What is Engineer Thinking?

I have thought about it before: "Understand a lot of truths, still live a bad life" What is the problem? I have heard different answers, such as staying in the comfort zone of "knowing", other people's reasons may not apply to themselves, and even lack of ability.

It was later discovered that this was an "engineering problem".

Chewing each truth is like taking the phone apart to understand each component, if you put the phone back in and can't understand it, you have to experiment it yourself. However, history tells us that even if you do not understand the principle, you can still build mobile phones, and technology and engineering are running ahead of science.

Do you believe that when there was no quality education system hundreds of years ago, how did the four major inventions come out?

Turning the perspective to business, middle and bottom employees often have more "economic and financial backgrounds", while the core executive team always has a few science and engineering people; what is the difference in their thinking? Liberal arts students are more adept at making decisions based on deduction and analysis from the original characteristics, and science students pay more attention to objectively looking at things and fundamentally changing when encountering problems, which directly affects the "company's operational efficiency".

Even Baidu founder Robin Li once said at the Xingong Technology Forum: Everyone must have engineering thinking, which is also the shortcomings of many graduates, and it is better to start from "software engineering" to understand it in depth.

What engineering thinking is

The work done in market PM, development, testing, and operation and maintenance belongs to the software engineering "code 080902", which is now one of the mainstream majors in universities; the learning content includes data structures, algorithms, interpersonal interactions, requirements analysis and other modules.

In the English environment, the grade of engineering is much lower than that of science, why?

The main reason is that the software has not solved the "delivery problem" since its birth, that is, the project cannot be handed over to the customer in accordance with the performance time, quality and cost.

In order to solve this problem, at the special meeting of the NATO Science and Technology Committee in October 1968, thinkers really proposed the concept of "software engineering". Using software to meet customer needs? Not really.

Easy to understand, for example:

In a factory packaging workshop product line often appears "leakage problem", the customer after receiving the goods to open the package is empty. So the person in charge looked for an expert to ask for a solution, and the expert suggested installing a monitoring system, and this phenomenon would not occur through the video recognition operation.

Knowing that the transformation costs millions of dollars, the factory director lifted the table on the spot and decided to "solve the problem internally", and a teacher said that it was very simple: we only need to measure the weight of the product, and then install a large hair dryer at the end of the assembly line and set it to the relevant wind. If the box is blown away and proves to be empty, if it is not complete, the crowd angrily praises the boss.

According to this, the purpose of the project is the problem of customer needs, as for the means of solution, as long as whether to use software within the qualifications is not so important.

In the computer major, the textbook "Software Engineering - Theory and Practice" published by Tsinghua University began with the following:

A computer chip practitioner believes that code is the only way to solve the chip problem, but a software engineer only uses software as one of the only ways to meet customer needs.

Therefore, engineering refers to a discipline that aims to meet customer needs, rather than simply developing software. It needs to capture, analyze, define, and give the overall system requirements and decompose the subsystems until the requirements of each detail can be met directly by an existing component, or by modification.

The biggest feature of engineering thinking is "to get things done", that is, it can be delivered, used, and open source and throttling.

Look at the definition from another perspective:

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is not a genius in technology engineering, and his entrepreneurial history shows that he spans three major areas (Internet, clean energy, and space). It seems that the three are not directly linked, why can they be so comfortable? There are two main elements: 1) engineering thinking, and 2) first principles.

In an interview, someone asked him why SpaceX could do it by building rockets to reduce costs that so many NASA experts have not done, and he replied, "I think it's because they have too many resources."

This is like when he optimizes Tesla's battery pack, first thinking about whether this goal is possible, and then starting from the commercial and first principles, and then studying the components of the battery's materials. In turn, through the operable path to find these materials, and then gradually reduce the cost of each material, and finally assemble to have a cheaper battery.

That is to say, he believes that each product (project) depends on the structure, and we only need to constantly disassemble, analogize, optimize, and imitate it in the closed structure.

Another example:

An airline did a survey on the customer experience and asked them what they were looking forward to? The result is to expect to arrive at the destination earlier, or to increase the time for security checks and check-ins.

Several expert perspectives give different answers, with aerodynamicists arguing that the former requires optimizing security and consignment processes, as opposed to how to make airplanes fly faster, involving the overall modification of power and components.

