Did I Make a Difference ?

To brutally honest, the answer to the question “Did I make a difference ?” would have to be “Not much” for large parts of my career. Which fortunately is a slightly more positive answer than if the question had been “Did I leave a legacy ?” – the latter would have to be answered with a flat “No”.

During my student days I never raised my horizon beyond getting through the exams without having to resit them – an ambition, low though it may be, that I achieved in all but my first year at university. On the other hand, one could hope that a thesis work had the possibility of having more of an impact, especially since the chemical products used in the galvanising and chromating process were supplied by Oxy Metal Industries, and presumably they would have had some interest in getting feedback on how their products performed. However, no feedback was forthcoming and I can only assume that the thesis was filed away and never looked at again.

My time as a researcher may have made a difference to myself in that it shaped me and taught me more in depth knowledge of certain metallurgical aspects of the job. However, I doubt that even the assistance I provided towards existing and future thesis works in the end resulted in anything but ephemeral value, and the literature surveys I produced would soon be made outdated by new developments in steel products.

As for the Belgian army, it may have shaped me as an individual, however I could not pretend that as a person I contributed in any meaningful way to the success of the Belgian army, or failure thereof. After all, that’s not what’s expected of you, and probably would have been discouraged if you had raised your head above the parapet.

The first time I think I made a difference would have been during my work at Iscor on attempting to correlated the results of the Flex-draw test on DWI tinplate with steel making and casting process, where I dispelled many convenient myths by confronting them with hard data. One can only hope that not too much of these findings got lost in the mists of time.

However, the first time that I really made a difference was through my involvement in the steel selection for the Mossref process. Maybe someone else might have done the same job with the same level of success, but in the end I was the person in the driving seat who ensured that we came through the qualification trials with flying colours. Provided that this ability to produce high-quality pressure vessel steel did not get lost in subsequent years, this could even be an achievement of lasting value. However, since I no longer have any contacts in Iscor, I have no way of knowing whether part of my building stone is still in place after more than 25 years.

See also the second part of “Did I Make a Difference ?” to see what my impact was in the second half of my career.

The Demise of the Slide Rule

It’s always strange to read a science fiction novel of the 1940s or 1950s, and see someone who is supposed to live in a distant future still using a slide rule. Understandably given that the miniaturisation initiated by the transistor only just had started, and real computers (i.e. mainframe computers) filled a whole room in a dedicated building.

Still, when its replacement by the pocket calculator happened, it did so with amazing speed. When I started at university in 1973 the slide rule was still the thing that students cherished to perform complex calculations – that, and books filled with log and sine and cosine tables. I never bought a slide rule, because in your first year, the complexity of the calculations did not warrant their use.

However, in 1975, during my second year of engineering studies, I started to get the feeling that I was at a disadvantage during the practical sessions since many of the students in my year now had these new-fangled things called pocket calculators, and those setting the exercises now started assuming that most if not all of the students had them.

So in the end I managed to convince my parents of my need for one of these calculators, even if it cost the equivalent of £500. The strange thing was how the switch from slide rule to calculator happened in the space of less than two years, thereby leaving those who still had slide rules for sale to future generations of students high and dry with unsellable stock.

I seem to remember Isaac Asimov at one time reminiscing on his new edition of “An Easy Introduction to the Slide Rule”, and how it appeared in print just when exactly this same transition was happening in the US. But then again, the ease of use of a calculator compared with a slide rule made just such an “easy introduction” totally superfluous.

The net result for me personally is that I never owned a slide rule, and never have known how to use one. I can’t say that I ever felt this to be a loss.

Salt Spray Test

As I may have mentioned in an earlier blog, the topic of my thesis was the investigation of weak acidic chloride solutions for electrogalvanising a steel substrate, and examining the respective corrosion behaviours of zinc layers produced using different coating parameters. I also used different types of chromate treatments in an attempt to improve their corrosion resistance.

So far so good, but how to evaluate how well the zinc coating was performing ? Obviously there was the possibility of a visual examination, and cross sections could be made to see how the coating thickness varied across the sample. But most important of all was the sample’s corrosion behaviour, and this was evaluated using the laboratory’s salt spray test chamber.

The idea was that different samples with varied coatings and chromate treatments would be hung up in the test chamber until first white rust (i.e. corrosion of the zinc) or red rust (corrosion of the underlying steel substrate) occurred, or until a predetermined maximum time had elapsed. For some of the better chromate-treated samples the test duration could last as long as 320 hours (about 2 weeks).

Obviously, the test had to be interrupted at regular intervals in order to examine the samples, and here I must admit that I had my doubts whether I performed the test properly : you were supposed to wash the samples clean prior to re-inserting them in the chamber. I’m fairly certain I didn’t do this. I also don’t remember whether I discussed the test with my supervisor in order to make sure that I followed a standard way of operating the equipment.

