Reinforcements Have Arrived

I was recently supplanted as the most experienced member of my engineering group. Not by just a little bit, either, we got a new worker who has been with the company twice as long as me. The department lost work on one project, so we gained him on another. The fellow knows a great deal more about specific systems than I do, and at least as much about things in general. In other words, I'm no longer the sole go-to guy for the project we are working on. I normally flourish as the one source of information, and even leading the group. As I thought this through, it seemed like the addition of this guy should, on some level, be a struggle for me. Nobody, least of all me, likes to be demoted in any sense. The reality is that this whole affair couldn't have turned out better. I have somebody to help do homework, to answer questions with confidence that I would have had to issue an I.O.U. on, and to bounce ideas off of. I am responsible for less, I am not front and center taking all the stressful questions, and with all that I end up looking better. Now this is a great turn of events, the additional help is probably helping me get home just a little bit soon. I'm just glad I didn't let my pride get in the way.

Gum Flappin'

The one who guards his mouth preserves his life; The one who opens wide his lips comes to ruin. -Proverbs 13:3

So, what are you to do when your job is to keep a room of 40 people talking until problems are solved? It's all well and good for each of them to remain quietly in their chairs until they feel ready to speak, but when you are the team leader it's your job to uncover every nugget of knowledge in the room in order to build a consensus pointing in the best direction. So, half of your questions make you look like an idiot, and the other 40 attendees have a chance to show how smart they are. Properly handled, even the most taciturn of the group contribute their knowledge, which is often substantial. If the guy at the head of the table says nothing, the biggest natural talkers just take over and whatever they want is the outcome (at least in the short term). Of course, being a natural talker is what got me here in the first place. So, I look like a fool crawling through the conversation, we hopefully get to the right answers, the project rolls on, and I get paid every two weeks. It works for now.

A la commode

Sirs,

I know that everybody's job in any sort of large team is of some import. And I also know that everybody feels a natural bias that there own job is really more important, and, if asked after a few cocktails, would admit that they believe their job is also more difficult than the jobs of others on the same team. That being said... if I have to sit again for two hours while people argue about where to locate bunks, toilets, and freezers while I sit patiently waiting to discuss details of weapon launchers, it's not going to be pretty. The hurt locker has a busy agenda, and does not like to be left waiting.

Multilateral Arms Race

I may have overstepped my strength this time. Being accustomed to being one of the strongest of the geeks in my engineering group for some years, I challenged some of my younger colleagues to a quest of sorts. We are in a competition to see who can be the first one to bench press 135 pounds (easy) 40 repetitions at one go (much tougher). It's great motivation for all of us to work hard to stay/get in shape. I started with a decent lead, based mostly on gristle and Old Man Strength. However, the race has really tightened up, with my two competitors hitting the gym daily at the obscene time of 5:30 A.M. It's tough for me to match that schedule. Now my lead is slim, 35 reps to 32 and 29 for my opposition. I love doing these sorts of meaningless, yet committed guy things. I do not love losing.

May Your Paths Be Straight

I recall that in December of 2008, one of our engineers left our group to take another position. He felt engineering wasn't for him, and it's certainly not for most people. Some days, I don't know WHO it could possibly be for, in fact. He ended up taking a position where his primary responsibility is training our workers on all manner of procedures, and there he remains.

In July of 2009 I ended up being asked to prepare a "combat systems for not-quite dummies" to educate a few customers on how we work. It was a good time. A few weeks later, I was asked to remove the "not-quite" and make it a lecture for anybody in the company who had an hour to waste. By November I was lecturing a packed auditorium, with geeked-ness only slightly exceeding nervousness, with cameras rolling. Now that lecture is on our company intranet which means I will get teased for years to come over this. Things went well enough that I've been tasked with turning the "not-quite" into "brand new" and making it a regular training presentation for new hires. In this roundabout way I have now gained a surprising amount of responsibility for... training, without so much as changing my desk.

