The only engineer at a business meeting.

[38Chevy454]

I've sat in far too many of these meetings where management is demanding red lines in all the colors of the rainbow. But Ive also been in meetings where sales has sold red lines, we have a deadline to produce the red lines in a week, and the engineers are demanding an additional two months to study what color red is the reddest, and to design a pen that can produce any multicolor line in case the customer doesn't want red in the future. This can go both ways.

True, engineers are the classic example of "it is not broke, but we can make it better". Or the more common expression, "sh!t or get off the pot"

My previous reply, I said engineers have to make judgment calls based on limited data. The natural tendency is to get as much data as you can, thus giving higher confidence in the decision.

Now for an engineer joke, we have to be able to laugh at ourselves:
Two college engineering students meet on campus and engr A notices that engr B has a new bicycle. Engr B tells him that last night a beautiful girl rode up on the bike and then stopped, took off her clothes and said "you can have anything you want". Engr A says "good choice, the clothes probably would not have fit"

 

[HFWR]

Case study #1: In a wafer fab, each lot of 24 silicon wafers has one extra slot in the cassette, wherein a monitor wafer would be added, so that film characteristics could be measured post-processing. [-]Operators[/-] Manufacturing specialists were to add/remove this monitor using a wafer-handling robotic sorter, and never move it manually, due to the high probability of scratching an adjacent wafer, causing scrap and reducing yield.

Problem was the specialists were whipped relentlessly to "go fast", and there was a constant bottleneck at the wafer sorter, which caused the specialists to sneak over to the manual vacuum "pencil" and add/remove monitors manually, causing lots of the aforementioned "scrap".

Undoubtedly, the wafer sorters were "expensive" ($100k?), though likely one of the least expensive pieces of equipment in the facility. It chapped my a$$ that this was reported to management by me and others, and yet ignored. Save a dollar, lose a thousand...

Sometimes the guys/gals on the floor actually know something, but acknowledging that would mean they couldn't treat us like interchangeable parts with no particular skills...

 

[Texas Proud]

He/She was kidding right

Nope.... that is why boss = blown gasket....

 

[Theseus]

Well, this video has officially gone viral at w**k. Shared it with a colleague who forwarded it, blah, blah, blah - saw it again today as my manager's boss played it our weekly staff meeting. Sounds like it has been quite a hit at the megacorp engineering office too. My industry is consumer goods manufacturing, where most of what we deal with can be boiled down to really simple physics, but it is pretty amazing how many people are a tad bit simpler than that.... hence the rolling on the floor over lines like "Geometry?"

Bring on the consultants!

 

[HFWR]

 

[martyp]

The business types seem to have a much harder time than us engineering types, accepting that limited resources implies limited results.

This was one of the reasons I chose to ER. My group had been (justifiably) downsized due to changes in technology. I sensed that management would expect the same output from my group with 1/4 the people. I didn't think that the job would be much fun in those circumstances.

After I ER'd they hired another engineer to lead the tiny group. He had more or less the same qualifications I had. Nine months later he quit because they kept asking for more than could be delivered with the group that he had.

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

On many projects that required overnight travel to an offsite vendor I would more often than not send an hourly employee or two which was pretty much unheard of back in the day. The payback was many fold as the hourly people would come back to the plant with a greater appreciation of what it takes to work a project plus they had a much better understanding how the equipment was supposed to work.

Great work!

A colleague, very senior ChE in operations all his life was put on an LNG project. There were many visits to the vendors in the budget. Who do you think went on these trips? The brass, of course. No technical subjects were discussed. Everything was 'great'. How do you think the plant turned out? You got it.

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

Hmm... I can assure you not all engineers are infallible. I work in Logistics which is downstream from Engineering (and everything else, but that is another story).

I've sat in shipping meetings at some very large industrial manufacturers and and looked at schematics of things that engineers have designed and are as proud as punch about.
Never mind these things are to large, to heavy or a combination of the two to be moved down the road, onto a railcar or onto a vessel for anything less than a kings ransom or a redesign of highways or a change in the laws of geometry.

But, heh, their drawings sure were purdy..........

Logistics and transport are not taught in engineering school to engineers. We just won't know what they are unless somebody tells us. It is a specialty all its own.

I have worked for several custom large equipment companies and have worked on design of huge plants for the oil sands. Everybody knew the limitations and the routes that had to be taken. It is the responsibility of the employer to provide these limitations to the engineers.

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

I once worked for a project manager who made up schedules to make his bosses happy and them dumped them on us. My project leader got sick of this so he ended up making a Project Time Slide Rule. You set the amount of time needed versus the completion date and then read how far back in time you had to start working so as to meet the deadline.

Been there.

Worked on a huge oil sands project.

I was #2 hired after the project manager. We sat around for a couple of months--waiting for the contract to be signed. (End date did not change. ) He showed me the contract. The customer had asked for a +/-10% estimate in the middle of front-end engineering. And the engineering company agreed to it. We knew this was going to be a train-wreck.

There are several steps in defining a project (in my business). there are different versions of these, but these are the essentials:

Conceptual design. This is where you make a lot of assumptions and check to see if it looks even close to feasible. You settle on the process you want to use. Plant lay-out is investigated and subject to change. Order-of-magnitude estimates are possible.

Front-end design. Here you check your assumptions, identify the bad ones and fix them and review the design in new light. Equipment is designed and sized. +100%/-50% estimates are possible.

Detailed design. Here you do the serious design work. Most design issues have been worked out and now you design and spec the equipment.
You can only get a +/-10% estimate if you have quotes on all the equipment and they are only good for 30 days.

