Engineers, guerrillas, and roadrunners

Ron Mancini

Experience has taught me that great engineers are like guerrillas—smart, dissatisfied with the status quo, aggressive, willing to risk failure, and driven to excel. When they fight battles their own way, they win, but march them in formation, and you take away their advantage.

I once managed a guerrilla band (otherwise known as hardware-design group) that had a reputation for producing cost-effective, innovative, working hardware—on time. No other group accepted the challenges that we did, and no other group got the impossible projects we did. Unfortunately, my career progress was slow, because we were in constant conflict with management. Management never understood that it takes more than schedules and milestones to inspire guerrillas to greatness.

Take Shilly, for example. Shilly, our superprogrammer, loved to goof off until the last minute, when he would put in a burst of effort to save the day. Actually, he just seemed to be goofing off; he'd be doing the project in his head all along. He'd come through, but not before management got plenty nervous. Once, though, we really were in trouble. Our project was way behind schedule, and we just weren't inspired. What we needed, I thought, was a cause that we could all rally around.

A cause appeared, believe it or not, in the form of a mentally unbalanced bird—a roadrunner that had taken to fighting with her reflected image in the floor-to-ceiling window outside Shilly's office. We nicknamed her Hurricane, after a fighter from Paterson, NJ, because she fought like a storm. She was so good, that in one especially savage fight, she KO'd herself, keeling over and lying feet up. Shilly brought her in, and we tried to revive her, but, despite our best efforts, she died. During a lunch of copious beer and tamales that served as her wake, I suggested that on-time completion of our project serve as Hurricane's memorial.

It worked. The next day Hurricane was hanging by her feet from Shilly's ceiling, and Shilly announced that she would stay there until the project was finished. After a few days, Hurricane stank, and the more she stank, the harder we worked. Unfortunately, management was harassing me, and Shilly's software was still inside his head. I doused Hurricane with cheap after-shave lotion, but that just made her feathers fall out.

Still, with Hurricane as our rallying point, and with her stench speeding us onward, my guerrillas finally prevailed. Shilly regurgitated his software. We finished the project on time. We buried Hurricane in the corporate front lawn, right beside an official corporate time capsule.

I lost ground with management, of course, even though our project was a success. For some people, how you look in battle is as important as whether you win. I like to win, though, and I guess I'll be fighting to win as long as I equate great engineers with guerrillas. When you win, war isn't so bad.

Ron Mancini is an applications engineer at Texas Instruments. You can reach him at 1-352-568-1040, rmancini@sum.net.

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