But the answer given by system engineering is that the problem of solving quickly should be optimized from going to the airport, finding parking spaces, security inspection, and consignment.

Compared with the above-mentioned incidents in which the factory director optimizes the assembly line, you will find that there are also the same rules, and the teacher Fu saves costs based on the closed state, and the dismantling link checks the leakage and fills in the gaps to solve the fundamental problem.

Google's early use of the Internet as a map did not follow the people, it is also a typical software engineering thinking.

In the closed task, it is necessary to overcome various difficulties, accurate each section of the road to the centimeter level, and then use laser scanning to avoid road obstacles, so that the car can understand the road conditions during the driving process.

Speaking of which, the entrepreneurs who want to be popular on the Internet are undoubtedly masters of the use of engineering thinking, Wang Jian of Ali, Zhang Yiming of today's headlines, Wang Xing of Meituan, and even Ren Zhengfei of Huawei. They are good at anticipating and "anticipating structure" without structure, and carry out a comprehensive top-level design, and then improve the fundamental elements from the first nature.

Understanding engineering thinking and raising the perspective can also understand many social issues, such as:

Now we can see the 2035 Beijing subway planning map, the 2030 carbon peak action plan and the energy green and low-carbon development system; this predictable ability is not exactly what every ordinary person (enterprise) should learn?

Three elements of engineering thinking

Combined with CITIC Publishing House and the economic management book "Turning: Solving Business Problems with Engineer Thinking", I summarized and found that engineering thinking has three major characteristics: 1) find structure, 2) binding design, and 3) know how to make trade-offs.

First of all, in the absence of a structure, the first feature is that the engineer can see the potential structure from the initial concept to the concept. That is to say, not only to pay attention to visible things, but also to unseen things; not to be empty of fantasy, but to be interpreted in combination with reality.

He has to consider how the elements in the system can be effectively linked in terms of logic, time, order, and function, and analyze the conditions under which the elements can work and which conditions do not.

For example, Newton's classical theory of mechanics was based on a "scientific view.".

Derive from a number of basic axioms (principles) as basic assumptions; the axioms cannot support the fact that some theorems are obtained through rigorous logical analysis, so as to continuously improve the theoretical system. Assuming that the evidence obtained by observation, experimentation, etc. matches the results, the more confident we are in the verification; but if there is a discrepancy in the results, we will see if there are errors in the derivation and then patch them.

There are many such cases:

Watt invented (modified) the steam engine based on "classical mechanics", and the father of computer science, Alan Messison Turing, proposed "On the Application of Numerical Computing in the Decision-Making Problem" in 1936, and engineers invented computers and smartphones based on this many years later.

In other words, the world depends on structure; experienced engineers can find rational structure in seemingly messy things, anticipating the full picture of maturity before a product is born.

Secondly, just as "freedom without a regular boundary" is not called freedom, and an unconstrained project cannot be a project, the project will encounter various conditional restrictions, such as insufficient time and insufficient funds. Then the second feature is that "in a constrained state" is also better to complete the goal, even if there is no constraint state, but also to form a self-driving force.

For example, the 2020 Black Swan Event (COVID-19), Leishenshan Hospital, which originally took two years to complete under normal conditions, took only 10 days from program design to completion and delivery, known as "China Speed"; the biggest constraint of the project is "time".

Because of this, the constraints on the other hand are the driving force of certain creative projects, applied to the enterprise scenario, assuming that there is an open demand in product development, it is difficult to imagine what the final product will look like.

Especially for rookie engineers and product managers, they do not know how to come with their own constraints, and many messy problems are involved in the process, such as: poor UI design, user needs are not clear, the process has multiple solutions, too many tasks are not enough time...

This results in never-ending meetings, details that cannot be solved, exhausting myself physically and mentally; I have seen many individuals who have such phenomena when doing tasks, and the same is true for companies, and the root cause is only "not designing binding conditions".

The third point is related to trade-offs, and if you compare constraint to walking a tightrope, then the trade-off is a cross-tug-of-war in feasibility, possibility, and predictability; you can also understand it as "fish and bear paws cannot have both."

as:

In the new energy and electronics industry, thermal design engineers in the process of product development have to communicate with structural, software engineers and PM, and in most cases have to make trade-offs. In the specific position of the drawing, even the heat dissipation part of the software or the overall space of the compressed battery are sacrificed to ensure the stability of the product system.

