The Goldilocks Job

Which type of job sits in the Goldilocks zone of “just right” for you? Government or private? Large or small organization? Service or manufacturing? It’s an important question for job satisfaction.

For many folks, the question is simply, “Where can I get a job, period.” Engineers usually have more options and finding your Goldilocks engineer job requires investigation and discernment. The correct fit depends on your personality, habits, and goals in combination with the culture of the workplace. You can find out for sure only by working at a specific place, day-in and day-out, but here are my general observations.

Large organizations, both private and government, share some characteristics. They have lots of rules (policies) on how to handle various situations, which can limit flexibility and creative solutions. They also have lots of resources, so if you encounter a tough problem there will probably be someone who can help. Large organizations can afford some less productive members. That can be good – providing some valuable expert that is needed occasionally – or bad – allowing poor performers (deadwood) to hide their lack of productivity.

A common occurrence in large organizations is that employees get slotted into a narrow specialty and do the same thing over and over again. I’ve known some people who loved that and others who hated it. Getting wider experience requires a policy that ensures rotational assignments or that the person aggressively seeks out new project types within the organization.

Small organizations offer a mostly reversed image of large ones’ characteristics. They are much more flexible and creative. Readily available skills and knowledge are limited to existing staff. If you encounter something new, you will probably have to look outside the organization for help. A small staff often means that everyone needs to be a generalist, able to take on a variety of project types. You don’t get pigeon-holed into one type of project but your ability to become really expert in some specialty becomes limited. Personality conflicts that might be tolerable in a large organization can be impossible in a small one.

Government organizations have much in common with large private companies with near-monopolies, including inertia. In fact, the differences between large and small organizations tend to be greater than those between government and private. Some people disparage government workers but I’ve seen just as many conscientious, smart, and hard-working people in government as in the private sector. One major difference is that the clients of private organizations are usually the ones providing the funding, i.e., buying the product; whereas, government is funded by political bodies, not the clients (i.e., the public). That affects priorities within the organization.

One notable difference between private sector and many government jobs is the notion of billable hours. Many engineers really hate having to generate funds for, and then account for, every hour of every day, which is pretty much standard in the private sector. It also happens in some government offices. New hires aren’t expected to generate their own funding but someone has to give them permission to charge to a project. I found that it helps keep people focused on what they were supposed to be doing but I do agree that billable hours can be a distracting burden.

Which one works best for you? 

Tribes at Work

“Nobody on this hallway would steal anything but those other hallways are a bunch of crooks.”

I thought he must be joking, but the man was serious. Everyone in the building worked for the same organization, all were technical professionals assigned offices almost randomly. Yet he truly thought that some magic had placed only honest people in the hallway where his office lay and landed dishonest people in every other hallway.

My investigation: find out what had happened to a missing portable generator. Multiple people had seen it the previous week in a storeroom. Then it was missing. Was someone legitimately using it or had it been stolen? [Insert NCIS theme song here.] Spoiler: It had been stolen and I recommended that the investigation be turned over to the police.

I never heard if they found the culprit or not. But that investigation and a dozen others taught me something terrible about us humans. Thousands of years after we grew beyond small hunter-gatherer tribes, we are still tribal beings. Now we identify with cultural tribes, trusting our tribe members and distrusting other tribes, convinced that the trust is based on facts.

Every person I interviewed that day expressed similar sentiments, although less bluntly than that first man. Every hallway distrusted every other hallway with a few exceptions for friends sharing other tribal bonds. Subsequent investigations produced similar patterns, a solid belief among interviewees that no one in their tribe would be careless or steal.

We also see the tribal effect in sports, where fans ferociously identify with the Saints, Barcelona, Atlanta, or Team USA even when fans don’t play and don’t personally know anyone on those teams. In politics we label ourselves and others as Democrats, Tories, Conservatives, Pro- and Anti-something, ad infinitum. In the workplace we label “Us” and “Them” by function, discipline, or even by hallway. Once labeled, we vilify the other labeled tribes as not just different, but stupid and dishonest. Sigh.

What advice can I offer in the face of such instinctive behavior? First, recognize tribalism for what it is in yourself and others. Work hard to prevent it from contaminating your work relationships. Go out of your way to cultivate friendships across the labels. Demonstrate a willingness to listen to contrary ideas from “Them.” But be aware that some bosses’ turf protection often hinges on tribalism. I once was caught between my supervisor who refused to defend his own turf and his boss who became furious when we tried cooperation before attacking competitors. Double sigh.

