The Elsie landed in ocean comfortably deep, then they used the auxiliaries to bring her close to the shore. She floated high out of the water, as two-thirds of her tanks were empty, burned up, the water completely disintegrated in boosting us first up to the speed of light, then backing us down again. The engineers were already overhauling her torch before we reached final anchorage. So far as i know, none of them volunteered for the landing party; I think that to most of the engineers the stop on Constance was just a chance to pick up more boost mass and take care of repairs and overhauls they had been unable to do while underway. They didn't care where they were or where they were going as long as the torch worked and all the machinery ticked. Dr. Devereaux told me that the Staff Metallurgist had been out to Pluto six times and had never set foot on any planet but Earth.
"Is that normal?" I asked, thinking how fussy Doc had been about everybody else, including me.
"For his breed of cat, it's robust mental health. Any other breed I would lock up and feed through the keyhole."
Time for the Stars, Robert A. Heinlein
There's a pattern my team follows as we strive for consensus between engineering and management.
A client comes to us with a problem they want solved. Their gizmo processor is actually a team of 30 gizmo processors managing a bucket brigade of paper and they'd like to automate the process. So far, so good! We've automated dozens of gizmo processors over the years, so that's no worry, but here comes the curveball: their gizmo processors work with a team of external gizmo processors (Gizmogineers) at another organization (Gizmoco) that use an archaic gizmo processing gateway (Gizmauthorize) over which we have no control and integration must be done via a system of carrier pigeons (PidginSMS) bred by a proprietary genetic engineering firm (Genotaku) incorporated in Beijing.
Hey, if the job was easy, everybody'd be doing it.
So we sit down and start hashing out how exactly we can solve the problem. The project manager helming this Titanic lays it out with some keen whiteboarding skills. He's captained enough projects to know that initial whiteboard isn't long for this world, and he's also ready with a tranq dart when the engineer starts screaming and tries to flee the room.
Everybody take five and we'll regroup in twenty.
The engineer thinks we should ditch the project and go grow pineapples on his family farm in the Phillipines. There's just no way a properly designed system can function under these requirements. The PM acknowledges the challenges and, hey, maybe we pass on this one, but it won't hurt to spitball a few ideas and explore the possible...
Gizmauthorize's pigeon-based API is a clear concern. The pigeons themselves are remarkably reliable but there's a cost associated with retargeting them and there are non-negligible costs associated with cleaning up all the damn bird poop. If you tip it on its head, though, the retargeting cost is just another kind of latency, and bird poop disposal and server heat disposal can both be lumped under a generic "server administration costs" line item. Genotaku's licensing fees for PidginSMS are sky-high and sales negotiations are conducted through a Wizard of Oz-skinned chatbot which speaks only in riddles--seriously, what is their business model? Is this a China thing?--but that's the client's problem once we get the system set up. Make a note and move on. Now that we've got a basic idea of how we're going to ferry information between the two systems and the costs and limitations of doing so, the only pieces left are automating our client's internal Gizmo team and setting up an adapter to translate Gizmauthorize's Gizmo Processing Format (GPF, naturally) into the one our client uses.
There you have it, a few hours locked in a conference room and the team has moved from an incoherent set of business requirements to a well-reasoned layer of technical requirements wrapped around an incoherent set of business requirements. Management thinks the risk levels are clear enough to translate into contractual disclaimers and the engineer is still sedated enough to agree to work on the project.
And then the next client comes in with an idea for an image-recognition platform that can sort pictures for color-blind users and the cycle repeats.