Sometimes, it's not about finding the right road to get where you want to go, but remaining on the road you are on until it takes you where you need to go.

A Talk To Remember

I was having a marginally work-related conversation with an older gentleman at the office the other day. He was discussing the background to a horseback riding trip in Hawaii. He casually dropped this line about his travel companions:
"They were from my first wife's family. She was from Indonesia, and she died young."
He quickly moved on to the rest of his story of riding horses up mountainsides, but I couldn't shake that sentence. It's one of the most compelling I've ever heard. He was from New England, went into the Navy and served in special forces (all history I already knew). Somehow he met a young woman from Indonesia, fell in love, was married, then lost her. Entire novels are written on thinner foundations, but he summed up perhaps 5 years of his life in a single sentence. And I will never get to hear the remainder of the story, for there is no polite way to ask.

Warning: Gratuitous Submarine Plug Ahead

The Providence Journal recently printed a pretty lengthy article on how we build nuclear submarines. I recommend it, if you have a little spare time. I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but what I've read so far has been pretty good.

Pass Go, Net $200

I moseyed out of the bank this morning quite pleased. After hunkering down with a limited bank account due to closing costs on our home sale/purchase, all of the checks due from various agencies came in over the following weeks, and today I deposited them in one sweep. Two thousand five hundred dollars in a single, fat deposit! Before I even reached the car, though, I recalled that last night I had paid bills, to include our new mortgage and vehicle taxes. How much did I dispense from the very same checking account? Oh, I remember now, two thousand three hundred dollars.

Running as fast as I can, just to stay in one place, just like the Red Queen. At least I have good employment to be thankful for.

Is Their Crew Team Violent?

I'm going to be away on travel this week. I'm heading to Boston to attend a seminar on submarine combat systems. It's hosted by MIT, and run by the Naval War College (Motto: "Go forth and sinketh"). The whole thought of a war college is mind-boggling to me. Do they have a fight song, or is that unnecessary since they actually fight? Instead of peace rallies, do they have war rallies? Because of the sensitive nature of some of the topics, I cannot bring so much as a notepad into class. How much will I possibly remember out of 30+ hours of lectures? We'll see

This link is the perfect confluence of some of my favorite pop culture. I leave it to provide a smile while I am away.

It Depends On Who You Talk To

My boss is sharp. Really, he knows what he's doing. For the first time in some years, I have felt for the past 24 months like I had a bit of a safety net if I made a mistake. He's an unashamed ladder-climber, but I can live with that. He's enrolled in some developmental program for potential directors or even executive officers, very prestigious. The program includes all sorts of personality profiling to determine an individual's strengths and weakness, as well as an awareness of the personality types of others they work with. The benefits of this sort of training for a reasonably young but skilled worker can be enormous.

There's one thing the program never does: talk to any of the people who work for the corporate shooting star. All the input that could be gained, valuable feedback over the real difficulties and frailties of the someday executive... nobody knows those warts better than the grunts who have to do the front line tasks. Sure, you have to watch out for disgruntled types who have an axe to grind, but isn't it possible that if you go back far enough you'd find that there is a reason for the axe grinding?

It Needed To Be Said

Let's give it up for Sub_Eng, May 28, 2009.

Steely Skies

My engineering group has made our long-anticipated move across the shipyard to the nice, relatively new high rise that serves as a sort of headquarters for design work. The view of the river and seaside is quite serene, even from the lowly fourth floor (really ground floor, but we're on a hillside sloping down to the water) of ten. A few of our guys have been disappointed by the generally rainy/foggy weather since we arrived, and I can see their point, since the sunny days are as colorful and uplifting as can be, with the sweeping horizon and gem-like reflections off the choppy waves. However, I am partial to the steely grays of the overcast day, with the far more subtle shifts of shade and more immediate feel to everything you see. To each his own, but I see nothing inherently worse about a day more suited to contemplation and coolheaded thoughts than idyllic whimsy and soaring fancy.

Beg Your Paron, But...

