Fuzzy Math

I have to say that I am not terribly encouraged. I am an electrical engineer and have been employed in such a profession for the last 15 years. 11 of those years I spent in "industry" and the last 4 I have spent employed with the government.

My first impression early on in my career was that most government engineers were employed by the government because they couldn't find a "real" job. I thought that most of them were so unskilled that they were not capable of holding a job in the "real world". So they were on a sort of government welfare because they would probably not be able to be employed if they had to make it in industry.

After my 11 years in industry, I discovered that there could, in fact, be some engineers in government that are there by personal choice. True, the pay is not as good in the government, and that would lead most engineers to say that they were "dumb for taking" a job that doesn't pay so well. Well, after spending 11 years dealing with the corporate greed structure of industry, I became so thoroughly disgusted with the deal I wanted to go somewhere they didn't judge me by the amount of money they could make off my efforts while shafting me.

Examples? For one job, I did a project that saved my customer $2 million over about 6 months. Sure, it was a team of about 5 or 6 people, but I was integral to the team. What was my reward? I was laid off within a month.

Another example - me and one other engineer were given the challenge of testing a rechargeable battery that was used in a proposed product our company was trying to prepare for deployment. They tried to get the manufacturer to test out charging the battery and running it down multiple times to see how long the batteries would survive. The manufacturer claimed it wasn't possible. Our company challenged our group to make it happen.

Well, we did it. We made a circuit card that had a recharge circuit on it and another that had to be developed from scratch to simulate the load of running the battery. The hardest part was the simulator circuit. That's the part I did. It worked great. We did what the manufacturer said was not possible and were able to do some vital testing on a product before it's release. My reward? A $250 bonus. My management got $25,000 bonuses the same year because of the work we did.

I later found that we were running around 1,700 test computers, basically illegally because they did not have proper licensing for the operating systems they were using. Taking the challenge I identified a bunch of equipment that was really old and sold it on eBay. Using that money, we bought licenses for the test computers. So, at no cost to the company, I was able to get rid of old equipment and use the money to buy licensing and prevent a major legal issue for my company. I figured out that I saved the company almost $250,000 directly on what it would have cost them to buy the licenses outright. What was my reward for that? Absolutely nothing. Not even a thank you.

So, I may not be paid a lot for what I do for the government, but I am making a difference. And they appreciate me for doing it. And I am not worried about losing my job, even in the bad economy we are in. And I am not making someone else filthy rich for what I am doing.

But I will acknowledge the bar is not set very high.

For example (and I am sorry for the seriousness of the post to this point. It gets better, I promise), I am working on a contract right now and I have found that the whole government process of contracting is interesting to say the least. I have found that the best way to compare this to something in the 'real world' is that it is akin to herding cats. A lot of cats. And some of those cats really aren't that bright to begin with.

I recently was in a meeting discussing a contract that I had done a rather extensive technical evaluation on. We were talking to the contracting officer to explain what we came up with. We had asked the vendors to send out past performance questionnaires where the vendors were supposed to be ranked by their other customers. The questions rated them from 1-20 (1 being the best, 2o the worst) on 8 different questions.

Two of the vendors had three questionnaires come back and the 3rd only had two. So, we added up the scores from each questionnaire, then divided by the number of questionnaires to come up with a score. I know, you are probably thinking, it's an average score, right?

This concept COMPLETELY defeated this contracting officer. Now, I understand that not everyone is math inclined, particularly as much as I am. I did minor in Math (a source of shame in some regards) and engineering really is a lot of math anyhow. I also understand that there are those that shun math as much as possible. But an average? Is that really so foreign? My kids in elementary school understand averages.

This contracting officer had to have us go to a legal council to explain what we had done. He went in there saying, "Now, we took the scores and added them up. But this one company didn't get as many responses, so we had to divide them by the number of answers they got..." and then the legal council interrupted him and say, "yeah, you took an average. I got that." That floored the guy.

I think he was convinced we were going to shock the lawyer with our totally crazy "math thing" we were trying to pull.

I honestly wonder that if it weren't for the opportunity to do contracting, if this guy would be homeless. My supervisor told me he figured his wife had to dress him every morning.

At one time, I thought that there weren't any really 'dumb' people in the world; that everyone had something to contribute. I am not so sure anymore.

Am I worried that he may read this and figure out it was him? I would say the odds are significantly less than average. (Can we do that?)