To the wiser (older folks), how has the profession changed? 19

[ManifestDestiny]

Hi all

I've been binging a lot on documentaries lately, mostly on the grand old stuff that still amazes today, Concorde, SR-71, Apollo etc. Over the weekend me and some friends were catching up for some beers and inevitably it lead to the usual workplace whinge. We surmised that there are really no new problems, just new and innovative ways of F$&@ing something up, and every 5-7 years you just add another zero to the cost of the F$&@ up. Some of these folks were older than me (early 40's) so really still too young to be in the age of the grand stuff, who would be at least at retirement age and beyond by now. I think the majority of Engineers these days are pretty well acclimatised to the corporate buzzwords, sterile leadership, politics and smoke and mirrors that is the western corporate world (it seems to infect the anglo countries more than the europeans). As a young Engineer (29), I'm worried that we may never know what good leadership ever looked like and what professionalism and the craft of engineering really means.

So my question, whats changed? Has it changed? No doubt office politics and boondoggle's still happened, but I can only imagine the look on Kelly Johnson face at Lockheed or George Mueller when he was leading the Apollo program if you told them to "think outside the box", "innovate with blue sky thinking" or (I love this one) "leverage our technology stack". I'm sure the good stuff still exists, but I'm yet to see or hear about it.

What were the keys to success of those grand old projects?

 

[aap2]

To answer your question about what's changed, I think terminology has been re-branded. For example, many of the old quality terms within Six Sigma are now being focused and defined within CAPA. I don't think there is much to be worried about. There are advances in space travel. Innovation and breakthrough happen on a much smaller scale, nano-meters, so it is not as visible.

 

[IRstuff]

I was going to refer you to a "wiser (older)" folk that stated that the Patent Office had claimed, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." But, that turns out to be apocryphal.

You, who have grown up in the age of change, should see this sentiment applied today as bogus. We're ostensibly on the verge of getting fully autonomous cars, which has never happened in human history. I fail to see how these aren't your "grand ole days."

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[zdas04]

In the early 80's I was peripherally involved in a multi-billion dollar CO2 flood in West Texas. It was clear from an outside observer that virtually all of the team members were dead weight and 2-3 engineers made all of the decisions and all of the innovations, the other 2-3 dozen just checked boxes and went to meetings. The project took so long that many of the (dead weight) team members got promoted off the team and by the time a post-appraisal was performed all of the "reviewing managers" had been on the team and the conclusion was that it was a stunning success in spite of huge cost overruns, terrible delays in start up, multiple changes in scope, and spotty well performance. This is a vivid example (at least to me) of how inept, political, and self-serving the "grand old days" really were.

I teach practical principles of engineering to recent graduates and I certainly do not see any diminishment of talent or ability compared to my class in 1980. I see more "I got one of the answers in the multiple-choice so it must be right" attitudes that say to me that instructors in engineering schools must be a bit lazier than they were in my time (where it was normal for the multiple-choice tests to have three answers calculated using the three most common mistakes the instructor sees), and actual resentment that I give a lot of irrelevant information in the problems and leave out critical information that they either need to assume or extract from the text (often significantly removed from the problem being considered)--just like actual engineering. The folks in my classes don't seem to be any different from previous generations, but it seems to me that the best-prepared among them got that way in spite of their engineering school instead of because of it.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[Sparweb]

Were there ever any grand old days when we were free from jargon?
Or is the meaningless jargon just so easy to forget that we only remember the triumphs?
To put things in context:

STF

 

[ScottyUK]

Ha-ha-ha, I love the closing sentence. I wonder if I can slip that into a couple of our policy documents?

 

[3DDave]

I'd say the main change from when I started in the early 1980s engineers wrote reports with cover memos to the time I quit where they mostly used bullet charts in PowerPoint and talking points.

 

[IRstuff]

That's probably more a sign of the changes in computing and word processing than anything else. In 1987, "secretaries" had to know how to use Wang word processors, and no one type their own memos by hand. Secretaries were about 1 to 10 engineers or so, we currently have one "executive assistant" for about 100 people. In that meantime, engineers had to type their own memos, using Wordstar or Borland Sprint, and "viewgraphs" were non-trivial things to create. Today, no one writes memos, because no one really has time to read memos anyway, and PowerPoints are designed to maximum information transfer with a minimum of words and images.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[3DDave]

IRStuff,

That's just it; with PowerPoint there is no information transferred. It's just slight of hand for storytelling**. In the PTC conference they publish the 'presentations.' I have seen only one PTC Conference presentation from which anything meaningful can be extracted beyond the number of people and approximate gross sales for whatever company is shilling their excuse for a user exchange. That one presentation (by David Haigh) is because he backs it to the hilt with all the info.

