The Unwritten Laws of Engineering

MEMagazine is running a three part series entitled “The Unwritten Laws of Engineering” by W. J. King and James G. Skakoon. W. J. King first published the three series articles in Mechanical Engineering magazine in 1944. Briefly the laws are:

  1. However menial and trivial your early assignments may appear, give them your best efforts.
  2. Demonstrate the ability to get things done.
  3. Develop a “Let’s go see!” attitude.
  4. Don’t be timid—speak up—express yourself and promote your ideas.
  5. Strive for conciseness and clarity in oral or written reports; be extremely careful of the accuracy of your statements.
  6. One of the first things you owe your supervisor is to keep him or her informed of all significant developments.
  7. Do not overlook the steadfast truth that your direct supervisor is your “boss.”
  8. Be as particular as you can in the selection of your supervisor.
  9. Whenever you are asked by your manager to do something, you are expected to do exactly that.
  10. Cultivate the habit of seeking other peoples’ opinions and recommendations.
  11. Promises, schedules, and estimates are necessary and important instruments in a well‑ordered business.
  12. In dealing with customers and outsiders, remember that you represent the company, ostensibly with full responsibility and authority.
  13. Do not try to do it all yourself.
  14. Every manager must know what goes on in his or her domain.
  15. Cultivate the habit of “boiling matters down” to their simplest terms.
  16. Cultivate the habit of making brisk, clean‑cut decisions.
  17. Learn project management skills and techniques, then apply them to the activities that you manage.
  18. Make sure that everyone, managers and subordinates, has been assigned definite positions and responsibilities within the organization.
  19. Make sure that all activities and all individuals are supervised by someone competent in the subject matter involved.
  20. Never misrepresent a subordinate’s performance during performance appraisals.
  21. Make it unquestionably clear what is expected of employees.
  22. You owe it to your subordinates to keep them properly informed.
  23. Never miss a chance to commend or reward subordinates for a job well done.
  24. Always accept full responsibility for your group and the individuals in it.
  25. One of the most valuable personal traits is the ability to get along with all kinds of people.
  26. Never underestimate the extent of your professional responsibility and personal liability.
  27. Let ethical behavior govern your actions and those of your company.
  28. Be aware of the effect that your personal appearance and behavior have on others and, in turn, on you.
  29. Beware of what you commit to writing and of who will read it.
  30. Analyze yourself and your subordinates.
  31. Maintain your employability as well as that of your subordinates.

ASME has published the expanded version of these laws as a book. From the introduction of the book we learn that these laws are the result of direct observation for 17 years in four engineering departments. Also “many of these laws are generalizations to which exceptions occur in special circumstances. There is no thought of urging a servile adherence to rules and red-tape, for there is no substitute for judgement; vigorous individual initiative is needed to cut through formalities in emergencies. But in many respects these laws are like the basic laws of society; they cannot be violated too often with impunity, notwithstanding striking exceptions in individual cases”.

[via]

The Tom Clancy Theorem

Laura McLay reminds us that in The Hunt for Red October Vice Admiral James Greer says:

“The likelihood of a secret’s being blown is proportional to the square of the number of people who are in on it”.

Anything that resembles Metcalfe’s Law, I dig. My first reaction was to wonder whether Tom Clancy had heard of Metcalfe’s Law. But thinking it through, I saw that it did not matter. Given that N people know something that is considered as a secret, representing them as a network, that would make them a clique (or an almost clique). In such a network there exist N(N-1) directed channels of communication, hence the N2 heuristic.

In her post, Laura McLay points to J. Michael Steele’s “Models for Managing Secrets” which was published in 1989. In this paper the author
builds on top of the clique a simple communication model and reaches to the conclusion that:

“The expected window of secrecy decays quadratically with the number of people who are in on the secret.”

The more the people, the faster it will get out in the open. The paper then examines one more (complicated) model, some counter-measures of disinformation and points to Game Theory for further study of such models.

So, if the numbers are correct, cablegate was waiting to inevitably happen.

Quick note on Lattices, Relations and stuff

Thanks to @mosabou I got to read about Formal Concept Analysis. What a cool concept! Of the first things that I read was “A First Course in Formal Concept Analysis” (an introduction to the subject without the mathematics). While going through the examples, I kept thinking Where have I seen that before? Relational Databases, that’s where! And it seems that my intuition was correct: see the excellent “Gentle introduction to Relational Lattice” by Vadim Tropashko and the links from there.

[ I vaguely remember Yannis introducing the lattice concept in a database context in a course lecture a few years back, but have to admit of not looking much into it back then. ]

This is mostly a note for people who insist on thinking that theory is disconnected from practice. Especially the ones who write SQL code and insist on not realizing that they deal with sets (and set theory). Stop holding an umbrella and invest some time in your math.