Performance Appraisals Stink

Most employee performance appraisals fail to improve performance and damage management credibility. Good performance appraisal systems in the workplace are like the abominal snowman, rumored to exist and sightings bragged upon, but never actually seen. Most supervisors and most employees dread the practice. Why? There are four obvious problems.

Problem 1. Management misuses them.

Most organizations SAY that appraisals are intended to improve employee performance but use them for other purposes. The ideal system allows supervisors and subordinates to communicate about needs, goals, and ways to improve performance in a collaborative process akin to coaching. However, management screws it up by using the results for pay raise and promotion decisions. Making a person’s pay depend on his or her performance rating changes the process from collaboration to a competition between supervisor and employee. The supervisor, under pressure to prevent ratings inflation, points to the employee’s deficiencies. The employee, seeking to increase income, points to strengths and makes excuses. The dynamic is no longer about improving performance. Then there’s the “ratings inflation” issue. The U.S. Army famously destroyed the objectivity of performance ratings by keying them to promotion decisions. Decent superior officers didn’t want to ruin their subordinate’s career with anything less than a top rating; while malicious ones deliberately downgraded those who disagreed with them. The result was massive “ratings inflation” and loss of many good officers. There are many such examples of misuse.

Problem 2. Management insists that ratings fit a distribution.

Applying an artificial distribution like the bell curve to performance appraisals is management malpractice. The bell curve (Gaussian Distribution) exhibits a bell shape with a few high values, a few low values, and a bulge of most values around the average. I’ve seen senior managers and Human Resources types draw a bell curve to explain how performance ratings should be distributed. (They weren’t laughing when they did that, so they were either liars or math dunces.) I’ve been told that I had given too many low ratings or too many high ratings and instructed to change some of them in order to achieve a bell curve. That’s total and absolute nonsense. Bell curves apply only to large numbers and to some random variables, including dice rolls and the length of peoples’ fingers. Any measure that people can manage is not random. Consider the high jump in track and field. If we pulled people off the street at random and got them to jump, we might get a bell curve of maximum jump heights. But if we look at the statistics from a high jump competition, we see instead a skewed, tightly clustered distribution (a gamma distribution with low k value) because those athletes have trained and been coached to do well. Similarly, people train to do their jobs and are coached by supervisors to do them even better. Whatever the distribution is, it isn’t a bell curve and never will be. Further, it will progressively shift toward higher average performance (i.e., rating inflation) if management is doing its coaching job and not destroying productivity with ill-conceived policies. 

Problem 3. Appraisals are too infrequent.

Most appraisals are conducted once or twice a year because it’s a convenient schedule. Unless someone has kept meticulous notes, it becomes a struggle to remember who did what and how many times. Any serious attempt at quality improvement in manufacturing or customer service is applied continuously, not in once-a-year retrospectives, and so it should be with performance appraisals. 

Problem 4. Different supervisors rate differently.

Some supervisors grade hard (think Steve Jobs’ abuse of his employees, even the great ones) and some grade easy (think Elwood P. Dowd in my post, “Plays Well with Others.”) A few rating systems use the supervisors’ overall average rating in previous appraisals to normalize them for comparison. That doesn’t solve the problem, since it neglects the coaching effect that good supervisors use to boost performance. A great supervisor gets great performances and eventually gives more superior ratings. Why should an average performer on a great team get the same normalized rating as an average performer on a mediocre team? Nonsense piled on nonsense.

Solutions? I have ideas on how a performance appraisal system should work, but would like to hear your thoughts first. In your experience, what works? What doesn’t? Comment below.

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A Good Excuse is Dangerous

When our grandson was about 5, he would ask to play with my “dangerous tool” (a Leatherman multi-tool). It was almost harmless but gave him a thrill because he knew he shouldn't be playing with it.

The “most dangerous tool” for any career is The Excuse, even if it’s a good one. Some examples:

One of our daughters suddenly started getting terrible math grades. Nothing we tried helped until one night she blurted out in frustration, “Girls aren’t supposed to be good in math!”  “Are you insane?” I politely asked. She had seen a TV comedy in which the girl was bad at math and had adopted that bad idea because it relieved her of the responsibility to work hard. To correct her misconception, her mother told her of female math geniuses starting with Hypatia of Alexandria. She led our daughter through the ages to Ada Babbage, Grace Hopper and our good friend and famous engineer Mary Kendrick.