It is a double-edged sword telling your boss "I have been too busy to draft a paper explaining everything I have worked on this year for my annual performance review. When I finish the 3 urgent things I am working on, I will be happy to oblige." Honesty is the best policy, eh?

Michimmigration

Last Monday another engineer joined our group at work. He is a native of Kalamazoo, MI, and attended the University of Michigan. The flight of college graduates from that state is startling. Of my closest friends at Michigan Tech (the engineering school in the state), not one remained in Michigan after graduation. Vermont, D.C., Massachusetts, Illinois, Texas, and other places all offered better employment opportunities than our home state. I can understand that Michigan, with the industrial and educational infrastructure to historically need and produce engineers, would be creating a glut of technical types who don't find the job they're prepared for near home.

Unfortunately, it goes beyond that. Even some of the education majors that I knew who attended other colleges had to join the exodus. One of my cousins just headed to Indiana to work as a technician at a hospital. Set aside the dorks, if you are no longer hiring teachers and medical types your society is hurting. Michigan is now manning the caboose of the nation's economy.

The Worst Math Joke You May Just Laugh At

I was walking to my desk early one morning when I saw the following sketch on a coworker's markerboard:This is just my re-creation, but it's a classic. If you get it, it's at least worth a chuckle. If you don't, you should feel very good about your priorities in life right now.

Pookie Power

This little buggy, according to http://www.defensetech.org/, was a solution to a problem during the Bush War of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). It is known as a Pookie. The problem was that rebels were sowing mines along roads, and those roads needed to be cleared quickly to keep supplies and commercial goods flowing. This glorified go-cart uses special tires (racing slicks) to distribute the vehicle and driver weight widely and evenly, reducing the likelihood of detonating a mine under the vehicle, and if a mine did detonate, the relatively light armor was sloped to deflect the blast safely away from the drive. The assembly underneath is a mine detector, which I imagine was just an electromagnet capable of noting the metallic mines of that era. The design located many anti-vehicle mines in service, and is claimed to have never set off a pressure mine. Some were destroyed by electronically (remotely?) detonated mines, but even then only a single driver died due to one of those explosions because of the armor. Not too shabby for a cheap little buggy.



There is another insurgency underway, in case you haven't noticed. While the intensity of the war in Iraq has dropped off, a very similar problem was and is still faced by American forces. While the explosive devices placed by Iraqi insurgents were far more difficult to defeat, here is the American solution:

If that doesn't give you a warm, fuzzy, patriotic feeling I don't know what does. There is a 99% chance that the vehicle (this variant is known as a Cougar) in the picture survived the explosion. It's a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle, or MRAP. It's about as traditional of a solution to a tactical military problem as one will find. When the bad guys get bigger guns, upgrade your armor. The armor is now too heavy, so upgrade your suspension. The vehicle is now slow, get a bigger engine. It's a very incremental process, inching along while your opponent is also sharpening his tactics and tools. Oh, and they are horrendously expensive, difficult to maintain, and don't even fit down many streets or across some bridges.

I see a great deal of this in military ship design/building. Don't take any chances. Something that does just a little bit more but is far more expensive is preferable to something that is cheaper and almost performs as well, or is pricey and is going to be either an astronomical success or an utter failure. This mentality does make some sense when soldiers' lives are on the line, which was clearly the case when the U.S. rushed to buy MRAP's. But is it the best mindset to instill in your entire defense infrastructure? Play it safe, and don't ever worry about hitting a home run.

However, that is not the only solution. The British also have soldiers in Iraq, and in their area (which includes the urban hole of Basra), they specialized in precise raids with minimum firepower traded off for speed, speed, speed. This method is not guaranteed to be successful, but it points out that the closed-minded, single solution approach often embraced by the military and defense design establishment is faulty thinking. I watched a series of shock tests this week that brought that lesson home.

