Archive for the ‘design’ tag
What does sorting potatos have to do with engineering no comments
Weeks before graduating from college, while I was handing out resumes and doing job interviews, my father, who has an engineering background, asked me the following question:
If I were a farm owner and wanted you to create a machine that sorted the bad potatos from the good ones, what would you do?
Seemed like a simple task so I thought about it for a few seconds. Initially I imagined a device that would take pictures of the potatoes and perform image processing queries on them. These queries could then figure out if there were any fungus or odd shapes in the potatoes.
When I told this to my father he laughed. He said: just throw the potatoes in water. The ones that don’t float are the bad ones.
Now this is a very simple example of an issue that I think rises with a lot of development and engineering teams. You see, had you had asked that question to an electrical engineer he might have thought if the current that passes in bad potatoes is different than in the good ones. A mechanical engineer might have thought about the weight difference between the potatoes, and so on.
People tend to face problems from their technical backgrounds, which is not particular a bad thing, but it is important to be able to extend to other areas of knowledge, even trivial ones. Had any of those engineers had asked a cook about the potato problem, they would have probably had the best answer.
And to me that’s the crucial point here. I think a lot of projects fail because people fail to assume some other realm of knowledge might have a better understanding of the problem they are facing. They assume they can ‘deal with it’ and in the end, all they get is a bunch of bad project decisions and thus, bad potatoes.
