Re: OT? Rant: Professional pride

Rune Allnor wrote: 
Hi all.

Many years ago, I attended some conference where some guy who did
not have English as his "natural 2nd language" gave a presentation.
This guy was the only one I saw during a full week to actually keep
the time schedule. He wrapped up his talk at exactly 15:00 minutes,
leaving five full minutes for questions and discussions. No questions
were asked from the audience, possibly because of the presenter's
not quite perfect English diction. Not that I blame him for that, he
did a better job than I would have managed if I was told to give a
presentation in Russian, Chinese of Japanese in six months time.

anyway, the chairman, a slick elegant English academic of Oxbridge
grooming, who was very aware he was a slick English academic of
Oxbridge grooming, found the silence soewhat awkward, and asked,
in a way only a slick English academic of Oxbridge grooming can,

"Excuse me sir, but what is new about this work?"

The reaction of the presenter was as if the chairman had pretended to
shake his hand but hit him to the stomach instead. And we got a speedy
almost verbatim re-run of the 15 minutes talk, this time in two
minutes.

After the session I went up to the chairman and asked if he hadn't been

a bit rough with the poor guy. "Oh no," he said, "that is the *one*
question everybody who gives a talk at a scientific conference should
always be prepared for. If you can't answer it, you should not give
the presentation in the first place."

It did make sense to me.

So I adapted it to my own version as "Excuse me sir, why do you think
this method will work?" applied to engineering. True, the question is
a bit tough if asked out loud, but I find it useful as a philosophical
basis. If I can not formulate an answer to explain the intention of algorithm, I don't know why I use it and should probably not be doing
using some method or the job in the first place.

That's the philosophical basis I have used for a decade. Whenever I
have had a saying in a project, I have used the philosophy to suggest
solutions when I can, and explain why I could not find any solution when that was the case. Lots of people don't like to hear that something
can *not* be done. So I have more than once pointed out that Niels
Henrik Abel, the only Norwegian mathematician of international fame, is known in the general public, for having proved that it is *im*possible
most widely to solve fifth degree equations by means of the "standard"
algebraic methods. I found some of the reactions to be all out
disturbing.
> 
It follows as a trivial corrolary that one should stay away from
projects where no path towards a solution exists, unless the objective
of the project is to find such a path. Basically, it is a matter of
getting a pre-project feasibility study, which is part of basic project
managment craftmanship.

Then one out to say that one should stay away from projects where no path towards a solution is known to exist.

Imagine my surprise, even digust, when I discussed some projects with
som guy a few days ago. This guy said he was not the least interested
in feasability studies. "They always conclude with that whatever can
not be done." Which is just about true, what underwater acoustics is
concerned. So no one write feasability studies. And no one validate the
methods they come up with. Neither is good for business.

And this seems to be intentional. I cited one particular project, that
was based on the following argument:

Use an active sonar to insonify the water. If target A is present, the
recieved echo will show property X, or

A => X     [implication]

in logical formalism. I do not contest the implication.

The project was based on analyzing the recieved signal for property X,
using this as an indicator for the target A. In doing this, one
implicitly
puts a constraint one can not defend:

A <=> X   [equivalence]

The equivalence means that only target A, and no others, induces
property X in the recieved data. Which is a very strong claim.
What needs to be done is to make sure there exist no other targets
in the sea that show property X. Since "property X" in this particular
case is formulated as "the target reflects frequencies f1,f2,...,fN"
there is no way of establishing the equivalence. It is a ridiculous
claim to say that one and only one type of object reflects a set of
specified frequencies.

So I pointed this out. There are most probably several targets that
show property X,

A => X
B => X
C => X

and so on ad infinitum. So making an observation X can not be
linked to target A in any definite way, basically kicking the feet
away beneath the project in question. "Yep, that's logical" was
the answer. Sure, it is. Students are required to take a basic course
of elementary logic before being allowed to take any degree in
a university. But the connection to the real-world project in question
was not grasped.