If you cannot kill the content, kill the path that leads to it

One can stop content distribution by DDoS-ing the networks hosting it. This is a direct attack from one opponent to another. There are also some indirect attacks that people rarely think about (or notice). For the content to be reached, two things must be available: routing and DNS. And these are services that are not necessarily under the administrative control of any of the two parties in conflict. And they can even be easier targets, since they can be put in the position to choose between one customer and the rest of their 500K customers.

With Wikileaks now moving to wikileaks.ch, are we to expect a DDoS on the .ch DNS servers?

When are we going to see Wikileaks blackhole routing? Or routing to its DNS servers being blackholed? Or even to its parent ccTLD, making whole countries invisible to DNS? I wonder whether has anybody collected any data on that…

downsizing

* Initially this post was started because of Sun’s layoffs (18%). Now Sun is no more, and so seems work for a large percentage of the Greek workforce.

Downsizing is to be expected in great numbers. At the scale that this seems it is going to happen, these will not really be informed layoffs, the criteria being simple: You have a high salary (for some definition of high) and your choices may include: retirement, layoff, substantial pay-cut (equals to morale / motivation downsizing) and/or transfer to another organization (in a take it or bye-bye offer).

The short term result of such a massive violent move will of course be proof of elimination of the so called “cost centers”. The mid and long term results will be far more different: The information flow within the organizations will be severely disrupted. There exists the organizational structure and then there exists the informal structure that gets built over time. The departure of a key person can be dealt with by an “unconscious” team auto-configuration. But what about more than one? While small teams communicate more effectively, small teams cannot be made smaller. Time is a limited resource and there is not enough to perform the required analysis before downsizing.

That is the price to be paid for not trying to be lean when you had the chance. And new “cost centers” will emerge.

Appendix: Chalk one up for math (or How even retirement disrupts information flow)

Steinmetz‘ most gratifying moment may have occurred after his retirement. An emergency brought him back to GE’s Schenectady plant to troubleshoot a malfunctioning generator. For days, the hobbled genius pored over drawings with paper and pencil in hand. Finally, he placed a chalk mark on the side of the generator, instructing the repairmen to cut through the casing and remove a number of turns from the stator. It worked.

When asked to submit an invoice, Steinmetz delivered a slip of paper with nothing on it but the surprisingly large figure of $10,000. The accountants, in shock, said they couldn’t process the paperwork without a more detailed breakdown. Steinmetz then forwarded another note on which was typed:

One chalk mark $1. Knowing where to put it $9,999.

A short time later, Steinmetz received his pay in full.

To those that believe that this was not because of disrupted information flow, but because of Steinmetz’ genius, I can only say that I know of cases where retired for decades engineers were called back for consulting due to lack of documentation. And today’s knowledge workers are not better at keeping it either.

on lisp and pseudocode

Remember that it is written in “The Roots of Lisp” that:

If you want a language for describing algorithms, you might want something more abstract, and that was one of McCarthy’s aims in defining Lisp.

It was only after Steve Russell programmed eval (in machine code) that Lisp became a tool for the keyboard rather than a tool for pen and paper.

Lean Behaviors

I’ve briefly mentioned Emiliani’s “Lean Behaviors” before, but lately I am finding myself coming back to it on a number of occasions. This time it was Al Iverson’s amazement in “What You Suggest Will Kill Email for Everyone“:

It’s amazing to me that some people are so blind to that outcome. A savvy marketer ought to already know that it’s not all that smart to burn up the medium in a way that arrests your future ability to make money from it?

Oh but people are not blind. They just have a different agenda. They aim for short-term profits (and bonuses) and results that last as long as they are part of an organization. Whether their actions set in motion the demise of the organization (which might occur after they have left) is not something to bother them. After all, the organization failed after they left, so it is not their fault, right? Wrong! I quote from “Lean Behaviors”:

Behaving poorly in the workplace makes everyone, including management, ignorant of how well people can actually behave, and results in the evolution of new types of undesirable behavior patterns. Poor behaviors allow people to avoid co-operation, gain personal advantage, and protect personal or departmental interests. These self-serving habits become well-developed over time, resulting in highly skilled but unproductive gamesmanship that no customer would want to pay for. All too often the most highly skilled gameplayers become unwholesome ego-driven role models for future generations. Survival of the fittest, in this context, means the lowest forms of behavior win – but only on a personal level, which is good enough for many people. However, the corporate culture, which mirrors the aggregate of individual behavior of managers, will likely fail to serve the larger community. The result is a deterioration of trust between workers, management, suppliers (Sheridan, 1997), and investors, which can further erode a company’s competitive position. Competitors may also suffer from this, as they now often work together in joint ventures or other co-operative business arrangements. A lack of trust and differences in corporate culture have been cited as primary reasons why collaborative business arrangements often fail or at least fall well below expectations (Kanter, 1994).

(I could quote the whole of the paper, but it is freely available, so go download it)

So it is not blindness. It is about the “take the money and run” attitude. Use whatever half-baked idea seems to bring money on the table regardless of whether it will slain the goose in the long run. With such people switching jobs every three to five years, by that time they will already be aiming at another goose.