I have heard dozens of people say about someone getting a promotion or a raise,  “She’s so lucky, being in the just right place at the right time,”  or “He only got that job because he takes the boss fishing.” From where I sat, it looked like the "lucky" ones had positioned themselves for success with extra education and hard work over months and years. But for these complainers, it was easier to slack off and complain because they had bogus excuses of bad luck or a refusal to brown-nose the boss.

Even good excuses are dangerous. I worked with a woman engineer who had a serious lisp. It made her seem even younger than she was and would have doomed her to a minor role. Instead of wallowing in "it's not fair." she refused to let her lisp define her, taking speech classes, joining a Toastmasters public speaking club, and learning to express her ideas forcefully. She soon became a lead engineer.

What’s your excuse?

Don't Do Your Best

Today’s topic is Don’t Do Your Best. School consciously and unconsciously teaches us that we should “do our best.” If we’re a C student, that’s okay, as long as those C’s are the product of our best efforts. That’s right for school, but wrong at work. Unlearn it.

Example: I once served on a team making water quality predictions for a national park. My role was to construct a numerical hydrodynamic model of the system, using data supplied by the park. At team meetings, Andre, responsible for getting the data, reported week after week that he couldn’t get the park to respond. I was happy to postpone the effort until a milestone meeting with our Director, Georgette. When she asked me about progress, I answered that I couldn’t start until Andre got the data. She turned to Andre. “Why don’t we have the data?”

Andre swallowed hard. “I’ve written and called the park multiple times, and they keep promising to send it, but they don’t. I told them how important it was, and they said they would, but they haven’t yet. I’ve done my absolute best.”

Georgette leaned into Andre, and he leaned back. “You weren’t asked to do your best. Stand up, get in your car, and drive to the airport. Now. Don’t go home to pack. Fly to the client office. Stand there until they put the data in your hand. Don’t come home without it.”

As Andre staggered out the door, Georgette turned to me, a baleful look in her eye. “Your job, McAnally, was to build the model, not sit on your backside using Andre as an excuse. When he gets back, you’ll do whatever it takes to build that model and meet the next milestone on time. Understood?” I understood, and so did everyone else on that project. Doing our best wasn’t good enough. Only getting the job done was good enough.

I don’t really care for the comedian Larry the Cable Guy. He reminds me of my crudest junior high school friends, but he created the perfect catchphrase for this topic – “Get ‘er done.” In your work life you must be the kind of engineer who gets the job done.

We have to temper this message with some caveats, of course. For an engineer, getting the job done means getting it done right – safely, on-time, on-budget, and fulfilling our professional responsibilities to the client and the public. More on that later. For now, Git ‘er done.

Who you know or what you know?

I once engaged in technical combat with a government agency. They said my technical approach was okay for hindcasting salinity in Galveston Bay, but not for forecasting salinity under a proposed deepening of the navigation channel.  It was a difference of opinion on a subject too technical for administrators to judge, so naturally it got bumped up the agency head, an attorney with no technical expertise. I got a call from his assistant, a woman I had helped with some technical questions years earlier.  Because she knew and trusted me, she called to get the inside story.  I told her my reasoning and explained my adversary’s reasoning. A short time later, the agency head said that my approach was appropriate and justified.

There’s some truth in the axiom, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” What we engineers know is crucial to doing our jobs but often we think that’s all there is to it. This experience and many others showed me that we have to be technically competent, but often that’s not enough. Knowing the right people and having their trust is essential, too. We have to know both what and who.

Networking is one way to know the “who.” It requires effort. Join professional and civic societies, both local and national. Volunteer for committees and make a real contribution. (Becoming known as someone who is just padding a resume without actually working won’t help your career.)  Professional and civic organizations don’t pay for our time but sometimes can pay travel expenses, so our bosses have to be supportive, or at least not opposed, and we have to be prepared to donate our personal time.

Networking is the best way to find a job and a powerful tool in career building after you have the job. Networking gains new clients, educates us on both technical and professional issues, and provide a string of professional friendships that help in unexpected ways. Do it.

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The Worst Reason

“That’s the absolute worst reason!”