**Death by PowerPoint

http://www.zdnet.com/article/death-by-powerpoint/

 

[rb1957]

yes, we've acquired a lot of "tech pubs" functions. We make very nice and pretty reports, and are word-smithed to death. And every so often Word has a fit and you spend days recovering the doc and trying to remember the changes. In the olde days we'd write our reports in pencil (easier to make changes) ... still got the information across.

and I too hate ppt reports. At best they summarise the analysis, but don't report it (completely, assumptions, etc).

These days an over-dependence on FEA and an under-use of FBDs and basic analysis. On the other hand FEA is a fantastic tool for complying extensive analysis results (way, Way, better than reams of output).

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[MotorCity]

I would have to say there have been two major revolutions since I began my career. The first is the advent of Cad. Somehow we went from placing typed "sticky back" notes (the original cut and paste) on drawings to 3D BIM. The second is the internet and electronic communication. The land line phone used to be the only instant method of communication. Now you can tweet, chat, Facebook, etc. Remember when there was no such thing as a "PDF" and if you wanted to send drawings to someone you had to fax them (or even worse, mail or hand deliver them)?

 

[Sparweb]

By the way, I have no reason to believe that the memo I posted is authentic. Just something that floats round on the internet like motivational posters and memes.
The fact that we all automatically REACT to it as authentic, is enough of a reminder that gobbledygook has been with us for a long time and doesn't promise to go away.

I started working professionally in the late 90's when the internet suddenly became a nearly universal source of information for products, government regulations, standards, and personal experiences. The office I started at had microfiche and CD-ROM's of all kinds of data that are useless now, because I can access all of that data in seconds through a web browser. And our hard drives have so much storage room that my old boss can put 20 years of work in a ZIP drive that fits in his pocket.

Nobody has any excuse, any more, for not having enough data at their fingertips.
We take this for granted now, because today's problem is that nobody knows how to deal with all of the information!
But this, too, will get marshalled as a next generation learns to weed through mountains of data in ways a guy like me would not think of.

STF

 

[IRstuff]

"And our hard drives have so much storage room that my old boss can put 20 years of work in a ZIP drive that fits in his pocket."

He must not have done much; the standard Zip drive was only 100 MB ;-)

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[Sparweb]

IRStuff - you got me on the details.
I don't know if it was a "ZIP" drive or some other mass storage drive, but the event in question happened in 2014 and a Maxtor passport that fit in my pocket then held 250 GB.
I have a thumb drive that's 1/2 the size of my thumb that holds 128 GB, and it would hold his life's work just fine, too.

STF

 

[IRstuff]

Yeah, I figured that. I just thought it ironic, given that it's essentially impossible to get a 100MB non-volatile storage; MicroCenter was actually giving away 16GB SD cards a couple of weeks ago. I actually did use actual Zip drives, back in the day, and often carried about half a dozen or so between work and home. Wasn't so much my own work, but reference materials, since I'm sort of a pack rat.

That's one of the beautiful things about our current state of technology. I've increased the amount of stuff that I pack rat by a factor of no less than 16,000 times, and the volume increased by barely 2x (!!).

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[Sparweb]

...and I just added a 250GB SSD to this computer - it's the size of a credit card. I wonder how much computing capability is on credit cards these days? It's not zero, I can tell you that. My latest Visa is semi-transparent, and I can see a spiderweb of little wires embedded in it.

Back to the OP:
Sorry for the little sidetrack. To your last question about seeing good leadership in an age that seems to have endless micro-managers, windbags, and incompetents:
I doubt that there are more (or less) of these than there used to be. The more you learn about the great leaders of the early 20th century (Edison, Ford, etc.) the more you learn they were total jerks and often a nightmare to work for. People just put up with it because complaining was less acceptable then.

And that's where I hope this thread ends off... I repeat: complaining was less acceptable back then.

