Efficiency at what cost?

So I’ve spent the past week interviewing my coworkers about what they do and what their thoughts about the company (a little more background is available here). One topic that’s come up several times is efficiency. How we can we make ourselves into more productive workers?

There were several things that were mentioned, things like: organizing the tools in the shop so people aren’t wasting time looking for tools, making sure meetings didn’t go off tangent, making sure that there's a proper schedule and that it’s updated. And for the most part these sound like reasonable suggestions for how to improve workplace productivity, though there are some questions on how they’re to be implemented.

There were other suggestions for increasing efficiency, like substituting email for getting up and asking a question, or having people only do what they’re good at (ie. a designer only designs, a welder only welds, etc).

And one phase I remember pretty clearly was ‘a good team member does their role.’ Sure, these suggestions also sound reasonable. An email may save more time than getting into a conversation that derails and when you’re on a deadline it makes sense to let the people who are best at doing certain things, do certain things. But like the phrase ‘a good team member does their role,’ it feels weird. Yeah its a job, but at the end of the day don’t we want the people we work with to be more than just cooperative?

For me, all this talk about increasing efficiency seems to be somewhat dehumanizing. Sure the person we’re getting up to bother might be busy, and it might disrupt both our and their work flows. Sure I’m not as good at using xyz than the other guy. But communication and learning is central to how we grow as human beings right?

If we take away those things in the name of productivity the job description then sounds robotic. A ______ that does one job really well, over and over again, communicates digitally.

Maybe I’m being a little dramatic. But still, it’s efficiency at what cost?

A book recommendation I would like to make is The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive by Brian Christian.

Shoot the Shit

For some context, this past week I’ve been doing UOCD at my job. Specifically on employee  sentiment surrounding my workplace. This job actually came about because I was running out of intern things to do, and I was feeling not as excited as I should be for my existing work.

What I did was I proposed a workplace review that would go in 3 phases (sound familiar?):

1. Interview everyone who works at the company.
2. Synthesize individual feelings into larger overarching trends
3. Come up with actionable suggestions for to positively impact the work environment

Anyway, the topic of “shooting the shit” came up during one of the interviews. This was the first time I’ve ever encountered the phrase. If you didn’t click on the urban dictionary link yet, you should.

I was pretty unsatisfied with most of my high school years. I was a really quiet teenager. The kind of kid that teachers would often say “can you please speak up, we can’t hear you,” the kind that dreaded any kind of group work because I was afraid that no one would want to work with me, the kind of kid that you probably pegged as “hates talking.”

Now I’m pretty sure that I didn’t hate talking, I was just really scared of talking. Ironically most of the unhappiness accumulated during those years came from the fact that I was so quiet. I would have probably enjoyed it more if I felt like I had more people to shoot the shit with.

So here I am again two years in the future with this uneasy feeling of being unhappy. I’ve thought about the reasons for why this was happening, like maybe I don’t actually like CADing, or maybe I don’t like sitting in front of a computer all day, or maybe I need to do more hands on things, but honestly everything would probably be better if I had people to shoot the shit with.

“Well then, why don’t you?” you ask. Well, what am I supposed to do when I feel that the work environment encourages people to put on headphones and isolate themselves? What I ended up doing was was writing up a proposal for a workplace review so I could interview everyone.

What is design engineering?

my 8-hour CAD cycle

I think I like the allure of being good at everything. Olin College offers three types of degrees, Mechanical Engineering,Electrical and Computer Engineering, and General Engineering with a concentration in pick your own. When it came time to declare a major, I decided to pick my own and declared as Engineering with Design.

Because it was a self designed major, it came with a self designed description that basically said that at the end of my four years I would be good at designing things that had mechanical, electrical, and software components.It made sense at the time, as someone who wanted to do everything.

Over the past year, the more people I told that I was majoring in “Design Engineering” the more confused I grew over what my self made title meant. It’s a really strange feeling when your boss gives you a job and says “this is a perfect problem for a design engineer, wink wink,” but my internal dialogue is like “what is a design engineer even???” So far what I’ve done at work is mainly a lot of CAD, things like converting a model from one CAD software to another, making motion animations, detailing models, designing a bottle rocket docker, etc. And I’m wondering if I’ve dug myself into this design engineering hole where I spend eternity clicking on a computer making 3D models.

So while I had this internal definition that a design engineer is someone who does everything, I had no clue what others thought design engineering meant. So I asked. One answer I got was that a design engineer is like if you combined a designer, and an engineer. Assuming the designer is the person who comes up with some awesome concept and what it does, and the engineer is the person who tells the designer that “no you can’t do that, because XYZ.” So what I’m getting is I’m destined to be a creative yet rational masochist.