First day of Engineering 101 at Arizona State University and the professor asks us to introduce ourselves and say why we decided to study engineering. We hear several versions of:

·       I like to take things apart and my parents said I’d make a good engineer.

·       I’m good at math and science and my teachers said I’d enjoy engineering.

·       My dad’s an engineer and it was kind of expected of me.

Then it’s my turn and I say, “Because I heard engineers make a lot of money,” and the professor shouts, “That’s the absolute worst reason! You won’t last one semester, Mr. McAnally.”

He was wrong on both counts. It may not be a great reason, but it provided plenty of motivation for me to get my Bachelor of Science in Engineering and my first year out of school I felt wealthy for the first time in my life.

Those other reasons were good, too. The ones who liked to take things apart were mostly dismayed by two years of math and science, but the ones who stuck it out made excellent engineers. The math and science whizzes got through the first two years fine but sometimes floundered when they encountered the practical engineering problems of the junior year.

The attrition rate was high that first year and into the second. Rigorous coursework and seeing our friends in other majors frolic while we studied made engineering seem like a dubious choice at times. For those of us who persisted, the payoff in job satisfaction (including excellent pay) was well worth it.

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Science or Engineering?

Which suits you best, science or engineering?

At a meeting to review research proposals, a scientist announced, “If a proposal didn’t start with a question, I rejected it because that’s the way I was brought up.”

Several heads around the table nodded solemnly, but the engineers looked perplexed. I said, “Well, if a proposal lacked a clear objective statement, I rejected it because that’s the way I was brought up.” Now the scientists were puzzled. Our intent was the same, identifying proposals with clear intentions, but our language was very different.

So which suits you best? Here are some quotations that may help:

·       Sir Peter Medewar: The business of science is telling stories, then scrupulously testing those stories to see if they describe real life.

·       Henry Petroski: … science seeks to understand what is; whereas engineering seeks to create what never was.

·       Eric Drexler: If the intended result is knowledge — a better model of what exists in the world and how it works — I think of it as science. If the intended result is a new product, process, or design methodology, I think of it as engineering.

These words explain why the scientists and engineers at that table had different perspectives on what illustrates proposal intent. I wanted to see an objective, an end-product described, even if the end-product was knowledge. The scientists wanted to see a question that clearly framed the knowledge to be gained.

Science and engineering are different but intertwined. Some scientists do engineering and many engineers do science in order to make their engineering work possible. Some examples:

·       Alexander Fleming’s scientific discovery of penicillin led to design (engineering) of antibiotics.

·       James Watt’s practical engineering creation of the steam engine led to creation of thermodynamic science and future engineering improvements to the engine.

·       Science and engineering worked together in many major projects – the Moon landing, Manhattan Project, Gulf oil spill cleanup, Louisiana coastal restoration.

Science and engineering have one major mind-set difference that reveals a lot. Science expects more rigorous proofs that will hold up under challenge. I have often heard scientists say something like, “I can’t answer that question because there’s not enough evidence.” Engineering seldom has the luxury of not doing something for lack of evidence. Engineers will make assumptions to fill a data gap and then use a safety factor to account for the uncertainty.

Many jokes attempt to explain the difference between scientists and engineers. My favorite: An engineer and a mathematical scientist are placed at the end of a long room. At the opposite end is one of the famous Chippendale Dancers. They are told that they can advance toward the dancer, but only closing half the remaining distance each time. The mathematician throws up her hands and says, “It’s no use even trying, theory shows that I’ll never reach him.” The engineer immediately advances halfway down the room. She says, “That’s okay. I can get close enough for practical purposes.”

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Are You a Dinosaur? (Education Part 1)

Dean didn’t know he was a dinosaur. Dean, an engineer who built and used scale models of rivers, was pretty good at his job.  The problem was that fewer and fewer clients wanted scale models. They considered them to be obsolete technology. When our boss told Dean that he needed to learn to use new technology, numerical models that ran on computers, he replied, “I’m not interested in that stuff. You’ll find something for me to do.” Dean was justifiably fired, unwilling to cope with a changing work environment. His career was as extinct as the dinosaurs’ dominant role on earth.

Graduating with a degree in engineering equips us with a substantial store of knowledge plus the engineer’s advantage, giving us an edge over other fields. Our edge – a methodical process to identify and solve challenging problems – provides excellent job opportunities and pay but comes with a big catch – edges get dull. We must continually sharpen it or lose it. Ok, I’m changing the analogy from a dinosaur to an axe. Humor me.

