There is a not yet confirmed news that some people from my department will be on load to another department. Our department is running out of project while the other department is short on staff. The loaning program makes very good sense as corporate strategy and it happens before. Just somehow everyone being loaned to another department hate it and swear they are not going through it again. It is not about the heavy workload. Workload itself is not necessary bad, as long as your hard work is rewarded and appreciated. In this company, all the loaners never receive above average in performance review and simply kiss their promotion goodbye while they are on-loan.  The loaner’s hard work just goes down in vain.

We can’t really blame the manager for being unfair, they just behave rationally according to the system and play by the rules. In this company, we have a quota system on performance evaluation and promotion. Each manager can nominate some of his sub-ordinary to receive excellent ranking or promotion, but at the same time they have to give names to fill the low performer quota.  The loaner still report to his original boss under the corporate structure, but the loaning boss will write his evaluation.  Assuming most workers are equally good, so whom will receive all the good evaluation and promotion quota?  Those who are likely to work with you in the next project or outsiders will disappear after one project?  Let’s make an analogy, say you are a parent handing out Christmas gifts. Will you flavor your own kids or the neighbor’s kids just happen to drop by?  No one wants to be a loaner, but too bad that it is not up to us, the lowly workers, to decide whether be a loaner or not.  We can only pray that we will not be drafted by the managers, sent to the front line as a cannon fodder.

Engineers do not like surprise. We prefer to know the result ahead of time with reasonably good estimation. We are well aware of the Murphy’s Law, so we will leave some safety margin to cope with the uncertainty. However, we will still do our best trying to to minimize the uncertainty.

On the other hand, girls seem to like surprise alot. They think surprise is romantic and shows much their boyfriends care about them. In fact, this is actually based on a wrong perception. Having an execution well according to the plan with lots of check and balance demands more effort than having a surprise. Since surprise usually lacks feedbacks and inputs from the customer (i.e. the girl) in the planning process, the quality of the end product suffers. When the girls receive a surprise, they are just too overwhelm by the element of surprise so they simply overlook other problems. In fact, the total amount of pleasure experienced by the girls is much more in a well planned execution than in a surprise. Those pleasant experience just goes unnoticeable because it is distributed over the course of the planning period.

Sometimes, the girl may be unhappy about the surprise delivered because it doesn’t match her expectation. The problem is that if the girl refuse to give inputs during the process, there is simply no way to guarantee a satisfying end result. The feedback loop is broken. Just like the product design engineers can’t build a product satisfy the customer’s requirements if the marketing department gives us confusing or insufficient specification. Surprise and quality is mutually exclusive, you can just pick one. Actually, you can attempt to balance quality and surprise. The important parts have to plan carefully, then randomize some trivial parts to add some surprise for decoration.

We have a foosball table at work in the gaming room, it is one of the attraction during lunch hour and after five.  There is a crowd of keen foosball player come and play everyday.  Technically speaking, foosball is a team sport.  Each side has two players, one take care of the defense and the other take care of offense.  In a foosball tournament, since the partner of a team is fixed, it is easy to tell who is stronger and who is weaker.  However at work, people come and go to the gaming room.  There are no fix teams, we just pair up with whoever in waiting in the room.  The out come of the game depends not only on how good you are, but also on who you happen to pair up with.  Now, determining the rank of each player becomes a bit tricky.  Today, finally I came up with a way to rank how the player relative to each other.  I named it the Ivy foosball scale (IFS).   Ivy is the only female foosball player among the usual gang and probably the least skillful one.  Don’t get me wrong, although she is not as strong as the others, but she is considerably much better anyone else not a usual foosball player.  We can measure the strength of other players in relative term to Ivy.  The method to use is pairing up the subject with Ivy as a team.  The strength of the subject is then measured by the number of goals he can scored playing against the others.  The scale is from 0 to 10.  It is zero if the subject score nothing, it is ten if the other team score nothing.  It is quite an though up hill battle, so most of us taking the challenge lose most of the time.  If we are fortunate enough to win the game, it would always be a close call of 4-4 shot out.

Engineers are rational being and their every decisions are made with practical and only practical considerations.  When the girlfriends of two engineers come together, somehow they always bash their engineer boyfriend being too practical.  Tonight I met up with a friend coming back to Vancouver with Pat.  She is an engineer herself but she also got an engineer boyfriend.  In the dinner, Pat start making comments about me with the typical mind set of engineer, somehow that rings a bell to my friend and they two start poking fun of engineers.  Pat complains I keep wearing the same model of Nike hiking boots for 10 years.

My friend nodded in agreement and complain her boyfriend has a full closet of black clothes.  My friend comments that the guys at work can wear company T-shirt everyday and everyone is doing so.  They said it is too boring, but I can’t see what’s wrong with this picture.  How often do you look down and see what clothes are you wearing today?  Rarely.  The primary function of clothings is to keep you warm and comfortable and the company T-shirt meets this requirement just fine.  The secondary function of clothings is to attract opposite sex, like the peacock’s tail.  Unless you are going after some girls at work, why bother to dress up?  It is unfortunate that there ain’t that many girls in engineering firm, so no one really cares what you wear as long as it doesn’t smell.  Isn’t having to pick which clothes to wear every morning is even more boring than simply wearing the company T-shirt?