| General > General Technical Chat |
| A philosophical question - Is lateral thinking a valued trait in engineering? |
| << < (11/14) > >> |
| penfold:
--- Quote from: e100 on March 02, 2022, 10:06:14 am ---[...] 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. Sometime I even put comments in! [...] --- End quote --- Me too, I'll avoid saying rubbish because, well, it is part of my job, a relatively small part of being a mostly analogue and power person, but, it happens that sometimes I need to do a small amount of embedded and the first pass is rarely satisfactory. So I'd clarify to say, it isn't a particularly natural language to me and the thoughts as they happen in my brain don't necessarily produce good code, so I definitely lack some lateral thinking in that regard and my analysis and improvement cycles are fairly logical. I postulate therefore that somebody who can write good code naturally must surely be doing a lot of lateral thinking, whether they realise it or not. Drawing good (appreciated by others) schematics, hierarchically, so that testable areas are cohesively documented, big BGA packages that are only ever going to be JTAG tested are pushed back, requirements and design decisions are visible and verifiable etc is kinda similar (in my opinion, feel free to oppose it), even flat, non-hierarchical, schematics which do that and avoid a big rats-nest of connections are difficult to draw if you base the arrangement of a circuit block only on a narrow set of logic following from the previous cluster of components... perhaps even the idea of "thinking ahead" is also a lateral thought process, or at least non-linear or high-order thinking as they call it. |
| RJSV:
OK, I'm 'wading' thru this; This subject is front and center, for those of us looking / needing improvement. Here is an example, of lateral thinking, in the 'immature' sense, maybe: The (smart terminal) had a 2 khz buzzer beeper, for when fax done, enabled by a mapped control bit, locally. Well, with a stretch of (8-bit ) code, from a hobby magazine, you could 'modulate', basically treating that 1-bit audio like the fixed 2 khz was, also, along for the ride; merely adding a 'buzz' to the musical tones. So, point is, that was, maybe, LATERAL thinking, but about 'goof-off' subject material, but DID get a response to the effect of: "...THAT will never work, as that channel is fixed frequency !..." While, like I said, it was a brief diversion, from daily tasks, that was 'Lateral thinking VS closed minds', ...was it ? That being: I was thinking 'Modulate', but also there was a file loading problem preventing proper load and run of the microcode. The other fellow; He was, apparently, convinced: "That will never WORK, ...it's a fixed frequency tone" A sort-of 'Anti-Lateral', or I guess you (already) have been terming that as 'Vertical'. But folks, like a lot of Engineers, I think a lot of TEAM concept hasn't been taught, well, at least in MY various schooling / training. |
| penfold:
I think that's a good example. But to a person who'd done that before or was from a comms and protocols background (maybe not that, but a background more naturally focused on modulation and spectra or whatever), that wouldn't be quite the same logical jump as to somebody who... can't think of a good example... but somebody who say, didn't think in those terms. So, a bit like an IQ test, as a measure of somebody's ability to recognise patterns, reason syllogisms and whatever else it tests, it is possible to raise your score a little by learning to recognise the kinds of trickery used in number patterns and at least with vocabulary, just because a person doesn't know the meaning of the words in a syllogism doesn't define their capacity to learn them and do better on successive tests. So... I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with anything, just musing on how lateral thinking to one person could be (I don't like the term verticle and lateral... surely if you're laying down they're co-linear?) to another, the opposite... so that's perhaps a lot of decisions and processes natural to engineering that to somebody else would be very lateral. Non-linear I think works better with my interpretation of it, more about thinking several steps ahead and evaluating a route between, drawing in knowledge from other disciplines, questioning the end result before it's defined etc. But most importantly, I don't in any way want to make it sound like I think that any of linear, non-linear, rational, verticle, lateral, real, imaginary, whatever thinking, is "better" than the other... I think I might have implied before that I do... the fact that some employers like to hear the buzz-words when justifying a salary boost is the only reason I'd call out-of-the-box thinking better. |
| mc172:
I haven't read the entire thread so sorry if I repeat what someone else has said. My experience is that it depends on who you're working for and this is the difficult bit as it takes you a few months in a place to figure this out. I've worked at places that didn't like it when I came up with solutions that were a bit unconventional and they made it clear that I should keep to the well-trodden path, and in some cases pretty much just do it like the last guy did because that's how we do it. OK then, time to find a new job. One of these bizarre places I ended up working actually told me that doing such things as thinking about problems wasn't my job, "that's what Colin's here for, he's the "ideas man" in this company!" Other places I've worked have encouraged thinking about problems and coming up with unique (or clever if you like, not that I think I'm clever) solutions to them that aren't immediately obvious, even if it takes a bit of extra time to get there over doing it "conventionally" or just cracking on with whatever you've been given like a dead-inside CAD drone. Often if you step back a bit and ask how the product you're designing is going to be used or what it interfaces with and how flexible those details are (which in my experience are never given to you without having to ask for them), lightbulb moments happen and that's where you start being able to claw back some performance margin, perhaps you might even be able to outperform your competitors because you've seen something they haven't. Keep yourself grounded though, it's important to remind yourself sometimes that it's also not good to be constantly reinventing the wheel, despite it being quite interesting to do so. Also, unfortunately, there are boring, mundane jobs that need to be done such as maintaining CAD libraries, PLM systems, BOMs, wiring harness drawings :=\ and such like. Putting thinking creative type people on those tasks for too long is a highly effective way of killing them off, whether they burn out or find more stimulating work elsewhere. |
| penfold:
--- Quote from: mc172 on March 02, 2022, 12:24:05 pm ---[...] "that's what Colin's here for, he's the "ideas man" in this company!" [...] --- End quote --- I once got accosted for daring to speak to a lead-physicist about possible ways we could solve a dire internal EMC issue (10kV pulses and FPGA reset controllers rarely play well at the best of times less so when there's no room to fit any more ferrites), it wasn't even particularly lateral or crazy thinking, in just a casual water-cooler conversation I dared to consider the root cause of the problem because there was no more room for sticking plasters (other interpretations of events may exist). The side-rant is that there is far too much, unjustified, value a company can take from saying "all of our engineers have advanced degrees, therefore, our product is great" when maybe it should be "we have a range of skills, expertise and qualifications among our engineers that enables them to function well together and produce us a good product". By the very definition, everything learned at university is learnable and everything from experience is forgettable (and vice versa) and there is a hell of a lot which can be learned from "drone" tasks and very little from exclusively having blue-sky ideas and not experiencing the pains of entering x-number of components into an ERP system. So, hopefully, I've self demonstrated there that my resume may or may not be blank, I may or may not be a competent engineer, what I consider in myself to be good lateral thinking may just be flawed logic and in any case, I don't know when to shut up. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |