Synergistic Red Fuse ...

Mapman 7-14-2016 12:42pm
The best engineers strive for accuracy and avoid making mistakes that will have consequences to someone down the road.

+1.  A good engineer recognizes that it is almost always best to get things right the first time, for example during the design process, than to have to fix them later.

Although having dealt with countless engineers during the course of my career, as well as being one of them, my perception has been that there are many cases in which perfectionism tends to be carried to extremes.  And many engineers tend to be a bit too dogmatic and inflexible in how they approach their work.  All of which can result in the paralysis by analysis that OP referred to.

One thing I have never perceived, however, is any particular tendency among engineers to fear criticism.  In fact perfectionist tendencies and paralysis by analysis, in a professional setting, can be expected to often result in big-time criticism, when schedules are missed and budgets are exceeded.

One thing that worked to my advantage in my career was being able to recognize that different circumstances call for differing degrees of perfectionism, and flexibility in how different situations are approached.  With the choice of how to proceed often being made just by technically-based instinct.

In any event, my thanks to Wolfie for having taken the time to provide an additional data point on these fuses, in a manner that sounds like it was done with requisite thoroughness.

Regards,
-- Al
 

mapman
13,507 posts
07-14-2016 12:42pm
"Read up about the Challenger space shuttle disaster for a textbook example. I worked in Huntsville Al. at the time down teh road from Marshal Space Flight Center where those engines were tested. My companies Computer Aided Design software at the time was used to design the shuttle. Human error not technology led to its fate. I was still a young pup but I witnessed how all the engineers I knew were totally shattered that day."

My friend from school in the Aero dept. at UVa wound up as executive director of the Challenger disaster Investigation, the Rogers Commission. He was the one who didn’t allow Richard Feynman’s report to be included in the main report, from what I can gather, because they clashed personally and because Feyman was rather eccentric. Too eccentric for Keel, apparently. 

Its true that "analysis paralysis"  is a common plague historically, but in software engineering for example, modern Agile or iterative development paradigms address it.   

Older traditional  development paradigms often referred to as "waterfall"  development have fallen out of favor these days in most any progressive development organization. 

Waterfall development depended on thorough analysis of the problem up front to determine a plan for development.  That approach fails as problems become too complex to assess completely and accurately up front, leading to either analysis paralysis ie doing nothing until the analysis is complete or heading down a poorly understood path doomed to fail.

Iterative development is more agile because you attempt to build something based on the key known requirements regularly, like once every few weeks and then stop and reassess so what was learned can be applied effectively to the next iterative phase of development.

So analysis paralysis can certainly still exist but is far less problematic as a whole these days than in years past. 

Today's complex and fast moving world has no room for "analysis paralysis" in product development.

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