Wednesday, 18 April 2012
Let's pretend you were a manager at a company and you had an employee you really liked. But every time you assigned that employee a project, they'd talk up how great they were going to do on it but their results would range from mediocre to abysmal. At the end of the project you'd be disappointed.
How many projects would you give this employee before you stopped liking them so much? How many mediocre projects must they screw up before you are forced to face reality and fire them?
And yet, there are still people who are Royals fans.
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How many projects would you give this employee before you stopped liking them so much? How many mediocre projects must they screw up before you are forced to face reality and fire them?
And yet, there are still people who are Royals fans.
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I'm working on a project at work that could "change everything." And when I say "change everything" I mean it would disrupt a market of really expensive devices by bringing in a very cheap device that does all their essential functions as well or better. I cannot describe it in detail do to disclosure limitations, but let's just say its a medical device that costs 6 bucks to produce and would directly compete with devices that currently retail for $12,000. So I could sell my device for...$500...and seem radically economical while quietly being radically profitable to me. Instead, I want to sell it for $25. That is how you "change everything."
Here's the rub: I've done everything I can on the project without other's help. What I mean by that is I built the crude prototype and proved to my superiors it worked. I developed the cost estimates and proved they are reasonable. But going from benchtop Quasimodo to commercialized Ryan Gosling requires other engineers start helping me. And from that, I give you Waller's Law of Engineering:
Good * (Mechanical Engineer + Electrical Engineer + Software Engineer) = ANYTHING
In narrative form: if you combine a good mechanical engineer with a good electrical engineer with a good software engineer and give them a scientifically plausible goal...they can make just about anything.
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Here's the rub: I've done everything I can on the project without other's help. What I mean by that is I built the crude prototype and proved to my superiors it worked. I developed the cost estimates and proved they are reasonable. But going from benchtop Quasimodo to commercialized Ryan Gosling requires other engineers start helping me. And from that, I give you Waller's Law of Engineering:
Good * (Mechanical Engineer + Electrical Engineer + Software Engineer) = ANYTHING
In narrative form: if you combine a good mechanical engineer with a good electrical engineer with a good software engineer and give them a scientifically plausible goal...they can make just about anything.
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Friday, 30 March 2012
1. Kid who didn't like getting hazed comes forward and talks about it.
2. Liberal media latches on and takes the story national in a wildly detailed editorial with basically zero fact-checking.
3. Liberal media simultaneously points out that fraternity hazing is awful while also describing a laundry list of high-powered execs and politicians that came from fraternities.
See what they did there? They pointed out that all these somehow all these people who networked and connected through the Greek System are bad because they are successful. You never see an article in Rolling Stone that points out the huge amount of time frat boys spend on philanthropy, then describes a laundry list of billionaires that came from the Greek System. Nyet, it's always "look, fraternities are evil because of X, here's a list of people that went to fraternities, therefore those people are probably evil too."
It's no secret that my fraternity banned hazing before I got there. And by banned I really do mean banned. A couple fraternities on campus had gotten in big [expensive] trouble for hazing in the late 90's, and my fraternity had taken the pre-emptive action of banning the practice in more than just the public eye. We had a couple of things we did to the pledges that were demeaning, sure. But those were things like making them clean the house every weekday morning (upperclassmen who created an intentional biological mess were fined), or forcing them to sober drive us home from the bars on Thursday nights. We never made them circle jerk, or eat vomit, or roll around in feces. And while I cannot comment on whether we let underclassmen drink...if we did we were extremely responsible and both controlled it as well as never forced it on them. Perhaps that is why my fraternities roll call swelled by 50% while I was there, and remains a strong house on campus a decade later.
On the flip side, we practiced mandatory study hours for freshman, did not allow drugs in the house, and had a pretty strict curfew. Our pledges regularly got the best grades in the Greek system, and the Greek system at The University of Missouri regularly had a higher average GPA than the non-Greeks. Go figure.
So these smear articles really rub me the wrong way. Not because I'm in favor of hazing but because as an "insider" I was privy to exactly how hard Greeks worked both for the local community but also for each other. When I joined the fraternity, I was accused by non-Greeks of "buying friends." Turned out living at a frat was a little cheaper per month than living in a dorm. So really I was getting discount friends.
The liberal media likes to portray the Greek network as some sort of Evil League of Evil. "Look at all these upper echelon scumbags that came out of the Greek system" they extol in article after article. Nothing like envy to drive liberal media into a frenzy. But the truth of it is the network I developed has lasted and I've benefited. Yesterday I was across town at a subcontractor's office, discussing the timeline for a project and another company's engineers showed up for a similar meeting. One of them, just by chance, was my pledge brother Tim. Minutes after I wrote the previous article about engineers (with a mild pot shot at lawyers) my pledge brother/groomsman/lawyer Adam called. Adam is an IP attorney, and has offered several times to help me navigate the turbid waters of submitting and defending patents.