After the start of the Front-End Design, the customer changed his mind about what process to use (never been tried before) and also broke the plant up into two parts well removed from each other.

The customer's overall project manager had a mantra: "Cheaper, better, faster". A friend looked at me in angst and said, "Cheaper, better, faster--disaster".

The customer broke up the project into many very large parts but neglected to arrange for co-ordination. Effectively, they had taken on the role of managing the overall project but didn't bother to do so. I do not think they knew how.

The project collapsed very publicly. The customer blamed everyone but himself. That company was taken over shortly after by a much wiser company and the high-profile managers were sent to distant places to operations that were on the chopping block or fired.

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

The reason I choke up the thread is that it is daytime here and y'all are sleeping.

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

I never quite understood how people like him got into high level authority positions in corporations in the first place.

So true.

I have avoided management because I have seen it.

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

John D. Rockefeller knew what he was doing. He knew that it was cheaper to spend time up-front to design equipment properly than to buy the wrong equipment. I have worked for people that were 'much smarter' than JD. And ruined many projects.

A project Manager I once worked for tried to educate upper management with studies and examples that it was better to take sufficient time to prepare the project than to fast-track it. Obviously not a candidate for upper management.

 

[braumeister]

Makes me think of the old saw we used in the custom software business:

Good/fast/cheap. Pick any two.

 

[obgyn65]

Not sure what engineers are complaining about there are days when I would take an engineering job in a heartbeat.

 

[MRG]

Makes me think of the old saw we used in the custom software business:

Thank you for that blast from the past. Very true.

A Sr. V.P., a mentor to me, used that saying and others. One of my favorites: 'If the customer wants it bad, we can give it to them badly'.
MRG

 

[aja8888]

The reason I choke up the thread is that it is daytime here and y'all are sleeping.

Not all of us, Ed....

 

[Chuckanut]

The customer's overall project manager had a mantra: "Cheaper, better, faster". A friend looked at me in angst and said, "Cheaper, better, faster--disaster".

We always knew that you can have two but not all three of Cheaper, Better, Faster.

 

[daylatedollarshort]

I thought of this thread when I was reading about Clark Rockefeller, the con guy who through lies and networking talked his way into various jobs high level management jobs he had no experience in:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703730804576321331878555032

 

[M Paquette]

"Cheaper, better, faster"

Choose any two...

 

[ERD50]

We always knew that you can have two but not all three of Cheaper, Better, Faster.

But it is the engineer's job to push the envelope on all three. That's what progress is all about.

Now if you are purchasing existing equipment on the market, yes, you will likely need to determine the priorities between those three attributes.

-ERD50

 

[frayne]

I was once reprimanded for using the word cheap, I was told instead to use cost effective.

 

[JakeBrake]

Back in the day, I was assigned to a team that was inventorying surplus complex MegaCorp equipment. I was the local rep. The rest of the team flew in from HQ. They were all engineers. The HQ inventory team brought multi-carbon copy inventory sheets. They spent several days and filled out hundreds of inventory sheets. Each sheet was pretty much filled with nomenclature. The HQ team divided the carbon copies and the originals and handed the various copies to the HQ team members. Then someone from the HQ team realized that they were all flying back to HQ on the same plane. A serious discussion developed over what they would do if the plane crashed. Finally, the leader of the HQ team said if the plane crashed, he was not going to worry about it! Fortunately, the plane did not crash.

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

But it is the engineer's job to push the envelope on all three. That's what progress is all about.

Now if you are purchasing existing equipment on the market, yes, you will likely need to determine the priorities between those three attributes.

-ERD50

There is a job in project management waiting for you! T

Don't tie an engineers' hands. It takes time to optimize things. 2-out-of-3 is all you can get. If you think you can get 'em all, you're living in a dream world.

 

[CaliforniaMan]

But it is the engineer's job to push the envelope on all three. That's what progress is all about.

Now if you are purchasing existing equipment on the market, yes, you will likely need to determine the priorities between those three attributes.

-ERD50

There is a job in project management waiting for you! T

Don't tie an engineers' hands. It takes time to optimize things. 2-out-of-3 is all you can get. If you think you can get 'em all, you're living in a dream world.

It is true that in most cases, and in all planning, you plan for only 2 out of three. But I do agree that sometimes it is possible to do something in a novel way that results in a much cheaper and better solution and get the project finished, because of its simplicity, faster. But it is maybe a once in a career happening. One can never make plans based on finding a novel solution to solve an old problem in a unique way, rather than incremental improvements, but it does happen.

But in my limited experience I have only seen it happen when engineers work autonomously with limited oversight or project reviews (which tends to weed out any novel approaches). It is magic when it does occur and fun to watch as the results of success where initial resistance eventually fades away to "of course this is obviously the way it should be done".

 

[ERD50]

Originally Posted by ERD50 View Post
But it is the engineer's job to push the envelope on all three. That's what progress is all about.

There is a job in project management waiting for you! T

Don't tie an engineers' hands. It takes time to optimize things. 2-out-of-3 is all you can get. If you think you can get 'em all, you're living in a dream world.

Are you kidding?

OK, maybe we are living in a dream world where computers, cell phones, TVs, and music players get... Cheaper, Better, Faster. But that 'dream world' is also our reality!

In my job as an engineer/manager, we were always pushed for (and measured on) cheaper (cut costs), better (improve quality), faster (increase production rates). And if we didn't deliver, they would find someone who would.

Your management let's you get by with 2 out of 3? That would have been my 'dream world'!

-ERD50