Lose Yourself to Engineering?

It’s fairly safe to say that 2013 was Daft Punk’s year. They brought out, to great hype, fanfare, and reviews their latest album, Random Access Memories, which made it into third place in The Guardian’s “Albums of 2013” list, behind John Grant’s Pale Green Ghosts in second and - in their opinion - Kanye West’s Yeezus in first (for the record)°.

I listened to Random Access Memories intently over the weeks following its release - and hated it. Then I loved it, finally settling for an awed respect. Nobody could put it better than Sasha Frere-Jones at the NYT: “The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of ‘Random Access Memories’ repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard… Does good music need to be good?”

The opener, Give Life Back to Music comes across as an all-too respectful homage to 70’s funk, without adding anything to new to music at all. Yet, filter away the actual tune, inspect the nuts and bolts of the whole album and you’ll find so much to admire in the way it’s been assembled. It’s a damn fine engineering job.

Music is my main hobby, so with access to all the power that Cubase provides, I could conceivably compose and then produce something along those lines (though I emphatically don’t work in that direction).

Despite those bold words, though, I’m still fairly terrible at production, which is music’s engineering. A music producer (or audio engineer, as they are also called) has to work on ensuring that:

• voices (human or instrumental) have their own place in the mix,
• are clean and tidy, or dirty and scruffy, as desired;
• no frequency is overloaded, or uncomfortable to the listener

As I say, I’m not very good at it. Whilst I can appreciate a good mix, I tend to desensitise my own ears by overlistening to my own mixes, always wanting more (when less is by far the better way) andthereby muddying the sound to a point where it sounds acceptable to me on my own headphones, but is a disaster on loudspeakers, for example.

Music production consists as much of a workflow as product engineering does and goes something like:

• Audio mixdowns (exporting each track, whether synth, samples, humans or tubas into an audio file)
• Post processing:
• Panning
• Levelling
• Equalising
• Loudness
• Compression
• Distortion
• Reverb
• (and much more)
• Testing
• Ensuring that none of those frequencies are overblown
• Making sure no voices are lost
• Validation
• pre-mixes
• album-wide sound levelling
• Final mix
• mastering and publishing
• (gulp!)

For each step, the producers have a vast array of tools at their disposal for each step, but final quality control can’t be quantified away - it’s still in and between the ears.

Daft Punk had three things going for them in this intrepid exercise: lots of experience, a huge budget and a big team. Now, whilst the duo weren’t short of a penny or two given their back catalogue, it was still a massive investment on their part to go down the rout of maximising the human aspect of this album. It ended up being a massive, globally managed project, with all of the collaboration, communication and data transfer challenges that such an enterprise generates.

And all of that for, musically, a rather dull record.

It takes me back, perhaps controversially, to my days working as a packaging engineer at Ford. It was part of my graduate induction programme at the company and, if I’m honest about it, I felt that it was somewhat beneath me. Putting parts into boxes? What’s “engineering” about that, then?

All of it. It was, in reality, a complex puzzle that needed to be completed against time whilst ensuring the safe arrival of pretty much each and every single possible component in a car after transportataion across half the world, with all conceivable qualities of route. More than that, the product and methodologies were endlessly optimisable.

So, working as part of a large global team, with a big budget, complex problems to solve, worse problems lurking behind any cut corner and bad, vending-machine coffee on offer, I came up with… a cardboard box.

If you’re in that situation, too, remember Daft Punk and Random Access Memories - your product may, superficially, be dull to much of the population, but, if you end up Doin’ It Right, it will sound great.

Happy 2014!

°(alright, and perhaps for a small boost in search engine findability, too… :-))

Blogging about considering new jobs (and doing something about it) seems like a risky idea. Posts are by their nature open to the world, so conceivably my boss could read this.

(Well, it's inconceivable, really, but let's go with it for now)

What will he think?

In my case, there's nothing that he can't have been inferred from previous discussions, so there's nothing that could surprise my boss unduly were he to read this. For you, dear reader, there are hopefully some worthwhile thoughts in here - so read on, whilst I write on.

