Should Engineers Get Their Fingernails Dirty?

Up the road from me in Austin, Texas, it turns out that Apple has been building Mac Pros, a desktop model, in a Flextronics manufacturing plant since at least 2013.  But a recent news item in the Austin American-Statesman says that the company will soon shut down its manufacturing activity of Mac Pros here in Texas and move it to China.  However, Apple is moving ahead with plans to open a new billion-dollar campus in Austin, which will increase the number of Apple workers there from around its current 7,000 to as many as 15,000.  But you can be pretty sure that most of those workers won't be holding soldering irons or screwdrivers—they'll be sitting at computers typing code.

The image of the engineer has changed radically over the years since the profession first attained significant public recognition, which came about in the late 1800s.  In 1900, artistic portrayals of an engineer would show a rugged, muscular man who might be holding an engineer's hammer in one hand (something halfway between a regular hammer and a sledgehammer), and adjusting a surveyor's transit as he squints through the eyepiece.  Most engineers prior to about 1920 were civil engineers, engaged in laying out railroad tracks or roads, installing water and sewer systems, and making sure bridges and buildings didn't fall down after they were built.

Then the era of scientific engineering came along.  The slide rule replaced the hammer, and now engineers were depicted in hiring ads in the 1950s as lab-coated intellectuals, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and looking through microscopes or fiddling with flasks of chemicals.  The habitat of the 1950s engineer was inside, not outside, but he (always a "he" back then in images of the time) was still engaged in working with exotic equipment or machinery for which special training and even clothing was required.

Then the computer came along, banishing the slide rule.  Companies quickly learned it was cheaper to let engineers try new designs in software models rather than actually building prototypes and finding out that most of them didn't work.  So as much of the engineering knowledge that formerly resided in engineers' brains moved into computer programs, the typical engineer wound up sitting at a desk in front of a computer monitor.  Sometimes she just writes code, and sometimes she works with drawings of actual stuff.  But whatever subject is displayed on the screen, that is often as close as the engineer gets to the actual thing that is built. 

The end product, whether it is a microchip, a car, or an airplane, is often made far away from where the designer sits, possibly in another country.  The people who actually get their hands dirty to make the products know no more about them than they have to in order to do their jobs right.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this—it is one more application of the great economist Adam Smith's principle that each person, organization, or nation should specialize in what they are best at, and swap their products with those who are best at other things.  If engineers are best at designing with software, why, that's what they should do, and not waste their expensive time on a workbench actually building things that lower-paid and less-educated technicians can build. 

I grew up and learned engineering at a time when math and models could get you only so far, and there were imponderable and incalculable factors that had to be worked out on the workbench.  In my specialization of RF engineering, that meant that any engineer worth his salt had to know how to solder and troubleshoot actual hardware, and we did.  And things got built—maybe not the absolutely most optimized designs, but good enough to go out the door and make money for the company (most of the time, anyway). 

But these days, things that had to be figured out on the workbench thirty-five years ago can be modeled in the much more sophisticated software that is available today.  And so almost every kind of engineer these days, whether chemical, electrical, mechanical, civil, or environmental, ends up spending most of their working time in front of a computer.  There are exceptions, of course, but it is in the interests of most firms to see that their engineers spend as little time as possible fiddling with hardware and as much time as possible doing what they are paid the big bucks to do. 

Engineering is an intensely practical business, and if most engineering firms succeed in satisfying their customers with the services of engineers who never touch hardware, I can't see anything to criticize in that.  The lingering suspicion I have that something is missing that may cause trouble down the road may be nothing more than an old guy's prejudice in favor of the way things used to be. 

In my own teaching, I try to make students deal with hardware when it's practical to do so.  This fall I will be teaching a course in analog design.  Software is available that lets you build the whole circuit on the computer screen and test it with software "scopes" and get results that are much more precise than anything you can do in the lab.  But after the students have done that, I will request them to go get real parts, that they really have to read the values of, and put them in a real prototype "breadboard" circuit, and show me that it really works. 

Most students don't complain of this.  In fact, over the years I have had positive comments along the lines of, "I never knew what that oscilloscope was for until I had to use it in this class," and so on.  I'm sure some of them feel that shoving little wires into just the right holes is beneath them, but a little humbling is good for the soul.

Next spring, if all goes according to plan, I will teach the first course in power electronics ever taught on this campus.  Power electronics involves things like controlling giant 1,000-horsepower motors in steel mills.  Much as I would like to have a lab that used a 1,000-horsepower motor, all the labs in this course will use software.  It's much cheaper and safer to have a software 750-kW motor blow up than a real one.  And that's perhaps the way it should be. 

All the same, engineers should never forget that no matter how nice things look on paper or the computer screen, physical reality reigns.  And sometimes, it bites back.

Sources:  The report on Apple's moving production out of Austin appeared at https://www.statesman.com/news/20190628/report-apple-moving-mac-pro-production-out-of-austin.