I found a more promising definition on wikipedia which more or less said that design engineers take ideas through conception, design, prototyping, and whatever steps come after that. It did sound a little bit like being a project manager while still having to do some grunt work.

But anyway, those are some outside definitions of design engineering, and over a year what I think I want to do with my life has changed too. I had the “do all the things!” mentality at the beginning of sophomore year and while I still kind of want to be good at everything, I’ve figured out that mechanical and software things come easier to me than electrical things. That may partly be due to the fact that most people aren’t exposed to things like circuits in high school outside of V=IR.

So I’m faced with this dilemma where I really want to be good at doing electrical things, but I find it really hard to use and retain what I’ve learned in class. More and more often I can’t tell if I’m forcing myself to do something I don’t like because it’s good for me, or if I’m choosing to give up too early because it's easier. I don’t have an answer to this yet, or an answer to what a design engineer is, but for now I think I’m replacing ENGR 3370: Controls with ENGR 1330: Fundamentals of Machine Shop Operations.

Commuting by Bike

So I’ve been using my bike to commute for a year now. During the school year I bike to and from Wellesley for my Japanese class, and now I’m commuting by to my summer job.

Heres a picture of my current bike.

I can’t actually remember why I started  biking, I think it was something to do with getting fit, and getting mad thighs or something. I also bought myself a super classy looking bike (which I can’t for the life of me find a picture of) so that I couldn’t back out of the plan without suffering significant losses.

Anyway, I think the most interesting way to frame this blog post is me, imparting my noobish biking wisdom to you.

Why should you bike?

1. Biking is healthy for you. You probably already knew that.
2. You’re sitting at work all day doing the clicky thing for hours, I find that it’s a nice break between work and doing more clicking at home.
3. It’s cheaper than buying a car. And even if you already have a car, it’ll cost you around $10k a year for things like shop trips, insurance, gas, etc. A bike costs the cost of your bike.

Biking in general:

1. Safety glasses serve as cheap cycling glasses. Once I got a tiny fly in my eye and it came out a few hours later covered in bright yellow mucus.
2. Watch out for cars. It’s a little bit “duh”, but when you’re on a sidewalk or a bike path you need to really look for those cars that are turning (both left and right). They’re not thinking about you, they’re thinking about other cars that are going straight and won’t hesitate to run you over.
3. Don’t bike on the sidewalk...I get that it’s intimidating at first to be where the cars are but it’s safer in the long run. You’re unlikely to catch pedestrians off guard and cars will actually see you and do a better job at not hitting you (see 2). If you insist on biking on the sidewalk though, get a bell.
4. Wear a helmet. Yes, generic biking advice. It’s a better alternative to dying. There’s some really cool looking, some might even dare say, stylish bike helmets out there.
5. Get a U-lock if you’re in a heavy bike theft area. I have a bigger one that I can wrap around my frame, the bike parking, and my front wheel. The front wheel part is necessary because the front wheel usually pops off, and apparently stolen bike tires is a big enough market.

Biking when it’s really hot out (>100°F):

1. Don’t be a dumbass and bring a water bottle. Personally I would bring one extra bottle  every 5 miles. Get those vacuum insulated ones, I still have ice left in my bottle after my commute (4miles). The link to amazon lists it at $37, I think you can get the same thing at Costco for $20.
2. It’s not that bad. Honestly its probably just as gross sitting in your car waiting for the AC to turn on.
3. You can still wear jeans and long sleeved shirts. In fact, it’s good because you’ll burn less, but it does get a little gross when it's a little humid outside. That and you’ll get awkward tan lines at your wrists.
4. Hide in the shadow of the traffic signals when you’re waiting to cross, it actually feels a million times better.
5. Sunscreen will turn your white shirt orange. I didn’t know that was a thing until it happened to me, so now I’ve switched to raspberry (why is the p silent?) seed oil, which according to my roommate has natural spf. I haven’t gotten sun-burnt yet.
6. Get a helmet with a brim. That means not a skateboard helmet.

Biking when it’s really cold out (<30°F):

1. Earmuffs are the best. Without them the cold winter air will not only make you lose all feeling in your ears but will also make you deaf.
2. Get yourselves nice warm gloves. I find that the rest of your body will eventually warm up, but your hands will stay cold forever.
3. Before you chance it biking in the snow, test it out first. I have commuter bike tires on my bike at school and I’ll skid immediately when I hit any kind of snow.

Biking in the rain:

1. It’s a free bike wash.