It’s safe to say that I had a frustrating time at work in 2012, mostly for non-engineering reasons (resources, too many inputs and outputs, etc). I decided that a change of scenery would be a good way of clearing the decks and starting afresh, so I applied for a couple of new jobs.

A seemingly attractive way of making the switch to a new company or even to a new industry was, I thought, to glide along the plane of least resistance, taking a training- and background-agnostic route. In my thinking, this route would take me towards Project Management.

It's not perhaps strictly true to say background-agnostic. Project Managers are often handed the role from within another, and that's what happened to me at various stages in my career - so I can show a Project Management history: nominally, I am in any case a project manager right now. It forms part of my job title (the other words being "Development Engineer and-"). Whilst I officially combine the roles I also tend to fulfil both roles simultaneously (Project Manager, manage thyself!), which has added to the frustrations I have felt of late.

We were also given project management training a while back. It was in itself quite inspirational and I came top of the class in the tests at the end of it. So, in essence, Project Management is something I can do, more or less without really thinking about it - in fact, what else do I do other than manage projects? Every single task I have, be it "engineering" or "not", is part of a project, big or small. I do have to force myself to do things like pick up the phone (I'm much more of an emailer or short messenger than a caller), but overall I can work with others and others seem to be able to accept working with (sometimes for) me.

I got invited to some interviews.

Both were within the automotive sector, so I wasn’t going to be changing industry, but I would be changing technologies - glass and engine products were the general themes.

And therein lay the rub with me wanting to switch via the PM route: I thought the technologies would be cool, not the job. You see, what happened in both interviews was something like this:

Interviewer, after some preamble: “Imagine the scenario that a task within one of your projects is delayed. What do you do?”

Me (brain whirring, thinking…): Um, what can I say to this that could possibly be interesting? I’d have to talk to the guy whose task it is, see if I can chivvy him up a bit. Talk to his manager, talk to the customer, see if we can delay - oh, this is all so dull!

Me (aloud): Well, we could, umm, talk to the person responsible for the task (etc)

Me (body language): help! I’m floundering here and both I and my interviewer have lost interest in what I’m saying. He's staring out of the window, I'm staring at him for some kind of positive reaction...

And so on. Yet within the same interview I had to field some engineering-type questions:

Interviewer: What do you think could be the potential technical difficulties involved in developing this kind of product?

Me (internally): Yes! Easy score here

Me (aloud): Well, there’s the material selection, the coatings, how to apply them within undoubtedly very tight tolerances, how to withstand heat without distortion that would…

Me (body language): Hands waving, leaning forward, engaging the interviewer - more, please!

In the end, I have to realise that I am by nature an engineer, with everything that that entails: all the coolest development work, all the dullest admin stuff and everything in between. Anything else (commercial, purchasing, quality) would mean going against my own grain.

The only question remaining, then, is: can I become an engineering manager? From the aspect of organisation and team working, data access and transfer, deciding on what's right for the product and for the company - yes. From the aspect of dealing with stroppy employees, an ever-increasing email and travel load, and becoming ever more involved in company politics (whichever company that may be) - who knows. But that discovery is for another day.

Have you transitioned away from pure engineering? Have you made the step up to management - either successfully or stressfully? Let us know in your comments!

Phew, what a day! What a lot of days! Things are pretty mad at the moment and have me racing from one fire to the next whilst juggling the other less serious blazes. Things are probably more or less the same for you (unless you work in aerospace ;-)). We need to get things done all the time and seemingly all at once. Priorities rest on ever-shifting sands, cups of coffee are gulped without enjoyment, nerves are frayed.

Having lots to do at work is both a blessing and a curse: of course we want to be gainfully employed, but there is a point beyond which the sheer number of tasks that we are responsible for becomes overwhelming. As a result, efficiency sinks to its knees, even if we physically manage to stay on our feet.

This fact has been recognised by many and has become the basis of whole careers on advising people how to do manage tasks. I've been on Time Management courses, as I described over at Engineer Blogs last year, I've tried hiding myself in empty cupboard-sized meeting rooms without my phones and I've tried all sorts of tools like the Tasks list in Outlook to try and find a way out of the mess, mostly to no avail.

Help is at so many hands that it's no help at all: there's such an uncontrollable thicket of to-do apps, self-timer apps, of notation apps and (e-) books to be bought that these have become an industry in themselves. All in the name of getting things done.