College can’t cram everything we need to know as practicing engineers into just 4 or 5 years. College gives us only the basics and prepares us for the real learning to follow. To continue the axe analogy, engineering school gives us a rough edge that’s okay for chopping soft wood but we need sharpen that edge to cut harder stuff. Jeremy, a master’s student, remarked that graduate school taught him how little he really knew.  He said that after his bachelor’s degree, he thought there was nothing left to learn in engineering. Graduate courses smacked him in the face with how much more he needed to learn.

The second part of the catch is that knowledge grows obsolete. Some experts say that the half-life of engineering knowledge is about 5 years. We have to be current in our knowledge and skills to keep a sharp edge and do good work. Sharpen the edge.

Next time: Raising the Bar

Raising the Bar (Education Part 2)

Last time we considered how an engineering degree is a wonderful start, but not enough.

The first two years of an engineering curriculum consists mainly of math and physics courses that prepare us for the engineering-specific courses to follow. For example, we must understand calculus in order to fully understand physics and to learn modern methods in solid, fluid and granular dynamics. And we have to have those dynamics classes to take on engineering design. Taking junior and senior level engineering courses without knowing calculus would be difficult to impossible. So even though most practicing engineers never explicitly use calculus in their day-to-day work, their education and work depend on knowing it. A lot of material has to be understood before we get that engineering degree.

When I was in Arizona State’s college of engineering we occasionally laid aside our clay tablet textbooks and whined, “How can we possibly complete 140 semester hours in just four years?” Our professors chortled and told us they had graduated with a required 150 hours. Today an engineering degree can be obtained with 125 to 130 hours at many universities. What got left out in downsizing the curriculum? Lots of technical material that an engineer needs to do her job got pushed into graduate courses.

The reality is that we can’t learn everything we need in an undergraduate engineering program.

The National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), discipline-specific organizations like the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and others recognized this situation and launched “Raising the Bar” initiatives. For example, ASCE recommends a bachelor’s degree plus 30 semester hours of graduate study as the minimum for professional training. The National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) has established a model professional engineering (PE) licensing law that requires the same before the PE exam can be taken. Several states have announced their intent to enact the model law and all will eventually.

Some practicing engineers grumble that Raising the Bar is a plot by university professors to jack up graduate school enrollment. They are wrong. Private sector companies started it, complaining that they had to train new engineers extensively before they could be turned loose on real engineering work. Raise the Bar was pushed by the private sector and universities followed.

How do you get the extra 30 semester hours?

Next time: Get paid to go to school?

Get Paid to Go to School? (Education Part 3)

I can hear the groans. I just finished my bachelor’s degree. Do I need graduate study, too?

The answer is yes, all 21^st century engineers need graduate study. The only real question is how to get it.

The reasons for the “yes” are that graduate study …

1.     Is an investment that pays off financially.

2.     Increases the quality of your professional life.

3.     Raises your professional standing with management and clients.

4.     Is ASCE’s and NCEES’ proposed minimal standard of competence. (see the prior post about raising the bar.)

Look at Reason 1, “… pays off financially.” Numerous studies over multiple years show that a master’s degree in engineering produces an increase in pay of more than 10% that persists for most of a career. That’s a big payoff over 30 years.

Reasons 2 and 3 mean that advanced degree holders:

·       get more challenging and interesting assignments

·       often get promoted earlier

·       usually get selected for a job over someone with a bachelor’s degree.

Further, engineers can get paid to go to graduate school. Full time students can get either a teaching assistantship or a research assistantship with:

·       A monthly stipend. (you won’t get rich on it but it’s enough for most young folks.)

·       Access to external and internal fellowships.

·       Tuition remission (i.e., it pays all or most tuition).

·       One-on-one mentoring by your faculty supervisor.

An alternative to full time graduate school: Work for an organization that supports graduate education (many pay the tuition) and take classes part-time. That takes longer and affects personal time but it enables you to earn a full engineering salary while doing it. Distance education is now widely available and web-based courses are dramatically better than the old videos-by-mail courses. Some allow real-time interaction with the professor and other students.

Next time: Keeping your sharp edge.