Look, here's my point. Rolling Stone uses the fraternity hazing situation at Dartmouth to essentially argue that not only are all fraternities corrupted by evil, but that their networking churns out evil people who now run the upper echelons of society. Example:
Last spring, Yale became the subject of a federal Title IX investigation after a group of 16 current and former students accused the school of creating a "hostile environment" for women, citing a prank in which the pledges of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the same fraternity that boasted both Bush presidents as members, paraded outside the Yale campus chanting, "No means yes! Yes means anal!"Oh well both Bush presidents must be rapists then.
And yet these exposes are universally based on anecdotal evidence:
"It's depressing coming of age here," says Deanna Portero, a senior from New York. While Dartmouth has an equal ratio of men to women, she says, it often feels as though nothing has changed since the 1970s.By my count, Deanna Portero was born in the 1990s. Her insider information into Dartmouth culture in the 1970's is unexplained.
There's no statistical information in this trash. There's no objectivity. The author almost exclusively goes after the Fraternities at Ivy League Schools, name-dropping conservative 'elites' with reckless aplomb. The author offers absolutely no defense for Fraternities, never once explains why Lohse' brothers were so loyal to SAE. The author mentions zero good things that happen because of the network frat boys develop. This article is nonsense.
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Allow me to gush for a minute. Last week a rep came to visit me from a company called SolidConcepts. They are an industry-leading rapid prototyping company capable of producing...well just about anything. In the past they've made silicon-molded parts for me, and I wanted them to come meet with me and my boss to discuss a working relationship here at my new company. The rep outlined what they can make: high-quantity injection molded parts, low-quantity silicon molded parts, SLA parts (that is, parts made on a 3D printer) and now they can even print metal parts that are impossible to machine. Oh, and they've just rolled out a 3D printer that makes PEEK parts. If you are a mechanical engineer worth your salt you just spit your coffee all over the monitor. PEEK is the holy grail plastic: inert, strong, machinable, corrosion-resistant. It's also expensive as hell. Which is why the ability to print it is amazing; no longer do you have to machine tons of scrap away to get your final product.
Anyway, the point is that with companies like SolidConcepts playing subcontractor for an engineer, the creative juices can flow like never before. "Design for machinability" suddenly takes a backseat to "design for function" and "design for aesthetic."
The question mechanical engineers used to ask themselves constantly was "can this part be molded or machined?" Now the young engineer's answer is "who gives a shit?"
The ability to make any part that is any shape made out of any material isn't the only reason its a great time to be an engineer. In the last 24 hours I've seen these articles:
10 Billion Earth-like Planets May Exist
Nuclear Fusion Now Seen As A Real Possibility
A True Bionic Limb Remains Far Out Of Reach
For A New Generation of Power Plants, A New Emission Rule From The E.P.A.
Forget Tracer Bullets - NASA Now Has Tracer Rockets
Man With No Pulse: How Turbines Can Replace The Heart
If you'll forgive the inherent egotism, its apparent to me that at no other time in human history was there the width and breadth of technological challenges for engineers to tackle. We still get to design buildings and cars and trains and bridges and airplanes and roads like we always have. But now we also get to tackle space travel systems, bionic limbs, replacement body parts, fusion power plants, and a host of others not listed. You can build an entire working computer for $35 bucks now. Smartphones have something in them called a SOC, System On a Chip. An SOC, if you'll forgive the oversimplification, is an entire computer in one single little microchip. My 1995 Dell desktop computer was about 2 cubic feet and had less power than this 1 cm x 1 cm microchip.
I can now build devices in 3D on my computer, the subject it to stress and strain simulations which are cheap, fast, and reliable. I can have my computer analyze my system as I'm building it, finding points where parts are too snugly fit, and parts where they aren't snug enough. When I have finished my work for the day, I can upload everything to "the cloud" so that any other engineer at my company can also work on that project...literally anywhere.
And yet, engineering remains one of the high-salary jobs in this world that defies robots. There's simply no effective way to input "what you want in your device" into a computer and have it design it. There's no way of saying "I need a circuitboard that does X" and a computer will draw it and route the traces and select the chips. These things require the blend of creativity and knowledge that computers simply cannot currently produce. While computers have in fact become an absolutely essential tool for all engineers, they show no sign of supplanting us. Subsequently, right now we live in the Golden Age where we are required, by industry demand, to use all the latest tech and software, but have zero fear of being made obsolete by that tech.
And as I alluded to, engineering jobs remain in high-demand and that is reflected in our salary. A newbie, fresh out of college, is pretty much guaranteed 40-50k even here in the low-cost-of-living Midwest. If the engineer has any ambition at all, they get a master's or an MBA and within 10 years are living comfortably with a salary above six figures. It's no surprise that of the happiest 20 jobs in America, 6 are engineering jobs.
I suppose its possible that a horde of people will move into engineering and flood the market, in the same way that lawyers got flooded. But with all due respect to lawyers...getting an engineering degree isn't like getting a poli-sci degree. I defy anyone to prove me wrong. Engineering programs have high transfer-out rates as they spend their first two years trying to break us, and only after 30-50% of students have transferred to something more manageable, like marketing or business, do they start teaching us the meat and potatoes. There's a small group of people who got an engineering degree, then a law degree, and these people are known as "really successful IP attorneys." But I digress. The point is that engineering is a tough field - tough enough to keep the purely-money-driven hordes at bay.
