Engineers and Their Play at Night Problem

One of the very best articles on engineers is in the current issue of The New Yorker by Malcom Gladwell - The Engineer's Lament.  From the article:

"There is an old joke about an engineer, a priest, and a doctor enjoying a round of golf. Ahead of them is a group playing so slowly and inexpertly that in frustration the three ask the greenkeeper for an explanation. “That’s a group of blind firefighters,” they are told. “They lost their sight saving our clubhouse last year, so we let them play for free.”

The priest says, “I will say a prayer for them tonight.”

 

The doctor says, “Let me ask my ophthalmologist colleagues if anything can be done for them.”
 

And the engineer says, “Why can’t they play at night?”

 

The greenkeeper explains the behavior of the firefighters. The priest empathizes; the doctor offers care. All three address the social context of the situation: the fact that the firefighters’ disability has inadvertently created conflict on the golf course. Only the engineer tries to solve the problem.
 

Almost all engineering jokes—and there are many—are versions of this belief: that the habits of mind formed by the profession enable engineers to see things differently from the rest of us. “A pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optimist sees the glass as half full. The engineer sees the glass as twice the size it needs to be.” To the others, the glass is a metaphor. Nonsense, the engineer says. The specifications are off. He doesn’t give free rein to temperament; he assesses the object. These jokes, like many of the jokes people tell about themselves, are grievances. The engineer doesn’t understand why the rest of us can’t make sense of the world the way he does.

 

Toyota’s safety crisis was, in a sense, a version of the golf-course conundrum. One of the problems facing the company was “sticky” accelerator pedals: drivers would take their foot off the accelerator, and in a small number of cases the pedal wouldn’t spring back up immediately. After four cases in Europe were brought to Toyota’s attention, the company determined that under conditions of high heat or humidity the synthetic material used in part of the pedal mechanism was degrading slightly.

 

Toyota’s engineers approached the problem armed with the two concepts that define the engineer’s world: tolerances and specifications. A system’s tolerance is its ability to cope with changes and unplanned variation; systems need to be tolerant because you can never perfectly predict what stresses and unexpected behaviors they will encounter. Specifications are constraints. No one tells you to build a perfect car. People tell you to build a car in eighteen months that will sell for twenty-five thousand dollars. The fact that a car is revealed to be imperfect, in other words, is not sufficient reason to recall it: imperfections and compromises are inevitable. The issue is how tolerant the car is of those imperfections and compromises."