.

------
dsugarman
how it is usually done in the fulfillment industry is a scale that changes the
track if it is off weight by more than a certain percent (think of how train
tracks work). The problem here is tougher than just a toothpaste factory
because you can have multiple items in one purchase order and you have to make
sure all items are in the box. Stopping the entire line every time something
is off with 1 package is never a good solution. With pushing the packages into
a 'problem' pile, someone can figure out what is wrong with each one and get
things moving again on their own schedule.

------
johngalt
I think there's a similar story about Fedex being the highest throughput
network provider.

------
lani
oooh !! 8 Mill !! I'd like that ..

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kimonos
Haha! Nice one! Thanks for sharing! Happy New Year to all!