One last thought. It's possible in 25 years my daughter (who God willing will choose electrical or computer engineering) will write about how she lives in the greatest time in human history to be an engineer. I will not argue with her. The truth is that engineers have the job of taking the latest technology and science and turning it into practical application. This is why engineers now are so lucky. We have so much more tech and science to apply than our engineer ancestors did. In another 25 years, most of the technology I use today will be comically obsolete. And the volume of knowledge will be orders of magnitude larger. As such, every day is a brighter day for an engineer. I literally wake up most mornings and wonder excitedly what new tech will be announced, and hope that it's something I can use.
_
Anyway, the point is that with companies like SolidConcepts playing subcontractor for an engineer, the creative juices can flow like never before. "Design for machinability" suddenly takes a backseat to "design for function" and "design for aesthetic."
The question mechanical engineers used to ask themselves constantly was "can this part be molded or machined?" Now the young engineer's answer is "who gives a shit?"
The ability to make any part that is any shape made out of any material isn't the only reason its a great time to be an engineer. In the last 24 hours I've seen these articles:
10 Billion Earth-like Planets May Exist
Nuclear Fusion Now Seen As A Real Possibility
A True Bionic Limb Remains Far Out Of Reach
For A New Generation of Power Plants, A New Emission Rule From The E.P.A.
Forget Tracer Bullets - NASA Now Has Tracer Rockets
Man With No Pulse: How Turbines Can Replace The Heart
If you'll forgive the inherent egotism, its apparent to me that at no other time in human history was there the width and breadth of technological challenges for engineers to tackle. We still get to design buildings and cars and trains and bridges and airplanes and roads like we always have. But now we also get to tackle space travel systems, bionic limbs, replacement body parts, fusion power plants, and a host of others not listed. You can build an entire working computer for $35 bucks now. Smartphones have something in them called a SOC, System On a Chip. An SOC, if you'll forgive the oversimplification, is an entire computer in one single little microchip. My 1995 Dell desktop computer was about 2 cubic feet and had less power than this 1 cm x 1 cm microchip.
I can now build devices in 3D on my computer, the subject it to stress and strain simulations which are cheap, fast, and reliable. I can have my computer analyze my system as I'm building it, finding points where parts are too snugly fit, and parts where they aren't snug enough. When I have finished my work for the day, I can upload everything to "the cloud" so that any other engineer at my company can also work on that project...literally anywhere.
And yet, engineering remains one of the high-salary jobs in this world that defies robots. There's simply no effective way to input "what you want in your device" into a computer and have it design it. There's no way of saying "I need a circuitboard that does X" and a computer will draw it and route the traces and select the chips. These things require the blend of creativity and knowledge that computers simply cannot currently produce. While computers have in fact become an absolutely essential tool for all engineers, they show no sign of supplanting us. Subsequently, right now we live in the Golden Age where we are required, by industry demand, to use all the latest tech and software, but have zero fear of being made obsolete by that tech.
And as I alluded to, engineering jobs remain in high-demand and that is reflected in our salary. A newbie, fresh out of college, is pretty much guaranteed 40-50k even here in the low-cost-of-living Midwest. If the engineer has any ambition at all, they get a master's or an MBA and within 10 years are living comfortably with a salary above six figures. It's no surprise that of the happiest 20 jobs in America, 6 are engineering jobs.
I suppose its possible that a horde of people will move into engineering and flood the market, in the same way that lawyers got flooded. But with all due respect to lawyers...getting an engineering degree isn't like getting a poli-sci degree. I defy anyone to prove me wrong. Engineering programs have high transfer-out rates as they spend their first two years trying to break us, and only after 30-50% of students have transferred to something more manageable, like marketing or business, do they start teaching us the meat and potatoes. There's a small group of people who got an engineering degree, then a law degree, and these people are known as "really successful IP attorneys." But I digress. The point is that engineering is a tough field - tough enough to keep the purely-money-driven hordes at bay.
One last thought. It's possible in 25 years my daughter (who God willing will choose electrical or computer engineering) will write about how she lives in the greatest time in human history to be an engineer. I will not argue with her. The truth is that engineers have the job of taking the latest technology and science and turning it into practical application. This is why engineers now are so lucky. We have so much more tech and science to apply than our engineer ancestors did. In another 25 years, most of the technology I use today will be comically obsolete. And the volume of knowledge will be orders of magnitude larger. As such, every day is a brighter day for an engineer. I literally wake up most mornings and wonder excitedly what new tech will be announced, and hope that it's something I can use.
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Thursday, 29 March 2012
One of the reasons I left my old company was that they were simply too honest. They didn't play the military-industrial corruption game very well, and suffered because of it. And they weren't large enough to buy Congresspersons. One of my old company's' niche specialties was in airborne particle detection, and as such we ran into pretty direct competition with this company. Except, we didn't get the daughter of our CEO placed as head of DARPA who then continued to fund the company even after the prototype failed miserably.
Know hopelessness.
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Know hopelessness.
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