Keeping Your Edge (Education Part 4)

You aren’t done when you get that master’s degree or doctorate. Every Professional Engineering (PE) state licensing board requires continuing education credits to keep your PE license. But even without a PE, we have to keep sharpening our edge with life-long learning to do good work.

Fortunately, a continuing education industry strives to meet the PE need. Professional societies, universities, and private companies offer continuing education ranging from one-hour webinars to week-long mini-courses. Many professional conferences offer 4- and 8-hour workshops on technical subjects. Just be sure that the training qualifies by the criteria of the states where you’re registered. Some states are picky about which training sources are acceptable.

On-the-job training can be part of your edge sharpening. It’s considered a basic part of a new engineer’s job, sometimes as part of formal mentoring and rotational assignments. OJT can also be used by experienced engineers by asking for temporary assignments to a new area or a new technology. It augments continuing education courses but doesn’t replace them.

Finally, read the technical literature – magazine, journals, books, and web sites – and attend professional conferences to learn how others are solving problems and applying new technologies. Network with colleagues and don’t be afraid to email your college professors with a question. Keep learning.

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Is there an “Engineering Method”?

“Engineers do a super job, no matter where we place them.” A recruiter from a financial services company told me that. I had wondered aloud why he was recruiting my students at a job fair as well as those majoring in finance. He then quoted the Dean of Harvard business school as saying that engineers were so valuable because they solved problems methodically. Hmm.

Engineers have been in the employment cat-bird seat for decades, with consistent demand and rising salaries. My graduate students got multiple job offers before they finished their degrees and often agonized over which attractive offer to accept. What’s the secret? Is there a “method” that gives engineers an edge over other disciplines?

“The Engineering Method” is defined in several online sources, often as a sequence of steps that parallel “The Scientific Method,” but they miss the essence of real-life engineering as I know it. Engineering doesn’t exactly fit a step-wise method. There are too many If-Then branches. It’s more of a mind-set.

Professor Billy V. Koen wrote an insightful treatise (Definition of the Engineering Method. American Society for Engineering Education, Washington, D.C. 1985) that defines the engineering method as: “… the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood situation within the available resources.” That’s pretty good but not very clear. It also requires his additional definition, “A heuristic is anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem but is, in the final analysis, unjustified, incapable of justification, and fallible.” He then provides a list of heuristics. Double Hmm.

One of Koen’s heuristics is, “Always give an answer.” That’s certainly a key element in engineering. Scientists can protest that a question can’t be answered without more information but engineers seldom have that option. Engineers account for missing information by making assumptions and then applying safety factors or uncertainty bounds to account for the assumptions.

I distill from Koen’s book and my experience these thoughts (heuristics?) about the engineer’s mind-set:

·       A clearly stated objective is fundamental.

·       There are constraints on what constitutes a successful objective achievement.

·       The objective must be achieved.

·       The solution is informed by state-of-the-art science, mathematics, and technology.

·       Large, complex situations can be broken into manageable, solvable chunks.

·       The solution doesn’t have to be the absolute “best.” It should be a good solution that fits the objective and constraints given available resources.

I’m still not sure this adequately captures the engineer’s mind-set, much less fits the definition of a “method.” 

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Don't Drink and Email

I once advised a group of students to never send an email when they were angry. One of them nodded emphatically and added, “Not when you’re drunk, either.” Both are good advice.

Email and social media postings are easily misunderstood because they lack the context of body language. Emoji help, but not much. What might be intended as a simple comment can come across as hostile and angry words can seem threatening in written form.

Electronic communication is almost instantaneous, which makes it too easy to dash off a note without sufficient thought; however, an unwise comment in email or LinkedIn can persist forever. We can’t delete what others have already stored or printed. Intemperate remarks can come back to bite.

A co-worker of mine was notorious for his oral outbursts of abusive language; yet, when any of us complained he would simply deny it, saying we misunderstood. Finally, management pulled all his emails and compiled dozens of examples of violent threats he had made. They required him to publically apologize and put him on probation.

An acquaintance made an outrageous comment on Facebook. Later he edited the comment to change the meaning of his post, but several of us had the original statement in an email notice from Facebook. He looked bad on both the front and back ends of the controversy.

My advice is to write the angry email you want to send but don’t send it. That helps cope with the anger you feel but doesn’t commit you. If you must send it, wait at least 24 hours and revise it to avoid unwise comments. Save your angry words, if you must use them, for face-to-face meetings.