It's amazing what a 3000 pound hammer dropped onto a spring loaded fixture can prove. At hand was the question of whether a lightweight, flexible linkage could stop a tremendous load (momentarily up to 15 tons or so) at one end while being held in place by... a 3/8" roller assembly. It survived! How? The heretical use of materials the Navy often holds in disdain (titanium, precipitation hardened stainless steels...) and a willingness to take a little bit of a risk. I had the good fortune of working with the man who conceived of this and numerous other ingenious contraptions. Most involved intentionally stretching a linkage to make it work, and running numerous linkages off a single actuator, and other Swiss-watch mechanisms that others dismissed as "claptrap". Some of the designs even broke, or seized in place, or rusted away in seawater. But none failed so badly that the design couldn't be fixed, and the savings in space, money, and infrastructure compared to more traditional concepts were substantial. In the end, this particular invention of his passed the shock test and operated just fine when the dust settled. A few washers were bent, but what's a little stretching between friends?

It took the absolute mental saturation of gizmos, widgets, and mechanisms for a man to have the vision to create machines like this on a blank sheet of paper. It took the experience of working with his own hands on boats and cars and many hours of applied engineering analysis to know when intuition mattered more than numbers, and when something would just stretch or crack clean through. It took the guts for him to stand before critics and present his vision to others and overcome their stubborn resistance and fear of failure. And it took him being correct time and again before he was trusted with the reigns of multi-million dollar designs and given the chance to prove his mettle. His mind was agile, unbound by convention, and stubbornly entrenched when the Dork-meter was pegged. This is the sort of mind it takes to produce a Pookie, not an MRAP.

Interstew

I had to cover for my supervisor recently while he took a week of vacation. I've had quieter weeks, to be sure, but that's not the focus of this entry. Through a series of events that is not likely to happen again for some time, I ended up conducting my first job interview.

I felt badly for the young man before I even met him. The guys I sit with at work all went emphatically on the record as being quite relieved that I did not interview them before they hired in. I obliged them by making up a few sample questions like "Why do you think you're good enough to work for me... I DIDN'T SAY YOU COULD ANSWER YET!" and proposing mind games like shaking my head "no" while he answered or saying "is that all?" at the end of each of his answers. Good fun, that, but it did bring to light that I am about as scary as somebody who stands 5'10" with glasses and no tattoos can be.

I did realize that the young man seeking a job deserves a little better than that, so, lacking any support from my employer on the matter, I hit the world wide interweb (now on computers!) for a few tips on conducting interviews. That was a Godsend. I got my act together, reviewed his resume and I was ready to rock the following morning.

Then I saw his transcript. The Hindenburg was less of a wreck. Heed my words, college and pre-college students; it is folly to claim that certain areas of your studies were your favorite and that you really have a knack for them when your grades in the relevant classes were in the C to D range. It's not in your wheelhouse, it's in your five-hole.

• Another tip: If your GPA is below 2.5, don't take 5 months off and THEN start looking for a job. Unless you spent your year off with the Peace Corps or on a foreign mission, you just look desperate.


• Additional free advice: If an interviewer notifies you in advance that the following question is a no-bull, honest query, don't throw up a smokescreen answer using a lot of key words like "leadership", "diverse", "core skills", and the like. It will get sniffed out.


• Kicking a dead horse: If the interviewer says "Not everybody can be a leader in their first few years of team projects in a field as specialized as maritime defense engineering, so what other roles do you feel you play as a member of a team?", do not present an answer that even sounds remotely like "I am the leader". Bad move.

Hopefully, the next interview I am required to conduct will go more smoothly, especially for the prospective employee. And it will ideally occur far, far in the future.

Comments > Free Time

I've had good comments to my last post, I regret that I have not yet had time to digest and reply. I leave you tonight with something I saw at work recently in an engineer's cubicle. Know first that CuNi is copper-nickel alloy, and NiCu is nickel-copper alloy, which is stronger. The note said:

NiCu > CuNi > pumperNi

Seriously, if you laughed and snorted, you are a geek. Welcome to the revolution.