Therefore, "what to choose" is the specific ability of engineers to reflect, the key to the establishment of this key is not only in how to design the focus, but also to study the problem of resource allocation, and even to extract weak targets from strong targets.

On the one hand, the framework of engineer thinking I think is systems thinking, not a single technology or product capability. On the other hand, he is a "metaphysical way" of building from technology to "finding structure" that is more universal than a single problem-solving methodology.

All in all, structure, constraints, and trade-offs are the magic weapons of engineering thinking, and in the Internet era, it is blinded by some linear concepts, such as: product thinking and project thinking belong to this category.

Many people do not use it to understand the key elements in the "latter two", if you can increase the binding force under the premise of having goals and structures, you will find that the efficiency of "completion" will be greatly increased.

What is the reason why it is not so easy for the product people of Internet companies to complete a project?

I summarize it as four words "flickering thinking", many software companies sell for sprint performance, accustomed to "drawing cakes" to customers, promising some features that the product itself has not yet done. After the customer pays, the entire delivery is transferred to the R&D team, and the final completion of the product seam repair, such as the old man's faltering appearance, how can the customer be satisfied?

Then think about the overall situation, you will find that whether it is a "pre-judgment structure" or a "binding" design, the two themselves represent the ability of "block" innovation.

The project itself is a block

What do you mean by that? Chunk is one of the most important forms of human information processing; the concept is G. Miller.com. Mil Jer, 1956-1963) proposed that it is mainly divided into dynamic and static. In the early years of working memory, he noticed that a certain working memory would fade before it was repeated within 10 seconds, and the preservation capacity was up to 7±2 units.

From a dynamic point of view, people integrate into one large project through several related small projects, reducing the number of basic blocks, thereby controlling information within the allowable range of memory (physical space). From a static point of view, it is a noun, specifically referring to the result or output unit of recoded, and for the sake of distinguishing between the former and chunking in English, the former is usually called "chunking" and the latter is called chunk.

The Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) proposed the principle of card writing and the core "modular systems thinking" of engineer thinking, which belongs to "blocks". They all pointed out that this is not a single talent, but a fusion of technology and principles; the reasons are:

A system becomes a whole because of the relationships between the modules, and they cannot be understood by analyzing the components separately.

Human neurons are also a kind of block, and under a light microscope, the axonal endings of a neuron can be seen branching through multiple times, and finally the end of each branch appears cup-shaped or spherical. It's as if the knowledge you learn and the slow connections you form all come from "neuronal blocks."

In addition, in the early years, Watson, the founder of American behavioral psychology, based on this concept, once proposed a training experiment to the government, saying that if I give me 10 healthy babies, through training, I can train them to become excellent scholars and artists. People thought it was ridiculous and didn't finish the experiment in the end.

A few years later, a Hungarian lecturer in psychology was very interested in the experiments he proposed. He then trained his wife around three daughters, and finally created three female chess champions, which is known as the "Polgar Three Sisters Experiment".

If you understand this principle, look further at the phenomenon of "blocks" in everything in the world; for example, the action of taking a book from a bookshelf contains four kinds of blocks: 1) confirm the position, 2) grasp the spine, 3) control the force, and 4) take out the path.

Each step is a small mini-block, if you want to make a smart robot that takes a book, you just need to write a program for each group block (activity) and then integrate the innovation.

To know that behind the program is a function, the function is a logic block, the logic block is a general code, use the computer to standardize each module, and finally connect the desired results. Just like learning to drive, the old driver sees the "red light" and naturally completes a series of related actions; the novice needs to decompose the actions one by one.

For example, the problems you encounter at work seem to be coherent, but in fact, they contain multiple parts, for experienced people, they will not grasp multiple blocks with one hand, but start from a certain block after overall analysis.

It can be seen that in the process of understanding the development of nature and civilization, block ideas and methods are everywhere; chips are blocks, negotiation strategies are blocks, smiley faces are blocks, subways are blocks, maps are blocks... Without the idea of chunks, it would be impossible to make each garment and build a bridge; of course, there would be no family, and these groups would be nothing more than a different combination of "form and content."