I do remember having a discussion with my predecessor, who had performed similar tests using alkaline solutions, plus I had the benefit of being able to look up stuff in his thesis.

Still, the literature states that the salt spray test should not be used to predict actual corrosion behaviour in a natural environment, but instead compare the efficacy of different samples under controlled conditions. I suppose that’s what I did, and since I used the same methodology throughout, I suppose my data must have had some meaning, if only through its internal consistency, but comparison with other data sets might be more problematical.

To be honest, I never had any feedback from the company who supplied the chemicals for the weakly acidic solution or the chromate treatments, so not really sure how much practical use the outcome of my thesis had.

What Does an Engineer Do?

That was one of the questions that puzzled me while I was still a student. For quite some time I had trouble relating what we learnt in our syllabus with the type of activities you would be doing in your day-to-day job.

Granted that in our last year we had a few real case investigations that had been carried out in the lab, and we had a few factory visits to Sidmar, but all of these were cleaned and polished to such an extent that it seemed as if in most instances the processes looked after themselves, and whatever deviations there were was up to the operators in the pulpit to deal with.

And maybe that’s why being a researcher at university was not considered a proper job as seen from the point of view of a person in the steel industry: it was really a cushioned life which possibly exposed you to some technical aspects of the job, but not to the real grit of an engineer’s job.

Because once you’re there doing the real job of an engineer, you learn pretty quickly how sanitised the processes in your syllabus were, and that in the real world you need a team of people, not just to develop the process for future requirements, but also to make sure that deviations from the desired process flow are properly understood and then dealt with. Otherwise you just put a plaster over the problem but you haven’t really addressed the underlying root cause.

In the end, you also learn that being an engineer is not just about being a technical boffin, but also dealing with people: especially as a junior engineer you have to try and convince people whose first job is to produce the tonnage that they should allow you some time to perform whatever experiment you want to perform on the live mill. So you quickly learn how to influence people without having any authority over them. In fact I became so good at this approach that I had trouble on the occasion that I had to lead a team of people and try and make them do what I wanted them to do without being overbearing or too wimpish.

So, to answer the original question “What does an engineer do?”, the answer has to be: anything that is needed to make the process in the here-and-now behave as closely to what the books say it should do. Chemical reactions may look after themselves, but someone has to make sure that the conditions are correct for those chemical reactions to follow the desire path.

Pressure

A common question during interviews is “How do you handle pressure?”. The standard answer is to give an example of a stressful situation where you came out smelling of roses, implying that to you pressure disappears when you put your mind to it.

However, if I wanted to be fair about my ability to handle pressure, I’d say I don’t handle it all that well. Put me in a situation where the workload is such that it can’t possibly be achieved in the allotted time, and watch me go to pieces. Maybe an exaggeration, but quite close to the truth nevertheless.

So over time you start to learn a number of strategies that make it less likely that you’re going to be confronted with the pressure cooker. One strategy is to cut corners by cutting down the task to the bare minimum that can be achieved in the allotted time. This happened when I was studying for my hydraulics exam in my second year at university: I had less than 24 hours between exams, and concentrated on the “tuyaux” questions (the ones that often came up and could sink you if you weren’t prepared).

A stroke of luck came my way when I had a few hours in the morning prior to the exam, and decided to go over one of the diagrams where you have to predict pressure and flow in complicated set of bends, valves and pumps. Fortunately for me that question came up, and the professor was so pleased that I was the first in that session to get the answer completely right that he gave me really high marks. Something that definitely helped me pass since in that year I only scraped through with 61%.

Other solutions that I developed over time was to be highly organised and prepared. It’s not easy to predict what will need to be done, but once you’ve been in a job for a while, you tend to get a feel for the type of things that might trip you up, and like a good chef in the kitchen, you have a few items half-ready so that the final product can be achieved so much more quickly.

The other side of the same coin is to manage expectations – you know that the only correct answer to the question “Is this an easy job?” must be countered by the sucking of air through the teeth and any variation of a reply that means it’s not. Also, when someone comes to you with the introduction of “I’ve got a little job for you, it shouldn’t take too long”, your immediate response should be “Let me be the judge of that”.

And the final response when all of those tactics prove insufficient is to put the hours in – especially in IT extra time means extra output. You may have developed all the tools in the box to streamline your production process, but in the end it’s almost a given that development time will exceed the original estimated time, so you have to calculate that in from the start.

Also, in order to make the best use of your time when doing IT developments you must minimise the amount of non-productive time: cut down on meetings (unless they’re specific to progressing your work), reduce the likelihood that you’re going to be interrupted when you’re “in the zone”, and don’t be too proud to re-use solutions from previous projects.

So my real answer to the question “How do you handle pressure?” is : at all times I’m trying to avoid being caught in a situation where pressure will become an issue. Does it always work ? No. But at least you can try and minimise the number of situations where you’re going to be caught between a rock and a hard place.