Frog in the well
On experiencing something outside of my purview. On one rule before asking for help at work.
Hi Friend,
Greeting from Newark.
For the last 6 months at work, I have been working on a project related to the interesting topic of Industry 4.0. It refers to the fourth industrial revolution, which is basically the integration of smart systems into the manufacturing processes. Some of the buzzwords associated with this topic include IoT, artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, and big data analytics, among others. I know it may sound complicated.
But let me explain it on a very high level. You know how your Apple Watch measures your daily steps and then gives you a nice graph on how good/bad you are doing. You can use that information to either walk more or less depending what your goals are. I am doing something similar with the machines in my factory. Connecting them to a smart system and extracting the data. Then analyzing that data to accomplish our factory goals.
We have a supplier who is helping us with this project and is a leader in the Industry 4.0 space. They were at our factory this week, armed with presentations about the current project as well as the path ahead.
Our pilot program was to collect basic data from our machines. I was already fascinated with the stuff I got to work on for this launch. I got a taste of the fancy software to build dashboards and even learned about the foundational blocks of IoT.
But when these guys presented their capabilities for a complex problem we have in one of our other departments. I learned that collecting data was only the first step. What you do with that data is more important. They have Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to analyze tons of data from our machines and then provide us with solutions and predictive maintenance alerts. I was blown away.
I felt like a like a frog at the bottom of the well who knows nothing about the sea.
What I found fascinating for the last 6 months was a very tiny portion of what can happen. There are so many more things. I’m excited for this big project ahead. Until a year ago, IoT, AI, ML and Industry 4.0 were just words that I read on the internet. Today, it feels like working on technology from the future.
Have you ever felt like a frog in the well?
🦾 On Becoming a Bomb Engineer.
This Week: One rule to ask for help at work.
As an entry level engineer, whenever you are you are faced with a problem, it is okay to ask for help. But the one rule you should always follow before asking for help.
Make sure you take efforts to solve your own problem before you ask for help.
First few months into my job, I was shadowing an experienced engineer. He would walk me through troubleshooting a machine and I would stand there and learn how it was done. Honestly, I wasn’t learning anything. When he let me take care of it myself, I would tell him what was happening and asked what I needed to do. My mentor at the time played along and held my hand though the problems. One day when I went to him with a problem, he asked me what I had done about it.
I had done nothing.
So until that point I was reporting the issue and trying to fix it by implementing what I was told. I wasn’t really doing anything by myself. But I was an engineer, I had to solve the problems.
So when my mentor asked me what I had done, I was taken aback and set out to do SOMETHING. The next time I went to him was after trying 3 different things that didn’t work. He helped me through it, and the next time I went to him for help was after a longer time. Eventually I had a better understanding of my machines and I was on my own.
It was like learning to ride a cycle, where you have someone holding the back of it for balance as you start. But you have to pedal yourself or you are going to fall down.
You should never ask for help without putting in some efforts yourself. If the other person has to do the job for you, you wouldn’t be hired in the first place. No one expects an entry level engineer to solve all the problems, but they expect you to at least try before you ask for help.
TL:DR
⛺️ Content I’m Digging
📑 How It All Works (A Few Short Stories)
by Morgan Housel
This article by the author of Psychology of Money presents a series of insightful short stories and thought provoking perspectives on human behavior and the world we live in.
My favourite one is about Henry Ford:
Henry Ford had a rule for his factories: No one could keep a record of the experiments that were tried and failed.
Ford wrote in his book My Life and Work:
I am not particularly anxious for the men to remember what someone else has tried to do in the past, for then we might quickly accumulate far too many things that could not be done.
That is one of the troubles with extensive records. If you keep on recording all of your failures you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to try – whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a certain method that another man will not succeed.
That was Ford’s experience. “We get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” He wrote: “Hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere in machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is called “the best shop practice.”
The important thing is that when something that previously didn’t work suddenly does, it doesn’t necessarily mean the people who tried it first were wrong. It usually means other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical.
Read the other short stories here→
Quote of the week
James Patterson on reading
One of the best things about reading is that you’ll always have something to think about when you’re not reading
Thank you for reading.
I really appreciate your attention.
Your Friend,
Shubham