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Better, Faster, Cheaper, Stupider?

How do we balance the demand for high quality engineering with economic pressures? The iconic demand is “better, faster, cheaper.” The ironic answer is, “Pick one,” but clients hate irony.

One example: Levee design requires precise and accurate calculations of how high flood elevations will rise. Estimating a design flood elevation wrong by more than a few inches can result in either excessive costs (miles of unnecessary levee height) or disaster (unexpected flooding).  Given the adverse consequences of even small errors, my organization spent lots of time and effort making sure our crest estimates were both accurate and precise.

Sometimes our resolve to generate the most accurate results created conflict. I knew an engineer who agonized over his calculations, demanding more and better information until his clients became enraged with schedule delays. I sympathized with him. None of us wanted to be the one who under-designed a levee that killed someone.

A wakeup call from a different world came when a U.S. Army captain called us and asked how high the Euphrates River would get at a certain location over the next 48 hours. Stunned, one of my colleagues told him that it would take at least two weeks to make those calculations. He replied, “Sir, I’ve got 48 hours to put a ribbon bridge across this river before the enemy arrives and starts shooting. Any answer after 24 hours is useless.”

That captain taught us a valuable lesson in balancing speed versus accuracy in engineering results. He didn’t care if we were off by several feet. He just needed it fast.

It isn’t just the battlefield where quality versus time judgments are important. Sometimes a quick, approximate answer is worth much more than a deliberate, carefully worked out answer. Every project, every client has different needs and engineers must find the right balance between speed, cost, and quality for each one.

Quality is usually defined as fitness for intended use – a solution appropriate to the need with available resources. That’s the correct answer to “better, faster, cheaper” demands. How do we get there?

•      Define the objective clearly. Ask the client about constraints on time, cost, and others.

•      Estimate time and cost as a function of needed quality of results.

•      Present estimates and limitations to client. Be prepared to negotiate.

•      Prepare final estimates with explicitly written objective, constraints, and limitations (including uncertainty bounds).

Luckily for Army captain, I had wonderful coworkers who understood his plight and got him the information he needed, when he needed it. They got ‘er done.

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Elwood or Chewbacca?

“In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.” That line from the movie Harvey, is spoken by Elwood Dowd. Elwood is pleasant to everyone, no matter how hostile they act. He would have gotten the highest possible grade in “plays well with others.”

Elwood is so pleasant, such a nice person, that he’s willing to undergo horrific and unnecessary drug treatment to please his sister. I’ve had colleagues like that, people so nice that they let anyone have their way just to avoid conflict. Everybody loved them, but they got steamrolled by folks that weren’t so pleasant. I had more than one smart, super nice colleague who got great projects taken away from him because he wouldn’t fight for them.

At the opposite end of the niceness scale, some people are like Chewbacca in Star Wars. They shout and threaten if anyone disagrees with them. They get their way a lot. They also get secretly shunned or even sabotaged by those they’ve savaged. A professor I knew always blamed other professors, student workers, or clerical staff when something went wrong, even if she had to lie about it. No one would willingly work with her. In addition, her important paperwork frequently disappeared, “lost” in the mail or even from her desk. She would roar and accuse but I noticed a lot of secret smiles behind her back.

Unlike Elwood, we don’t want to give up being smart, but being pleasant helps our career. Why? Co-workers are more cooperative with those they like, providing advice and assistance they may withhold from the more abrasive types. Second, attitude is contagious. Elwood’s pleasantness infected everyone around him and the good vibrations spread like ripples in a pond, just like in real life. Good work happened.

Niceness is largely an innate characteristic, producing in people a spectrum of pleasantness between the extremes of Elwood and Chewbacca.  Those of us without the pleasant gene may never become an Elwood but we can cultivate niceness, working at being pleasant and saving our angry impulses for really serious problems. Those who are just naturally pleasant can work on being pleasantly assertive. There are even books on that subject.

One example: I witnessed a meeting in which the team leader asked easy-going Freddie to create a three-dimensional digital elevation model (DEM) of coastal marshes. Freddie readily agreed, surprising me because he had never done that sort of work before. After the meeting I asked Freddie why he took the task on. He replied, “I don’t know. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I’ll just have to find someone to do it for me.” Freddie had endangered the project and his job with his inability to say, “No.”

Have you found your sweet spot between Elwood and Chewbacca? How did you adjust your behavior?

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