“Simply” Wrong
This morning in a meeting, an account manager voiced an opinion: “well, you simply have to X…” Irrespective of the content, and of any thoughts merits of the words of an account manager in an engineering discussion, I was suddenly aware of that word, “simply.” How easily it trips off the tongue! It and its cousins “just”, “only” (and “easily”) slip so – well, simply – into conversation; they are so often that they are usually ignored. But they still affect the tone of the sentence, of the discussion itself. They diminish the things that we engineers have to get to the bottom of. In this morning’s case, it was a process: “simply insert it and tighten it.” Account Manager talk, yes, but do you see how quickly that trivialises the problem, without adding anything useful to the discussion? In fact, in the spirit of thinking things through, I would propose that…
Sensitivity
No matter what kind of engineer you are, or what systems you are working on, your projects will have sensitivities. In simplistic terms, sensitivity is a measure of how much changing an input will vary the output. From a mathematical point of view, you can assign coefficients to describe how important each input is, and generate a model of your process. From a practical point of view, this means it’s important to understand which factors in the project you are working on are the critical factors. For instance, let’s take making biscuits as an engineering project. Making basic biscuits is a fairly simple, well-known process. There are only a few ingredients, it only takes one bowl, and cooking only involves popping them in the oven. So what parameters do we have in our process? For the purposes of the example, let’s make a short list (although there can be many more):…
Weekend Journal: Know Your Nerd Audience
One benefit to being part of a large(ish) corporation is purchasing power (not super large, but big enough to turn a head or two). You get lower part costs, you get more guarantees of delivery and you get better support. And sometimes as part of support, you get to talk to some very smart people (hardly exclusive to when you’re an important customer). Well, let me back up a little bit. Sometimes you get to talk. And sometimes you only get to listen. My issue comes up when vendors come in and say they want to talk. That they want to have a ‘conversation with their valued customer’…and then proceed to plow through slides that you have no interest in. This happens all the time and I dutifully sit through them, especially if they’ve bought me lunch (I can be bought with food, doubly so for good food). My problem…