Late last year I caved and bought the book with those words capitalised by Dave Allen: Getting Things Done. I read it, too - and came away rather impressed. It's certainly a book of two halves (it feels a little like a 'buy one, get one free' deal, where you don't necessarily want or need the free item), but the first half, where the concepts and mechanisms of Getting Things Done are explained is well worth the entry price. Mr. Allen has an incredible font of quotes that are splashed liberally throughout the book, too.

This isn't a book review, though. It's a process review, about Getting Things Done, or, as it's now known in the trade, GTD.

In essence, the GTD methodology is about freeing up your mind, removing all the vague projects and to-do's lodged quaking anxiously in your brain and onto physical or digital lists. The discipline of creating lists, of categorising, of sifting and sorting into whatever systems best suit you is geared towards relieving the mental pressures of non-started or incomplete tasks and towards focussing your attention on the next thing to do.

Next steps are a key element of Getting Things Done and recognising this goes a long way towards success. When I have to update a drawing, that is not a task itself, it's a project. The next steps for me go along the lines of: Creating a new part number or release level in the system. Printing out the current drawing. Sketching up all the changes required: whilst I'm doing that I'll realise that I need to pull a Change Request number, so I'll need to go onto that system and generate a form and a number. That number goes onto the new print, which, once sketched up, goes to our CAD designer for modification. I wait. I get the print back for review. I make corrections, or I don't - I send the drawing back if I do need updates, wait again (doing something else in the meantime), then switch focus back to the print once it's finalised. Then I need to upload it and "publish" it... And so on.

Each one of those steps are all "small" things, but there are so many of them that constitute this mini-project called "update drawing xyz" that they easily clog up my mental passages (for want of a better turn of phrase). Listing the tasks out on paper or in some kind of digital software means that I don't have to hold them in my mental buffer. Equally, I won't have to worry about remembering where I am whenever a distraction occurs - a colleague walks in whilst I'm sketching and requires assistance (often setting off the next mini project of Things To Do), or quite simply when I'm waiting for that drawing to come back from CAD: I can quickly find the next open task and use that,

I've worked according to this methodology, applying the same logic to pretty much everything I do: ideas for new developments, testing that I need to do and subsequent reporting that I need to complete.

The general methodology works very well. It took some time to sift through my projects and my emails, but surprisingly quickly, I found a decent system of project taxonomy and began to see more and more white space in my inbox.

Tool-wise, I ended up using the browser-based software Asana, mainly because I wouldn't need to install anything on my locked and stitched-up work laptop. Outlook is too stuffed to work for me. It has all the functionality - emails, notes, to-do's, ability to drag and drop emails into Calendar and into Tasks - but somehow I need to escape the Outlook environment and keep things as focussed as possible - Asana provides this "cleaner" environment for me.

Up until mid January, I had a good set of lists and tasks, as well as an email in-box hovering around the zero level (each email is either archived or generates a set of tasks in my list setup). It was only when I embarked on a series of business trips - to Shanghai, to Kassel - and became sucked into a series of "urgents" that things started to subside back to the old ways of inbox infinity and anxieties everywhere I looked inside my head.

The focus of GTD is very much on mastering the low-level tasks. Dave Allen addresses this regularly in the book - he acknowledges that life-goal-setting (his "50,000 ft+ view") is a way of finding orientation and goals in life; but if you're mentally overloaded with pending things to do, you don't have the headspace to creatively think about the bigger picture.

Get your everyday tasks under control, unload your mind of that burden, and the bigger picture has more room to grow of its own.

Honestly speaking, I'm a bit like a dieter here: bouncing from inbox-zero and being on top of things to feeling overwhelmed. I'm back at the overwhelmed phase, which is why I feel that now is an interesting time to write about all of this: not from the perspective of a smug succeeder, but from that of the struggling disciple, trying to turn things around again.

I am starting to get back on top of my tasks and lists again. I know how it feels to be overwhelmed, to have a brain buzzing with alerts and anxieties; and I know how it feels, however briefly, to be in control.

So - here's to engineering more efficiently, fluently and... more cannily