Therefore, compared with the self, you can think about your own work skills, and the required soft abilities are not blocks? Except for the table part, which weaknesses can be solved by pulling it out and finding the rules and deliberately practicing?

All in all, the essence of engineering is realization.

Block application is the process of dividing a complex problem into several modules layer by layer from top to top, with multiple properties that reflect internal characteristics.

For example, a typical low-code platform seals up commonly used functions, like Lego, allows users to quickly configure; it pursues value-oriented and creates value with "constructive thinking for efficiency".

The use of engineering thinking

Understanding these principles, how can you apply the thinking of an engineer to your daily work or learning? I divide it roughly into three areas:

1) Structures that foresee the future

It is divided into two levels: "structural force" and "foresight", perhaps you will understand the former as a variety of thinking models, such as the 5W2H principle, pyramids, golden circle theory, etc., in fact, the structure in engineering has some "scientific" elements. What's the difference here?

Scientists mostly "look up at the sky", rarely in practical application; mainly expound the laws of understanding, discover the rules; just like you often see science discover new earths, tsunamis, huge stars and so on. The project pays attention to "down-to-earth", transforms the discovered principles and actually does it.

That is to say, in the process, we must first respect scientific laws, consider the structure of multi-factor actual existence, and then strive for continuous improvement.

The two closest words to "foresee" are "mission" or "dream."

Elon Musk's fascination with Mars is definitely not due to the influence of science fiction, but he believes that he has gathered top technical talents, and then understands business investment, coupled with the spark of mission, which put him on the path of SpaceX.

According to this, how can we be ordinary people help us? You might as well think about your mission, what is your dream?

Perhaps more imaginative idealism, try to quantify it into a goal, think about whether it is possible to become an actual action; as long as you are diligent, the probability of splitting can be achieved.

For example, if you want to become an expert in a certain field after working for a long time, you may only need to spend 1-2 years deep learning theoretical knowledge, and then combine your latest self-knowledge, and you will be discovered through continuous sharing, and so on.

2) Find the block within the constraint

Deliver results of a clear "scale" within constraints as much as possible at a specific time, without these limitations compared to scientific research. Because in the beginning, they don't know where the specific direction is. For example, to this day, human beings have not been able to unify relativity and quantum mechanics.

Combined with myself, I feel that after having a clear goal, the first step is the difficulty of the "deadline" principle, and many people's unfinished work ends at the management level of time and energy.

Assuming that this step can be overcome, the next step is to consider the "block" link; to try to find the smallest unit that forms the structure, some people stagnate without finding the block and series, and finally blindly pay to exhaust the energy.

For example, there are blocks to talk about the piano, and writing and playing music are the same.

Larry Brooks, the author of Story Engineering, believes that writing such seemingly inspirational things can be designed with engineering thinking, which divides story creation into 6 core skills in the way of engineering construction: 1) intention, 2) character, 3) theme, 4) structure, 5) scene, 6) style

Everything for the average person can be "formulaized", and you can make a few more backups to ensure quality; Charlie Munger called it a redundant model (Backup Systems) in the Poor Charlie's Book.

3) Make trade-offs in balance

What is the basis of the trade-off? Pay attention to the "first principles" in engineering thinking, that is, your top-level design based on the future structure.

If the block is the blood in the frame, the key to the trade-off is how your "frame" is designed; how does the framework come about? I summarize it as the "old system". Imagine what you want to do or reach, has anyone done it before? Find and design him as a dynamic benchmark; privately research three areas: 1) learning path, 2) career development, and 3) success stage.

The American mythological writer Joseph Campbell's 1950s edition of Heroes with a Thousand Faces divides human experience into three phases, namely separation, ordeal, and return.

After refining the development route, what to do is to "optimize the old system", such as: in the second stage, you see that the target person uses three years of experience from manager to director, so is there a faster way to do it?

Therefore, it is not limited to the details of the surface, the hidden path and mechanism behind the excavation is the fundamental, and the real engineering thinking is to "deconstruct the old system" and combine and innovate the "new system".

To sum up

Mission-driven, top-level framework design, blocked SOPs. This global view, coupled with the feedback mechanism within the constraint, is the engineer's thinking that ordinary people are worth learning.

Back to the beginning of the article, why have you learned a lot of truths and still have a bad life? Because you didn't get into the system behind "that truth", it was useless to listen to it, think about it, don't you?