[WalterBright]

My first day on the job at Boeing, in the 757 flight controls group, as a newly minted mechanical engineer, my lead engineer told me to "size the jackscrew". The jackscew is what drives the leading edge of the stabilizer up and down. If it fails, the airplane becomes uncontrollable.

I went back to my desk, stewed for a while, and panicked.

So I go back to Erwin, shamefaced, and said I had no idea how to size the jackscrew. He chuckled, and said "did they teach you column buckling in school?" I said sure. He said it's a column buckling problem. You know how to do it.

And sure enough, I did.

[salawat]

Nothing to be ashamed of there. You hadn't had enough domain specific exposure to cut through the jargon from the sounds of it. First exercise I do with my hires/juniors is work to connect what we're doing with something they already know.

That's communication 101.

201 is divesting yourself of the assumption you always know exactly what everyone else is talking about, and remembering that it never hurts to play the fool and learn something, as in the process of being taught, sometimes new knowledge will become apparent.

People who master both pieces tend to be the most amazingly competent people I've ever had the privilege to work with.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

OOh, ooh, ooh, me too!

A couple months into my first job, the chief engineer, who was an ME in an EE company, told me to figure out how a certain filter worked. I sat down at my desk with the diagram for hours struggling with it. Then I got up to go to the bathroom or something and came back in through a different door and saw the schematic upside down and that from that perspective it looked totally different. It was just a 2-port network; I know all about 2-port networks!

A few minutes later I was done :-)