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Read that story on a bulletin board (cork, with tacks pinning tree products to the surface with writing on the tree products in ink from something called a pen) in the late 60s. Now it will live forever in the revered archives of Ricochet.
Hurrah.
Printed, folded, and tucked in behind my pocket-protector as I head into to office. Great material for the cubicle wall…
This is the Quote of the Day. (Yes, you can quote old jokes here.) If you have some bit of wisdom, humorous or un, that you would like to share, why not sign up for a day of your own?
http://ricochet.com/752667/quote-of-the-day-may-signup-sheet/
Evergreen. Thanks Goldie.
There’s a great video on YouTube with an engineer, his manager, and a customer in a conference room. The customer asks if they can produce 7 red lines. The engineer responds, “Yes”. Then the customer says, “I want them all to be perpendicular to each other. That’s when it gets funny.
.
You know, as an Executive Director and former CEO, there is truth in this from the other side of the manager too.
In actuality, of course, there are a lot of managers and executives who are themselves engineers by training and experience.
I worked with a lot of engineering managers who were sharp. Not all are like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss . . .
But they get over it.
This….. This has been so painful to witness with engineers you have spent 30 years working with who have chosen to “take the management” branch. Then slowly watch them drink the kool aid where they start to spout the pablum that come from up high that requires them to set aside logic and physical reality, and talk in nostrums.
Sadly, and it still does not change reality, with any of the things they profess to want to manage; advancing technology, pulling in schedule, greatly reducing cost without adjusting requirements.
That I think is why the apocryphal story above has such staying power and many folks have seen it in there careers thru the last few generations. I think we have had a increasing expansion and more exposure to large corporatish organizational management arrangements.
I will believe this is a recent phenomenon, unless of course someone can find this story written in hieroglyphics in the work room of one of the great pyramids.
Some of these are the absolute best people to work for. Unfortunately, some are the worst. A real crapshoot.
It is possible to be a good manager and a good leader.
“I need an estimate how long it will take to diagnose and correct the problems with that interface that you are working on.”
“You want me to tell you how long it will take to find problems that I don’t know about and how long the fixes I haven’t designed yet will take to implement?”
“Yeah, yeah … I know, I know …”
And they do know. But they still need an answer.
Yes, but probability is nowhere near .500.
Classic from my boss after we reviewed my list of projects.
Me: Which of these projects is my top priority?
Boss: (pauses and thinks) All of them.
This allowed me to work only on projects that I wanted to work on. When other people asked me about working on others, I replied, “My boss said this project is my top priority “.
In the end it didn’t work out too well for me, but I knew that was going to be the case as soon as Boss answered my question. It was great fun while it lasted.
I think that we don’t teach people to be good managers anymore. Those training programs all went away.
I used to get the same in a serial fashion from one boss. My top priority was the one in his hand.
You are correct.
I had a business partner once ask me to “round up” hourly rates in a report. When I did, she asked me why 3.45 and 3.60 didn’t both come out =4.
so I said “Oh, you want me to add .99 to everything and truncate?”
”no” she said “Round it up”.
so I added .99 to everything and truncated. She was satisfied.
Until her report showed we were paying more than what was budgeted…
Bryan,
I have a Masters of Engineering Management. Even in an organization like NASA, one does not really have the ability to adhere to principles formally taught to effectively manage a task, project, or mission. I enjoyed getting exposure to the tools of the trade, and another NASA guy and I in the program enjoyed our private guffaws when the instructors used some NASA programs as example of how to effectively manage technology development. It always made me wonder how the other branches of the government that had to develop technology were doing if we were held out as the “good” example. (Several of our instructors were retired DoD managers/engineers, so I shutter and understand why they have such colossal overruns.)
This is especially true when you are working to develop technology that has not been fully explored, then commit to it, then hits an unforeseen snag. That is the best case, then when you introduce some elements of the human foibles, the real uncontrollable items start. There is over selling a technology, awarding a contracts without clear goals and deliverables because the PI’s are looking for more than you can really afford, having your budget plundered by HQ because you are doing well at the moment to cover some other projects having failures, HQ directing contracting payments for non performance because someone’s congressional representative will lean on next year’s budget.
Yes the ideal management practices get hammered when you get to the real mess of dealing the failings of humans.
Most people do the same.
Hahaha!!! I’ve been in that meeting!
A lawyer, a priest and an engineer were taken to the guillotine.
The lawyer’s head was put in the cradle first. The executioner pulled the lanyard, but nothing happened. The lawyer jumped up and said “Your execution was unsuccessful, so you have to let me go.”
After the lawyer was freed, the priest’s head was put into the cradle. The executioner pulled the lanyard, but nothing happened. The priest was also freed.
As the engineer was being led to the guillotine, he paused, pointed to the top of the guillotine and said. “Do you see up there that a screw has come loose, and it is blocking the blade from coming down?”
I’d think that, as a lawyer, you wouldn’t want to start telling lawyer jokes… (There’s a lot more of them than there are engineer jokes, and very few of them make the lawyers look good…)
First thing I did after reading this post was get the link to that video so I could post it in the comments. You win.
Surely an engineer would be more specific than just to say “between 40 and 42 degrees’ north latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees’ west longitude.” That’s an area of over 14,500 square miles (69 miles/degree latitude, 53.1 miles/degree longitude at 40 degrees latitude and 51.4 miles/degree longitude at 42 degrees latitude). Unless he’s one of those engineers who’s mind is out in space where 50 miles off in either direction is just a rounding error.
Not true! We need to know the probe’s location to within a few cubic miles, especially when you are cruising to a planet looking for a little aerobraking for parking in orbit. Like engineering tests, units are especially important!. Otherwise you make the unintended contribution to one of Mar’s famous dust storms as …….dust.
The engineers answer bespeaks a relative geographical knowledge of the moment who probably did not have time to investigate the precise coordinates. Most likely action by this manager will be to tasked the guy to give a better answer on an unrealistic schedule (Look buddy, the wind is picking up you got 30 seconds to refine that location, and yes there is no internet here in the boondocks, and why are you asking me if had a GPS receiver before I embarked on this flight?)
altar.
@gldiii, don’t fix the OP or make the change! If you correct that typo, your post will be automatically demoted from the Main Feed. Thank @max!
Goldie is notoriously bad at grammar and spelling. To quote Arahant