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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

I think it actually matters that it's an urban legend. If it were a true story the value of its message would be less disputable. But if it's an urban legend that means that the message -- that line workers have valuable and inexpensive insights to offer -- is unsubstantiated and may not be true in the main. (I qualify this with "in the main" because of course there must have been some occasion when a line worker had a big brain idea that saved the company a bunch. The question is how often it happens and whether it's cost effective to detect and implement these cases.)

Parables are dangerous, because they sound good and appeal to common sense, but it turns out that in real life common sense is often not correct. Common sense works best when applied to situations encountered in the ancestral environment and does not necessarily convert over well to systems engineering.

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I used to work as a SW developer for an assembly line. Anecdotally, "my" "line workers" were very good at micro optimizations s.a where to place tools, when to duplicate stands, what order of operations makes more sense, alert when a material/part quantity drops.

I was occasionally replacing one of them to QA a SW tool, and was pretty slow and clumsy comparing to them.

I'd say overall their resourcefulness or "practical engineering" did some 1-5% impact on throughput.

But sometimes...

My anecdote: a close friend's brother was working as a laborer on a pipeline dig. One day work halted for a couple of hours, during which the construction supervisor and engineer were huddled over some plans.

My friend's brother saunters past, looks over, and says "there's your problem," placing a finger on the plan. Then he walks on.

He had seen a triangle with angles not adding up to 180 degrees. He was right - that's where the problem was.

> He had seen a triangle with angles not adding up to 180 degrees

Genuinely curious. How does one even draw a triangle whose angles don't add up to 180 degrees?

My guess is that the triangle was drawn correctly, but its interior angles had labels like “55°”, and those labels didn't add up to 180°. So the triangle could be constructed differently from intended, depending on which two of the angles the constructors used for reference.

You might want look in Kaizen, which one of the key basis is that the workers closest to the problem are empowered to stop production when issues arise and have input when approaching problems on the line.

Does it really make a big difference if it’s true or not? Even in the case where it’s 100% certifiably true, it’s just one anecdote. As you point out, you need more data on a trend to take it more meaningful.

That all being said, I think this sort of tale can still be a useful tool to have a discussion around. And then that discussion can in turn produce questions that could later be backed up by research and data.

>in real life common sense is often not correct

I can easily imagine a real-life scenario where some quick and dirty fix works, say, 75% of the time. (And maybe that's good enough.) But the expensive process change works 99%+ of the time and, even though there are cheap ad hoc alternatives that work in a particular scenario, you're still better off actually fixing the problem properly.

> line workers have valuable and inexpensive insights to offer

I saw it more as just a lesson about not overthinking things. Another version of the "During the space age Americans spent money developed a special compressed ink pen that could write in space, the Russians used a pencil". I think looking for a simple solution first is always good advice.

That story seems more or less to be a myth, too. And there seems to be a good reason why they used from pencils, which they used in the beginning to pens:

"Pencils may not have been the best choice anyway. The tips flaked and broke off, drifting in microgravity where they could potentially harm an astronaut or equipment. And pencils are flammable--a quality NASA wanted to avoid in onboard objects after the Apollo 1 fire."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...

Interesting, I had meant to point out that I had no evidence one way or the other if it was actually true, the point is just the idea of keeping it simple.

And your counterpoint about the graphite floating around is a good parable for why seemingly obvious, "clever" solutions often don't actually work, and that armchair critics should not assume the solution team was not smart enough to consider the obvious ideas :)

Never considered the compressed ink pens that could write in space were an example of Chesterton's Fence. Damn. The fence strikes again.

A.K.A. "What an ordinary engineer can do for a dollar, a good engineer can do for ten cents."

I heard that's another myth. The pen was developed privately, NASA and the Russians just bought them at extremely reasonable prices, and they worked better and safer than pencils.

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