The Bright And The Pivot
There’s this anecdote about Einstein and the student. It goes like this: a student goes to see Einstein. “Prof. Einstein,” he says, “look, I have this notebook I keep just for ideas. Every time I have a good idea I write it down in this notebook, so I don’t forget it.” “Very well,” replies Einstein, “my good ideas are relatively few. Every time I have one, I just remember it.”
I heard this anecdote a few days ago, at some private occasion. It demonstrates, of course, the rareness of really good ideas. I was talking with someone who is generally appreciated as a very bright person, and he claimed that he has good ideas only once every few years. I agree with him: really good ideas are extremely rare.
When I graduated my first degree, every colegue I had wanted to work in “R&D”. It was like a magic word: every fresh engineer, who just studied 3 or 4 courses on some subject, felt like an “expert” on this subject, and wanted to do only “development” - that’s what we became engineers for, wasn’t it? Then I went to a military “development unit”, and actually developed a few systems. Very soon it became clear, that developing a system means spending a lot of time doing messy jobs (if you want a system, it needs to have a box, needn’t it? And be properly assembled, and pass experiments to prove its worth; not to mention taking care of budgets and other nontechnical stuff; even the more technical side - let’s say you develop some electronic instrument, it would normally involve some software to be written, some hardware to be chosen, manufactured, assembled and tested, and a lot of other daily work); shortly speaking, I got a better glimps of how the world of development works. I think they call it experience.
For almost a year now I’ve been working with Freescale, on much larger scale projects. The kind of projects that involve dozens of man-years to achieve. Of course, many engineers work on them in parallel, which makes every single one of them much less important then in smaller projects like I was used to. My big brother claims, that every such huge scale project (and smaller ones, as well, for that matter) requires one or more pivots, which are the guys that really understand what’s going on, even if their actual contribution to the progress of the project cannot be conservatively measured - in addition to all those engineers that only see their tiny corner, someone who sees the entire picture and is essential for the job.
I think he is extremely naive. Let’s put it nice: unexperienced. On very large scale projects, the managers are far less important then they consider themselves. Even a knowledgable “technical expert” is just a knowledgeable technical expert. The sad truth is, that after a certain level of complexity, no single individual can both fully grasp all aspects of the project and have an important enough contribution to the progress of the project itself. Also: bright ideas are usually very far from good projects. Tough luck.
The obvious conclusion from this insight, is that we should be more modest. If we want to really be in control of all the project aspects, then we must limit the project scale to a small - medium one; if we want larger projects, we have to rely on various people to take care on various aspects; and from a certain size upwards, nobody will fully understand what’s going on. Example: look at career paths like the academic path, which is the one that my big brother took. People in the academics usually limit themselves to small scale projects (inherently, academic work is done individually or in small teams; thus in can never get to a really large scale - for that we have the industry), and every good idea (and some academic ideas are not too bright) requires a few months of technical work to test; so we get to the same point again - one rare, sometimes good, idea, which is accompanied by months of not so bright work. Not exactly the romantic view some people have about the way the academics brings progress to mankind; it does, but on a daily basis, behind the glamour, it is probably more technical, dull, and closer to work in the industry, then one would expect.
Bottom line: you can either be a pivot in a small project, or be involved yet not really a pivot in large projects, or not be a pivot at all, regardless of wether you’re an expert in your field or not. The other opportunity, which is not to be involved at projects at all but become an expert in some theoretical field without real applications, also have many drawbacks - but that’s a different story.
May 16th, 2007 at 2:25
You said “dozens of man years”. Thousands of man years seems much more likely.
Unless of course you don’t factor in all the solitaire/email/youtube/lunch hours - in which case a few dozens might actually be a reasonable figure.
May 17th, 2007 at 14:58
I’m not sure I agree, altough many of the observations are true. Managers are hugely important, especially in the larger projects, and there are technological pivots in every successful technological project. The issue is that in both cases, their work isn’t obvious. It’s useful here to consider successful large projects we are a bit familiar with but from a distance (e.g. Los Alamos, The Linux kernel, some Intel processors etc.) rather than those we see close by (especially since the later often aren’t really successful or managed).