The Pain Train

This week has been tough at work. My supervisor is on vacation, so that requires me to field an awful lot of questions from the other engineers in our group. I basically just try to keep the wheels spinning until the boss gets back, which is very different from actually being in charge.
While the long days have been tough, they have not been nearly so painful as Sunday's second annual (for me) running of the Tarzan Brown Mystic River Run. The weather was gorgeous, and Wifey and Sweetness accompanied me to the starting area to cheer for me at both ends of the race. I even knew a few people who were running as well. Talking while running is not the most efficient way to conduct oneself during a race, but those who know me know that I have been blessed with the gift of gab, so I chat with those I recognize. And a few I don't.
After a gradual start, I picked up the pace a bit to keep stride with my coworker Nick. At mile 1 I heard the watch holder call 7 minutes, which was not bad. After 3 miles I was around 20 minutes 30 seconds, which was even better and made me realize I should coast for a little bit. Sure enough, after cruising to mile 5 I heard that watch holder call just shy of 35 minutes. That was good, because my goal was to beat 40 minutes (7:14/mile pace). It was also a bit agonizing, because I was starting to feel bad. Actually, awful. Actually, thinking death might be a sweet release. I mean, I'm kind of a tractor when it comes to running, a big load, full diesel, pouring out black smoke on the hills, all that jazz. Nonetheless, as I approached the last corner, there was a small group of runners about 20 yards ahead that I just knew I could pass. So I poured it on, black smoke and all, and ripped right by them! No joke, they were actually cursing me as I went by. And then... I realized it wasn't the last corner, and I had about 3 blocks to go. I did make it to the finish line, but my mis-estimation was written all over my face in discomfort, according to Wifey. It was great to see her and Sweetness waving and cheering, but I needed a minute to regain my strength and focus on not puking and stuff.
After that passed I was able to enjoy the fact that I beat my goal. Five and a half miles in 37 minutes, 24 seconds, for a 6:48/mile pace. Huzzah! I've never beaten 7:00 in a race before, so that was nice. Strangely, having handily beaten the goal I set for myself, and facing long hours this week at work, I have not so much as put running shoes on my feet in preparation of next week's EBAC Fall Challenge. I figure my body needs the rest, and let the 4.75 mile chips fall where they may.

Free Association Friday

• I was in a meeting where a well-meaning engineer used the words "erroneous modes". I felt a little bit naughty.
• (OK, so the phrase really just refers to a computer model falsely showing how a part bends under loading, which I am well aware of... stop judging me!)
• At work, I also saw a recently made presentation advertising the construction of the Astute Class submarines in the U.K. It featured this little computer image of a guy in coveralls and a hard hat strutting his way through the gigantic hangar containing the shipbuilding ways while (no joke) 1000 ton hull cylinders zip by at about 50 m.p.h. as a nuclear submarine is constructed in fast-forward. It was OK, as far as these things go. The coup de grace, though, was the fact that Hall and Oates's Maneater was the soundtrack. And you thought early '80's music was dead! The best part is imagining the this-is-so-HOT smirk of the guy dubbing the soundtrack in.
• I'm preparing for the annual 5.5 mile run, which is fast approaching at Nov. 2. I clocked in around 7min. 45 sec. a mile for about 5 miles this morning in a practice trial, which I feel good about since it was 6:00 A.M., cold, and dark. And part of it is up a hill I like to call "El Capitan".
• Bravo to the Detroit Lions for getting a dime on the nickel for offloading a disgruntled Roy Williams for 3 draft picks next year. Apparently Matt Millen really is gone.
• Me: "Sweetness, you are the most beautiful girl in God's creation." Sweetness: "Daddy, you smell like coleslaw."
• Wifey prepared steak, squash w/ brown sugar & honey, coleslaw (see above bullet), sauteed onions/mushrooms, and battered fried onions that were 100% awesome for dinner tonight.
• Oh, how my co-workers howled when I shifted 1/4 of my 401(k) portfolio to fixed income about a year ago. At least something I have is still making money.