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A philosophical question - Is lateral thinking a valued trait in engineering?
RJSV:
One sincere question I have might seem out of place, but what about the disfunctional players who, not on their own merits, still manage to hold on, to jobs and responsibility...
That's the sort of imperfection that goes on, if you observe for a while. I had a lawyer once, hired part of my team. But he had a drinking problem, not at work, but he needed 'time off', to be elsewhere, a bit too much. Those edge types, not too extreme but sometimes undependable, those types exist, around big office settings.
Where would the 'mostly OK but sometimes not OK', where did those types 'fit' the team types...because they DO persist.
The guy doing legal work for a small entity, partially because he can't hold a main-stream regular job. A guy with no school, besides high school, doing fine in software, (despite prison record, for narcotics).
These sorts of workplace 'landscape' are just as much a part of (our industrial) history, as a story about Steve Jobs is.
Put everybody working in the ORG chart, is all I'm saying...They are already contributing, so...
Nominal Animal:
For what it is worth:
I have worked quite a bit with visual artists, on things that needed engineering of some sort. When we formed a team where I could provide the logical and rational feedback to the 'vision' –– and quite often very lateral ideas! ––, the results were impressive, and the work was fun. (When I was instead seen as a hindrance, 'mundane', artless, the work was horrible and destroyed peoples creativity and will.)
The key point is that lateral thinking cannot shortcut the hard work, and the limitations of the resources at hand. All 'visions' must be tempered by logic and hard work to become implementable with the given resources.
This means that lateral thinking is useful and valuable, but only in conjunction with rational thought and applied logic. It radically expands the achievable solution space, but without the logic and rational thinking and hard work, it alone will not reach a solution. At best, it can suggest a solution, but without any basis as to why that solution should be better than any other solution.
e100:
--- Quote from: RJHayward on March 02, 2022, 03:14:41 am --- One sincere question I have might seem out of place, but what about the disfunctional players who, not on their own merits, still manage to hold on, to jobs and responsibility...
--- End quote ---
If you have someone in your team who is dead weight, then the quickest way to get ride of them is to get them promoted out of your team to be the manager of another team. Much easier than getting HR involved and going through the long winded and soul destroying process of trying to get them kicked out due to poor performance. Of course things could backfire and they end up back in charge of your team, so it's a calculated risk.
Obviously from a company perspective this a bad thing, but if you're a humble cubicle dweller then all you really care about is making life easier for yourself. It's the office survival instinctTM.
penfold:
--- Quote from: snarkysparky on March 01, 2022, 08:17:39 pm ---Whats the definition of lateral thinking. I could not find any significantly qualitative description.
[...]
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You're right... definitions look a bit sparse. Reading between the lines of a few articles...
Conventional, logical, verticle thinking would be to solve a problem using defined rules, such that each step of the solution had a very clear and rational trace to the previous steps. The value of a solution would be measured (also in the lateral case) by its usual merits of meeting spec, BOM-cost, time to implement and risk (which puts a high weighting towards historic implementations). Lateral thinking would be where the "lateral thinker" is able to see solutions that might logically not, initially, be a strong solution can still become much stronger than a direct logical solution... and is able to evaluate their merits before anyone has realised they deviated from the programme.
So lateral thinking could be quantified by the number of apparent logical absurdities if you were to describe it in abstract-ish terms i.e. not how you'd sell it to a project manager. Perhaps "we are going to produce a solution that uses a totally new design, employing a much larger BOM-count and won't have any programmable components", the reasoning might be "because the old design was too expensive to manufacture, component shortages were killing production schedule and validation cycles for software were too slow". And that involves thinking outside the box in so much as considering broader benefits to the company and how resources can be better utilised.
With that example, I'd say that a lot of people don't necessarily realise when they are laterally thinking and it's just part of good engineering generally. There's also a lot of people who think they're laterally thinking when indeed they're just having crazy random stabs in the dark. Thinking outside the box could just be questioning a spec, in an intelligent way, to intelligently ask "is this genuinely a requirement the customer needs" and whether it is improperly constraining a solution where a much better one would result by relaxing that requirement slightly.
Firmware may be a good example also, I rarely write good code first, second, third time around, it always seems logical to me, but lots of nesting and too many repeated logical tests and can always be refactored better. I think the refactoring is a good example of lateral thinking... if not only that my original logic (whether wrong or not) didn't produce an optimal solution but revised to a different pattern produced much better. This is again something that some people can just do automatically, some people can't and some people just think they do.
How's that for a definition? Apologies if I've just repeated a few things that others have said along the way.
e100:
--- Quote from: penfold on March 02, 2022, 08:28:55 am ---
--- Quote from: snarkysparky on March 01, 2022, 08:17:39 pm ---Whats the definition of lateral thinking. I could not find any significantly qualitative description.
[...]
--- End quote ---
Firmware may be a good example also, I rarely write good code first, second, third time around, it always seems logical to me, but lots of nesting and too many repeated logical tests and can always be refactored better. I think the refactoring is a good example of lateral thinking... if not only that my original logic (whether wrong or not) didn't produce an optimal solution but revised to a different pattern produced much better. This is again something that some people can just do automatically, some people can't and some people just think they do.
--- End quote ---
The first time I heard engineers talking about refactoring code I had no idea what they were talking about. It was only later that realized that it was just a fancy buzzword that could of been dreamt up on the Starship Enterprise.
Spock: Captain we're going to have to refactor the code
Kirk: I have no idea what that means, but if that's what you need to do, then do it, do it now!
Spock: Captain, it just means we have to re-write it because we did it wrong last time.
Kirk: <Places hands over ears and turns away> Noooo, don't tell me these things. Too much information. I'm just a middle manager.
I'm a rubbish part time self taught programmer. My struggles aren't so much with algorithms and bugs, its just getting the goddam code to compile so refactoring is basically a cleanup process where I take my ugly inelegant code and make it slightly less ugly and inelegant. Sometimes I even put comments in!
Currently I'm working in an OO language so have all my numeric values hidden inside self reporting objects that monitor for min max violations, have reporting thresholds and check for expired data. Essentially the system logs all changes to everything so I can step back in time and slowly replay events without having to jump into the debugger. It's taken years to get to this stage, perhaps I'm re-inventing the wheel, I don't know however it's the first system where I can actually say, "I think I know why its doing that, it's because <reason>" without having to step through code.
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