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.]
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.
Did the clock also total up all the days spent down rabbit-holes resulting in worthless work because there wasn't adequate communication? :)
It does remind me though of a guy I once knew (late 90s) who was a senior manager at the national arm of a large, well-known international investment bank. He'd be in a meeting with the CEO and the rest of the senior managers, and the CEO wouldn't let the meeting commence if there were any computer cords visible, sometimes taking up to 15 minutes to personally clear away cords...
It's true that there's a balance... maybe some kind of amplification based on the # of people. Nothing frustrates me more than a 20-person meeting with three guys talking (actual all-hands meetings to communicate critical info excepted, of course).
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.
The problem with the meeting (hourly rate | billable rate) × members × time cost approach is this: a well-performed meeting is what provides your worth. In this sense, considering a meeting to be a cost based on what you can charge for your time is as ridiculous as a professional sports team considering workouts and training to be costed at the average revenue rate of a game.
The training is what provides the ability to charge for admission and airtime royalties for games. The meeting is what gives you a product or service offering.
The question shouldn't be "how much is this costing us in salaries" but "is this meeting productive, and more productive than the alternative activity which could be performed at this time" -- the opportunity cost basis, in other words. Salary/billable is simply the wrong metric.
To the sports metaphor, the question concerning training would be "is this training improving our skills / ability / capability / teamwork", as compared with alternatives (rest/recovery, marketing, travel, game time).
Where meetings often get derailed is that participants:
• Don't understand one another.
• Have different agendas.
• Are simply incompetent.
Identifying these challenges and addressing them, without bogging all participants down in the process is far more productive than simply showing the cumulative pseudo-cost of the meeting.
> The training is what provides the ability to charge for admission and airtime royalties for games. The meeting is what gives you a product or service offering.
The cost analysis of the meeting is however helpful to make people realize that there's way too many people in that meeting. It's just like a sports team where half of the players are not actively training while you're paying them all. And on top of that, the effectiveness of a meeting decreases very quickly with the number of participants.
While I do agree with you that the opportunity cost based analysis is better, I do want to point out that for this context (or any context where this might be the case) the opportunity cost of doing an opportunity cost based analysis might be high enough to warrant opting for the inferior but easier/cheaper cost based analysis.
Of course there might be an easier way to quantify the opportunity cost that I can't think of.
"Is the the best possible use of our time, collectively, and/or of each of us, individually, for the organization and our collective goals?"
I suspect you'll find that more effective people tend to recognize when they're in a meeting they 1) don't need to be in and 2) which is keeping them from doing something more important.
Socializing, strengthening group cohesion, and other organizational (as opposed to individualistic) objectives may mean that even if you personally perceive greater benefit at being elsewhere, the organizational / collective goal may still trump, which is why that's included in the metric.
The concern isn't to do a thorough evaluation where that's not itself cost-effective, but to use the correct basis for measurement. Deciding on imperfect information is perfectly acceptable. Deciding on the wrong basis should really be avoided where possible.
No. I mean the startup in question went on to be worth about a billion dollars (last I checked), but the stock I bought from them was turned into wastepaper through some mechanism that I don't understand. Might have been a rescue job of some kind. Maybe they're lying and owe me a bunch of money. I don't know.
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].
I wouldn't be surprised if accountants are also affected. There's something so excruciating about acting as a hypothesis checker for hours while the people in the room gradually develop the knowledge they need to solve their own problems because they don't trust you enough to delegate.
In a very meta twist, your comment reads with a slight undertone of "engineers are the only smart ones."
Engineers might end up with the keys to the servers, but many problems (and solutions to them) are not very technical. Things like the copy on landing pages, or customer support workflow, and many other problems businesses can face are only technical in that at one point an engineer will do something.
But it's not just engineers that have this problem. Designers can get them, marketers can get them , etc. Any opportunity for there to be cognitive dissonance will be exploited by Murphy's Law to make people's lives like this
> However, this is illustrating a particular problem that only affects engineers -- engineers are the ones at the end of the day who have to make a solution reality.
This is simply not true. In the past I was a Business Analyst. I would meet with clients to gather requirements and that illustration would often unfold in the same manner.
It has nothing to do with a persons role, it has everything to do with having large knowledge or expertise gaps.
Having been a developer, contract developer, consulting analyst, and consulting architect, I can say you are right. There are challenges for business analysts, similar to this.
But it's not the same league. Technology often comes down to "it can be done" or "it can't be done without a lot more effort than you are willing to pay for".
Sure, a business analyst may have similar problems ("this process works" vs. "this process would take 5 people a week, each time - but we only have 1 person for 4 days"). However you, the business analyst, are not usually then expected to go away and actually make X happen - you hand over your requirements to other people for them to "make it happen".
So you think BA's can not learn, even through experience, what can or can not be done?