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VW's In A Fix With Their Fix

Back in September, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accused Volkswagen of cheating with regard to emissions controls of many of its cars that use diesel engines.  VW admitted as much, its CEO resigned, and now the firm faces the problem of fixing all the cars that violate emissions standards.  One way or another, some 11 million cars worldwide are implicated, with about half a million in the U. S. alone.  How did VW get into this fix, and how are they going to dig themselves out?

As new information has emerged on exactly how the cheating was done, it's pretty easy to tell that this was no single-line software tweak by a lone rogue engineer.  According to a Nov. 4 BBC report, someone (probably several someones) designed software to detect when the car was on a test stand designed for EPA checks.  This typically involves running the car while it is on a dynamometer, which uses rollers underneath the wheels to load the engine to simulate actual road conditions.  But in order for the stationary test equipment to be connected to the vehicle, the car is usually sitting still in a laboratory somewhere during the test.  I'm not saying that I know how the software guys did it, but if I were faced with the problem of how to figure out if a test-stand situation like this was going on, I'd look at the built-in accelerometers that every airbag-equipped car has.  If nobody's at the steering wheel and the car isn't going anyplace even if it's in "drive" and the engine's running, chances are it's on a test stand. 

However they did it, when an emission-test situation was detected the car switched into a mode that made it pass the emissions test.  But the price was severely crippled power and lowered engine performance, which however would not typically show up on an emissions test—after all, nobody's actually driving it to tell.  Once the test was over, the software readjusted the engine settings to produce normal power and performance—and as much as forty times more nitrous oxides (NOx) than the EPA allows.  But hey—it passed the test.  That's all that counts, right?

This mode of cheating is why fixing the problem with many diesel models, especially older ones, is not going to be some simple reload-new-software exercise.  If you've gone on a road trip recently and looked around in a truck-stop convenience store, you may have noticed piles of plastic bottles full of something called "diesel exhaust fluid."  Turns out that this stuff is now needed for many tractor-trailer diesel engines in order to meet the EPA's requirements for NOx emissions.  There's machinery on board the truck that squirts the fluid—which contains urea—into the exhaust, and the urea solution vaporizes to form ammonia and carbon dioxide.  The ammonia, in the presence of a catalyst in a thing called a selective catalytic reduction system (SCR), combines with the nasty NOx molecules to form nitrogen and water, which finally leave the exhaust pipe and rejoin Mother Nature, leaving her nearly as pristine as she was before the truck came by. 

It's one thing for truck engineers to see the regulations coming down the pike, and take time to redesign the power plant so as to accommodate another anti-pollution system which requires valves, heaters to keep the urea solution from freezing, pipes, level-monitoring systems, and all the other stuff needed to do the NOx-killing job.  It's quite another thing for VW to be under the gun to retrofit small diesel passenger cars that are maybe four or five years old, with a kit of SCR stuff they were not designed to have.  You'll need someplace to stick the SCR unit in the exhaust line, a way to get a pipe from the SCR to the urea tank, a place to put the urea tank, control lines, etc.  Engineers estimate the cost per vehicle could range up to $1000 or more.  With some cars, it may be cheaper for VW simply to buy them back from the owners and send them to the scrapyard.  Software-only fixes may be possible for some diesel models, but it looks like millions of cars worldwide will need expensive hardware installations to meet current emissions requirements.

VW says its internal investigation into how all this happened is still continuing.  For their sake, I hope they wind it up pretty soon, at least well enough to publish a timeline with names and actions.  But even without such information, it's obvious by now that deception with regard to emissions controls was an established policy.  Maybe the conspiracy—that's not too strong a term at this point—was concealed from upper management, and that's one of the things we need to know.  But even if it was, it's clear that there was a group of engineers inside VW who deliberately set out to cheat the system of pollution controls.  And they got away with it for several years.

It's not often that such a clear-cut case of wrongdoing by engineers makes the headlines.  Far more often, engineers will face a dilemma in which either choice has advantages and disadvantages, both morally and otherwise.  And sometimes engineers make the wrong choice, basing their decisions on incomplete information.  But in most engineering situations, information is always incomplete.  There's always more you'd like to know, but at some point the project must go on, choices must be made, and sometimes they turn out to be wrong ones.

But the VW emissions case is different.  Deception was intended from the start.  I don't know what internal company dynamics brought pressure to bear on engineers to the extent that developing a software evasion of emissions controls seemed like a good idea, but clearly something was wrong with the way ethical principles were stated and handed down. 

Sometimes, companies who do bad things are unrepentant and fight tooth and nail despite being in the wrong.  In such cases, large government fines are sometimes the only thing that will make an impression.  But in VW's case, its CEO resigned, sales are dropping, and there are news stories with graphics that show the famed chrome VW emblem breaking apart.  It's starting to look like the market and news media will do more punishing than the EPA is likely to do.  Whether that's fair or not is almost beside the point.  To survive, VW will have to own up fully, fix the mess it made to the best of its ability, and be a different company from the inside out—from now on.