STF

 

[CWB1]

We surmised that there are really no new problems, just new and innovative ways of F$&@ing something up, and every 5-7 years you just add another zero to the cost of the F$&@ up.....I think the majority of Engineers these days are pretty well acclimatised to the corporate buzzwords, sterile leadership, politics and smoke and mirrors that is the western corporate world (it seems to infect the anglo countries more than the europeans).

Unless you're generalizing "new problems" in the sense that autonomous vehicles are simply an improvement of automobiles, an improvement of carriages, chariots, sleds, etc which might be viewed as one singularly large transportation problem.....there's a huge number of new problems needing solved today, possibly more than ever. As mentioned previously, in the auto world we're going autonomous and moving away from gasoline, in aerospace we're ever moving away from the earth, and in IT there's all manner of new analytics being developed. The internet of things is interesting to me in many regards, 10 years ago companies rarely received feedback about their products whereas today products regularly provide feedback without the customer even knowing. One former employer has been receiving live data from every engine produced worldwide for a few years now and like many is struggling to analyze the incoming flood before data storage limits dictate unnecessary data's deletion. My work has led to seven patents in the last decade, my poor attention span struggles with the numerous challenges and opportunities I see in every niche and field today.

Being in my mid-30s I cannot comment on the office politics of yesteryear however my 79 year old father listens to my gripes and commiserates with many similar stories, so I tend to think little has changed in human nature. Having worked for European companies both stateside and in Europe, I am regularly thankful for our lean American engineering staffing practices. Far fewer engineers involved = fewer egos, fewer disagreements, and far fewer office politics to overcome. In a similar vein, while human nature hasn't changed I sometimes wonder if advancements in engineering tools like 3d modeling and analysis packages hasn't insulated individual engineers a bit from office politics that might've been more common when more folks (draftsmen, secretaries, etc) were involved in every process step and decision.

 

[cranky108]

At one point before the internet, and special software for internet service, most computers seemed faster, even though they were actually slower. The difference is that the software now is so inefficient that it takes so long to operate.

At one time there was a contest to see who could write the best program that would fit in 16KB. Now you would be lucky if modern coders could fit a program in 16GB.

On the other hand the new software has so many features that no one needs half of the functions offered.

Then again I did start doing calculations with paper and a hand calculator. It would take me two or three days to do what can now be done in a second, but I knew what happened and what to expect for a minor change in the conditions. Now I am about the only one that can predict the results before the simulation is run.

 

[IRstuff]

Bah, humbug; all of Turbo Pascal fit in 16 kB, including, the editor, compiler, linker, and assembler, with the remainder of my 64kB available for my program in 1982. This was running on CPM-80, which took only 4kB of memory for the entire OS.

However, less than 5 years after that point in time, I got a nice program (TECAP) from HP for extracting transistor parameters running on their 68010 processor-based computer that fit in the 1 MB of memory we bought for the computer. That computer was so bloated that the text editor would actually displace the operating system in order to run at all. TECAP v.2 arrived a few months later, and WTF! it required 2MB of RAM to run.

So, that was 1984, which just goes to show that software bloat is hardly a new invention, and certainly cannot be totally blamed on Microsoft.

Two years prior to that, our CFO got the first i386 computer in our division, so that he could run his monthly Excel financial reports faster than the hour it was taking him. He was jumping with joy that his spreadsheets were only taking 20 minutes to run. BUT, less than 3 weeks later, he was griping about how slow his spreadsheets were running, AFTER he added all the things he couldn't run before.

So, bloat occurs at the user level as well.

One thing that hasn't changed is schools still do a terrible job of training their students for public speaking and doing presentations, even as teachers down to 4th grade are using PowerPoint for teaching.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[ScottyUK]

Technology has given birth to the pseudo-profession of planning and scheduling, primarily built around software such as Primavera's P6.

Used by someone proficient with the software and who actually understands what they are planning, it's a very powerful tool which helps both planning the work and reporting on costs and progress.

Used by people who have adopted the title 'planner' - or worse 'senior planning engineer' - who frequently have no clue what they are planning, but can nonetheless produce a Gantt chart of important steps placed in the wrong sequence and with target dates which would require the use of a time machine, it spawns an ever-expanding bureaucracy hell-bent on bringing progress to a halt and sinking morale into the floor.


It's OK, I feel better now.