Sure, there's always somebody else, same role or not, who has more expertise, but don't confuse role/title for expertise. I've seen BA's with a decade of experience school junior engineers on what can or can not be done.
It's that when it comes down to actually making it work, it's the engineer that has to provide a working solution to the specification. Not a figurative engineer with years of experience and knowledge. The actual person that has the task. Pretty much everyone else in the chain has to make assumptions about what is possible, in what time frame, with what resources. Yes, the more experience you have, the better you get at doing that.
But trust me when I say that all too often, even product engineers for million dollar figure products, have little idea if X is possibly in time Y until they actually try and do it. (I've worked at multiple companies with multi-million product licenses, and seen it at all of them). Sure, a few of the delivery engineers had a much better idea. But there was no way any of the analysts, project managers, and especially not the sales engineers, had any clue about the time. You'd get answers from 1/10th Y through to 10 x Y - 10000% variance.
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).
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.
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.
It's possible to respect that the other people in the meeting are experts in their own topic and still find the level of misunderstanding hilarious. I work with a team of biologists and I know we all feel like that engineer during meetings.
I thought this was a very funny video, not because of the reasons you are articulating but because it underscores a very real problem, namely that people come in with unrealistic expectations and can't understand why they are unrealistic.
This being said, I don't think this is a problem specifically related to engineers. I think it affects nearly every specialist who is tasked with a vital role outside of the general knowledge. Accountants, particularly cost accountants, would be my second thought for a profession that must be in a similar position.
Doctors and lawyers also come to mind.
In the end, I think it is funny because the problems are framed in a way we specifically can relate to, not because the problems uniquely affect engineers.
I'm sorry, but it actually effects anyone who is in individual contributor. Even with the caveat for "a work pipeline involving engineering". Linguists doing translation run in to it, designers run in to it, document writers run in to it, even individual sales folks run in to it.
engineers are the ones at the end of the day who have to make a solution reality
That's rarely true. More often than not engineers hand off their plans to lowly underling programmers/technicians/builders/craftsmen who are the ones who actually have to make thing a reality.
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.
Absolutely. And it's not just a powerful position, it's an extremely important one.
Some engineering teams so effectively resist meetings that they worm their way right out of any decision making beyond "how do we deal with the mess we've been handed THIS time?"
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.
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.
That's a very inspiring way to put it. For balance, I'll put out here that being the only janitor in a building also puts you in a position of power, and learning to interact with the stakeholders should be invaluable.
If you truely believe everything is an opportunity, being an engineer or janitor should be on a similar footing (there's actually janitors that build companies and set their prices)
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.
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."
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.
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.
"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.
I agree completely. And here is the crazy part, if you smile, and appear friendly without looking weak, people will be more willing to follow you down your line of questions to the beginning, to their own base problem. So things like the body language you use when you enter the room may be the difference between learning the real problem or not, and thus delivering a great product or not.
Myself, I generally have to make conscious decisions to do all these things.
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).
Agreed. Many times when you are approached with nonsensical requirements it is wise to try to figure out what problem the asker is trying to solve. This is doubly true when you receive technical requirements from non-technical people.
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.
My comment when someone posted this on Facebook earlier today-
"Although... A true engineer would know how to solve the problem of 7 perpendicular lines. And a master corporate engineer would get the budget for developing 7 perpendicular lines. Actually, that more or less explains defense contractors"
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.
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.
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!
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".
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.
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.
I was shocked when no one drew that lesson from our international corporate hackathon. We were cranking out impressive new products in less than twenty-four hours without a single PM.
Granted, it's a sprint requiring downtime afterwards and everyone was doing what they really wanted to do instead of their day jobs.
I don't think every person needs manager infact management is only needed to "manage" and managing comes into play where there is a large number of "things"/"people" to manage or look after. Small number of educated ppl doing minor tasks will never need management.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
Common guys. The downvotes are okay (points don't mean anything anyways). I just like to explain that what I wrote is a metaphor and that's it. It ain't to be taken literally.
What's the commonality between both vids? Just enforcing negative stereotypes & emphasizing the weakness found in the worse case scenarios of each group.
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.
I noticed this, but even without race and gender the characters are profoundly stereotyped—intentionally exaggerated for effect.
At least, I hope there aren't real-life Certified Red Line Experts running around, nor designers hoping to draw red lines in green ink…
Taken too literally, this sketch could be offensive to all of women, portrayed as clueless; male executives, portrayed as willfully ignorant and over-demanding; Asians, portrayed as obviously engineers; non-Asians, portrayed as obviously not engineers; engineers, portrayed as incapable of working backwards from impossible requirements to find a solution that actually works; and probably other groups I've forgotten.
Um, because the stereotype of an engineer is a male, Japan is often associated with engineering and having the engineer be the only one of visually different nationality emphasizes the divide between techinal and non technical. Yes, it is horrible typecasting like every character in that clip and that is the point.
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.
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.
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.]