mental time constant

I have wild ideas that have been ruminating in my head for years... Like a rubber sheet representation of poles and zeroes of complex transfer functions... partially solved, but still some loose ends after 15 years of rumination ;-)

Meetings are where good ideas go to get destroyed or mangled so badly as to be useless.

"Design by committee" guarantees disaster.

Yep. In a typical chip design I often conduct mini design reviews weekly via E-mail or Skype... to ensure that the customer and I stay on the same page. ...Jim Thompson

Yeah, that happens to me as well. My mental picture takes time to flesh out.

There is the ideal and the realistic. One of the big things I hated about working in a corporate environment was the unrelenting pressure to hold to that schedule at all costs.

I find that when I have a complex and maybe tricky problem, it takes a couple of days, one or two overnights, before all the pieces fall into place and I can decide what to do. Some things take longer, weeks or years, but most things make more sense after a day or two. The answer is usually delivered in my morning shower, so there is overnight background processing + coffee shock going on. How about you?

I'm thinking that a meeting is not the best way to decide things, because there is pressure to come to concensus by 3:30 or something, and nobody has had time to let their background computing happen. Maybe a preliminary meeting, to explore the problem, should be followed by a more serious one a couple of days later. Multiple design reviews are probably a good idea too. PDR, CDR, PCB maybe.

Depends on the problem you're trying to solve. If it's a bunch of routine stuff except not all _your_ routine, then one meeting may be all it takes.

If it requires background cogitation then sure -- have the preliminary meeting on Friday, happy in the knowledge that their brains are cooking while you're not paying for it, and then convene on Monday morning for any "aha" moments.

If you could build the right culture around it maybe have the "this is the problem we need to solve meeting", and then welcome texts or emails at random times containing random bits of "aha!".

Yeah, showers are amazing. Human progress took a giant leap when we went from weekly baths to daily showers. But I'm guessing that a lot of processing happens overnight, and the delivery is made in the wash. So your boss's idea would just make you cold and wet.

We have good brainstorming sessions, and design reviews generate ideas and find mistakes, often dumb mistakes. But only one person can be top-level responsible for a design.

If you are ready, and are up against a just-formed customer committee, well.... that can be fun, like Daniel in the lions' den.

Consensus is overrated. Meetings need preparation. Present your case, discuss, LEADERSHIP DECIDES. You do this, you do that, both of you come back tomorrow with confirmation or a better idea. Dismissed!

Unfortunately, leadership is scarce. Followers are too.

Yep. I _always_ have fun >:-} ...Jim Thompson

I went to one meeting at a giant aerospace company, to talk about a new VME ARB. It was in an ampitheater, me and 30 engineers and managers from all over the east coast. I had been scribbling on a pad during the bumpy plane ride, and somebody grabbed my sheets and started putting them into an overhead projector. Different groups wanted to simulate different things, and I went away think they were collectively insane. We've sold over 1000 of them so far. It's getting old, so I need to redesign it soon, more digital than analog this time.

That was large-scale design-by-committee, but architecture and not circuits. Some corporate cultures can brainstorm like this, and some expect you to make a slick PowerPoint presentation with all the answers, and challenge ideas instead of playing with them.

If I'm presented with a new idea or problem, I certainly like a day to think about it. (Wander around with a beer and the dogs after work.) If you need an immediate answer I'll give one.. but don't be surprised if I come in the next morning and tell you I've changed my mind. My best stimulant for thought, is new data.

George H.

Oh, definitely. I learned this the hard way, with regard to computer programming and debugging, when I was back in college.

Write program. Run it. Have weird, obscure symptoms. Try all the standard debugging techniques... nothing. Be inventive... nothing. Look over the code carefully... it all looks correct, should work, doesn't. Spent hours digging deep into rat-holes... with nothing gained except exposure to rodent feces.

Give up in disgust. Walk away, head home.

Anywhere between 30 minutes later, and the next morning, while doing something else entirely, a bolt of lightning hits, the source of the problem appears before my eyes in glowing letters, and I say "Platt, you idiot."

Lather, rinse, repeat a few times. Finally I learned the lesson... when stuck, look it over carefully, then walk away from it for a while. The answer will appear, often without further conscious effort.

There's a heck of a lot going on in our brains as "background processing", not directly obvious to our conscious selves. At least some of this occurs during sleep. It does take a while for the program to run, but it often comes up with the answers.

There have been a bunch of studies done on learning and tests. If you cram-study some new material, you'll do best on your test if you "sleep on it" first. All-nighters are often counter-productive... an all-evening study session followed by a good night's sleep works better. If I understand correctly, they're beginning to learn something about the biochemistry and neurology of this... how memory consolidation works during sleep, and how things go badly if you're sleep-deprived.

Agreed.

Nearly all my good ideas are late at night. Never in the shower.

NT

Yep, doing something mundane such as driving home does it for me as well.

Cheers

You mean like these pretty plots?

You can make them for any meromorphic function of a complex variable...

I recall a software guy who was trying to integrate (develop actually) his voice software with my hardware. He saw 100 kHz trash on the signal and wanted me to put smoothing caps on the output of the class D amplifier feeding the speaker. lol

There were other issues where he stuck his nose in and got my manager to order me to add useless parts that I proved were not needed.

Background processing. The coffee shock doesn't come into it. My father use d to claim that he got all his good ideas while shaving (and he had 25 pate nts, so there were a few of them).

Meetings are fine for setting strategy, or finding unexpected implications in detail decisions - I've done that from time to time, and the people who made the detailed decisions tended to be bit surprised by it.

Getting other people's points of view can be valuable (if they aren't too p redictable - "not invented here" is very predictable, and rarely useful).

The background processing thing is real. When I was doing my Ph.D. I used r un my data analysis program on the university computer (I had access to a P DP-8 as well) for a couple of hours, usually from 2:00am to 6:00am. If the program crashed I learned that trying to fix it at the time was a waste of time - if I went home and got a couple of hours sleep the solution to the p roblem would usually be obvious when I woke up.

You must live somewhere other than Washington DC. The drive home is stressful enough to make you forget everything you learned during the day so you have to start clean the next day.

I'm so glad I'm out of *that* mess!

The power of the shower :)

I get some of my best ideas in the shower too.

Michael

interesting topic.

does anyone notice that it is the times when you have several unsolved problems at the same time and feeling a bit mentally overloaded,

that that is when you come down with a cold?