Sources:  An Associated Press article on the types of fixes needed by VW was published in numerous outlets, including the U. S. News and World Report website on Nov. 19 at http://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2015/11/19/vw-has-only-a-few-costly-options-to-fix-polluting-diesels.  Information on the details of how the cheating software worked was carried by the BBC on Nov. 4 at http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34324772.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on diesel exhaust fluid.  I last blogged on the VW emissions scandal on Sept. 21, 2015.

The Sudden Death of Windows XP

Okay, it wasn't that sudden:  Microsoft announced as long ago as 2012 that, as of April of 2014, it was going to end all support of its creaky but still serviceable Windows XP operating system, so it's not like it happened without warning.  And strictly speaking, computers running Windows XP didn't die on April 8, 2014:  they just became instantly vulnerable to malware, hackers, and others who had been kept somewhat at bay by security upgrades from Microsoft.  As it turns out, this includes well-intentioned network managers such as the ones at my university, who now sniff out any PCs on their network still running Windows XP and simply snip them off the network.  But the whole episode has occasioned some thoughts on planned obsolescence, and how different computer technology is from other kinds of technology.

As it turns out, I have a dog in this fight:  an old Dell laptop in my research lab that runs a number of applications I use in my research, and its operating system is Windows XP.  The applications all run with expensive hardware I have accumulated over the years as funding intermittently became available.  One such item is a high-speed camera that cost about $15K new when I bought it a decade ago with a combination of grant and department money.  Another is a $10K spectrometer that I happened into after I met my department chair in the hall one day, and he asked me if I knew of a good way I could help him spend ten thousand dollars real fast.  The software for these items will not run on anything other than Windows XP, and the laptop is so old I don't think I can upgrade the operating system to Windows 8 in any case.  I have a little grant right now, but I've obligated most of the money toward other items and there's nothing left for software or hardware upgrades. So what's an impoverished researcher to do?

I wasn't the only person caught with my operating system down on April 8, by the way.  One estimate (www.netmarketshare.com) says that about a quarter of all PCs are still running Windows XP here over a month after the drop-dead date, so I'm sure there are millions of computers out there in the same slowly sinking boat that my laptop is in. 

In a lot of ways, the end of XP support resembles the old Y2K scare that those of us old enough to be computer-savvy in 2000 can recall.  Because programmers dealing with the limited memory in mid-20th-century computers didn't always take into account the possibility that their software might still be running on Jan. 1, 2000, they sometimes wrote dates in a way that would make the software bomb if you tried to keep them running past Dec. 31, 1999.  Fortunately, the turn of the century was highly predictable, and despite certain fringe elements who predicted a digital Armageddon, nearly all software had been successfully upgraded by New Year's Day on 2000, and the big Y2K scare turned out to be a bust.

Similarly, judging from the cricket-filled silence on the Internet concerning any dire consequences of the end of XP support after April 8, I think things have not turned out to be as bad as some people thought.  Still, I can't connect my PC laptop to the internet without getting it squelched by IT support now, and if anything goes wrong with any of the software or hardware it runs, I may find myself up a creek.

Those involved in the computer and software industries rarely think in terms of indefinitely lengthy stretches of time, although I will give Microsoft credit for announcing the end of XP support so far in advance, and sticking to their commitment.  Every design of an engineered product is an act of faith:  the designer rarely knows exactly who will use the design, how they will benefit, or how long the design will be useful.  The business model of software companies is a constant scramble to issue upgrades and new products, and in a competitive global economy, it can't very well be otherwise.  But in the rare cases that a thing shows unexpected fruitful longevity, it seems that there is a kind of nobility or merit attached to that fact that most engineers rarely recognize, having been trained in the philosophy of "old = bad, new = good" from their college days. 

I recall the story of a mechanical animation stand and camera that begin its existence back in the 1920s, and was used to make some of the earliest animated cartoons.  The same stand was still in use in the late 1990s for commercial film production, because the mechanical standards of 35-mm film had not changed in all that time. 

Animation stands are junk now, rendered that way by the advent of computer-generated images (CGI).  And motion-picture production companies that have switched to all-digital production find that it costs them a bundle simply to keep a movie on the shelf, because all the software and memory standards associated with the huge pile of digital information that goes into the movie are constantly changing, and it's a full-time job for several people just to make sure that the movie is still in shape to be played from month to month.  It brings to mind the words of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's story Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There:  "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Those who have the resources to run twice as fast have long since upgraded their old PCs (or not so old PCs) to Windows 7 or 8 or 13 or whatever the latest version is, and will continue to keep up with the times.  And those of us who haven't, will just have to deal with the situation any way we can. 

Sources:  The online journal Computerworld carried a debate as long ago as December 2012 at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9234316/Experts_question_Microsoft_s_decision_to_retire_XP in which experts differed as to whether Microsoft would really stick to their announced deadline, as they in fact did.  Some good advice to those who can't afford upgrading from Windows XP appeared in PC Pro's online edition at

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/387022/what-to-do-if-you-re-still-on-windows-xp-should-i-upgrade-from-windows-xp.  The statistic about the percentage of PCs running Windows XP is available at http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx.