In memoriam.
We want to express our most severe condemnation to the bomb attacks occured in the Boston Marathon.
Our sincere condolences to the families and the friends of the victims.
We hope that those responsible for these despicable acts are brought to justice.
DIP-team
Today, we will continue where we left it the last time, with our top ten ranking of aeronautic designers in history. As we haven’t had enough feedback yet to make a proper statistic, I will start my own top ten ranking.
Number 10 is for Rostislav Evganievich Alexeyev (1916 – 1980) as the ground effect aircrafts’ creator (aka Ekranoplan). Nowadays you can find a lot of information on the web about them, although until the end of the Soviet Union these aircrafts were a well-kept secret.
These ground effect aircrafts represent an imaginative solution to a specific problem that the soviet military had, transporting large cargos to remote places, too far away from the helicopters’ action radius and in places where a standard aircraft couldn’t land.
Therefore my number 10 in the ranking goes to Alexeyev.
Continuing with my thoughts about the newbie engineers’ lack of contact with the real world, I have to point out that all the knowledge that a fresh graduated student has acquired (that nowadays is, without any doubt, more complete than in our time) is nothing more than an unknown and mysterious seed in a field. To grow they need water and fertilizer, and there is where the magic happens. Depending on the water’s quality and the fertilizer we use, we can obtain melons or strawberries.
All these years studying hard and trying to be friend with Laplace, Euler, Kutta, Joukosky, Navier and of course Stokes and many, many others, hoping that this is only an inevitable harm and that, once you are finished, you will be able to fulfill your dreams and calm your concerns, evolving your creativeness when you start working.
And then, this special day arrives, almost not knowing, that you are declared “ready for service” and you tell yourself “this is my time”. We can’t forget, that in the same way a small kid’s willing is to stand up and walk by himself, the willing of a new grad is to walk into the world and try to show everything he is able to do and he wants to feel that all these years working so hard have been worth.
The first thing that surprises you when you begin working in a large company, the dream you have been dreaming for so long and for which you would sacrifice your own life, is that you receive the “Engineer’s kit” that usually is composed of: table, chair, computer (but only with the company’s approved software), stapler, punch, pen set and, if you are very lucky, a censured Internet connection, that lets you only surf on corporate webs and little more.
At this time you wonder and ask yourself, “where is my caliber?” or “where is my development system?” or “where is my oscilloscope gone?” These questions remain in your head for some days, but then you convince yourself that these items will come later, after a certain time that hopefully will be a test run, where somebody more wisdom than you verifies your work aptitude. So, armed with the mightiest tool that exists, this is your illusion, you make a superhuman effort to prove that you deserve to be one of the “chosen ones”.
After an indeterminate time, you will be invited to a meeting where you have to expose your progress in the project you have been working on. You think that this will be your final exam and you prepare the meeting thoroughly. You work out for hours with the Power Point, with Excel and with all the rest of the tools the company had given to you (plus probably other and more useful tools you have at home) in order to make your best to achieve your long-awaited dream, because “NOW, certainly is my time”.
When the day arrives, you will enter the meeting room and you will look into nine unknown people’s faces and then, you may remember a glint of them walking down the corridor with the coffee machine. You start your presentation and, when you get to the climax, you turn to your audience to watch their reactions AND THEN you realize it. Two of the people are highly interested in what you are telling, but they are your colleagues in another department and they are attending this meeting, only because his manager had another meeting at the same time. Another six people are with an opened laptop answering e-mails (in the jargon this is called multitasking) and at last there is your manager, looking far, far away, and giving you the impression of not understanding anything at all. In this moment of confusion, with a dense silence in the room, one of the laptop guys will start asking you a couple of questions that have nothing to do with your presentation, but these questions will include some recurrent words.
The “recurrent words” have always been there and they change with the course of years. He will use, more than probably, three:
- Transversality
- Visibility
- Traceability
When you are finished with the meeting you will calm down and you will think that probably these people did not reach their positions so easily and that you should adapt your point of view.
Then another meeting will come, and another, and another… And the years will go by and one day you will discover yourself answering emails during the meeting and using the “recurrent words” of the moment.
And another brilliant mind is gone with the wind.
At this time, an inevitable question is in the air, how is it possible that these great companies still put on sale products, are profitable or, summarizing, are referents in their actuation fields? We will discuss about this next week.
[1 translator’s note: in the original version (Spanish) "melon" is used in a double sense, as the fruit, melon, or as colloquial term for clumsy]
I leave it here for now and lay out our first problem. I don´t want to make the blog too long, so you can find the problem in the following link:
http://engineers-corner.dip-solutions.com/Problem_1.pdf
I will be waiting for your answers.
There is one single warning. In some of the problems, to set you in the same context we have at this time, we will set some technical limitations to find the solution. Today’s problem isn’t this case and you may use any available technology that can be applied.
A thought:
A big organization is like a leafy tree where the incompetents can make their nests.
See you.
Be brave!
Visit www.dip-solutions.com for more information of what we do.
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