Three local ministers were concerned that so many congregants came drunk to services, and set out to determine the cause. They spent one night drinking Scotch and soda, with predictable effect. Another night, they drank whiskey and soda to the same effect. On a third night, they drank Bourbon and soda, getting drunk again. Their conclusion was easy: soda is the cause of intoxication.

I just don't get it. Somebody proposes and sells a project where
there is absolutely no chance of success, whatsoever. When asked,
they see the argument why, and agree with it, but still go on. Why?
Do they have no professional pride at all? Is it worth the carreer
and reputation of the junior engineers that are assigned to do the
grunt work? There is a peculiar pattern in these types of projects,
that the basic ideas behind the projects are never criticized when
they blow up. It is always the assigned engineer who is not up to
the task.

That's the unfair part. I worked in a research organization. I had to tell a new boss that it was perfectly all right to assign me a job with clear goals, tell me how it would be accomplished, and how long it will take. He had to realize, though, that the last two specifications were mere predictions. Moreover, Whether they proved accurate or not, the project could hardly be called "research".

Oh well.

There must be material for at least a couple of doctoral theses in
psychology, somewhere inside here.

The writer of the paper will have to differentiate speculative projects (those where no solution is known to exist but which seem worthwhile anyway) from the ones with asinine managers who, like a landlord I had in my early 20s, think that engineers can do anything.

Long ago, I needed a character generator for a dot-matrix printer. We know that ROM would be available in a year or two, but we needed the generator in the short term. I undertook build one with magnetic cores, threading each with sense wires representing the dots in the matrix for one letter, and with seven select wires, one for each ASCII bit. The half-select problem seemed insurmountable, though requiring unobtainable tolerances. My lab director at the time held the patents on memory cores and was the recognized expert in the field. (Jan Rajchman) We discussed the difficulties and he could see no way around them. He sensed my resignation as I was leaving his office and said to me as I approached the door that he wanted me to continue looking for a way: "If there is one, you will find it." In less than a week, I did. I think he felt even better about that than I did. (Tolerance didn't affect my solution. It easily accommodated +/- 30% on the select currents and any mix of core thresholds in the batch I had.

Later, another director assigned me to get a machine (of his design) to work without changing it. I was almost fired over that one, and would have been if he hadn't been fired well, moved upstairs) in my place.

One former director (former because he was so abrasive and sarcastic that few could work under him) had been promoted to assistant to the president. (In reality, general snoop and Grand Inquisitor.) What stopped him from being as good as he might have been at answering management's question, "How's it going?" was that everybody was afraid of him. If you were bullshitting, he would know before anyone else, maybe even yourself. He waltzed into my room one day -- I was trying to build a contactless keyboard with rollover (RCA still believed in computers then) -- and wanted to know how the project was coming. I answered his questions in a clear voice that hardly shook at all. Then he asked me a real tough one: "Why make this particular choice?" I figured that honesty was, at that moment, the worst of all possible choices, but conscience won out. I asserted that /some/ choice had been necessary, and this one seemed good at the time. He then asked what alternatives I had entertained, and I said, "None". He bought it.

We became, if not buddies, respected acquaintances. I devised ways to water his flowers while away without limiting flow with orifices so small they would clog. I figured out how he could legally stop the Pitot-static airspeed indicator on his plane from freezing up without a mechanic's license. We brainstormed about problems I wanted to crack; usually about work, but not always.

It seems that for all his bluster, what he wanted was someone who didn't flinch. (As a researcher, he had built the first power transistor -- one watt -- while a meeting was being held to discuss the feasibility of ever reaching a quarter watt. He had left the meeting impatiently and returned before it was over with a pellet soldered (by hand) to a copper plate. He chucked the thing still warm into the middle of the conference table and said, "One watt, ten minutes, still going strong when I disconnected it."

Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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.

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