I’ve worked with a lot of really talented engineers in my time. It takes a little bit of special management. The thing you have to remember about them is, they’re pretty much all crazy. They need constant stimulation, new projects, or they’ll destroy your house out of boredom. If you own a cat, you’re probably already on the right track to become an engineering manager, including the part where you spray a lot of enzymatic cleaner onto your carpets to try and get the smell of piss out of everything.
One guy I worked with, who for reasons of basic liability is called Joey, was probably the most talented engineer I will ever work with. The reason for this is pretty simple. Most engineers can only build new stuff, and have almost no ability to diagnose problems. Joey could figure out how someone fucked up a board from a mile away, and we always gave him the most confusing jobs to figure out.
It didn’t take me too long into my management career to realize that Joey’s magic only worked when he was left alone to concentrate on it. Every time someone peered into the windowless hovel he had carved out of our third-storey office area, it would cost us the entire day in productivity. Joey was super good at his job, as I’ve said previously, so a day of his time was worth like thirty other people’s. You’d be better off just randomly opening fire on the engineering bullpen with a Ruger. So I had to keep him isolated.
Still, I was curious. Just what kind of technique did he have that let him isolate the faults in our products? Could his knowledge be taught to others? I set up a deer-hunting camera in his workshop area, figuring he would never notice it in amongst the nest-like piles of garbage he had surrounded himself by. And that’s how I saw it.
In the dark, Joey would put the board to his face and smell every inch of it. Somehow, he was like a sommelier for component failure. That nose was worth millions. I just wish that my cheap-ass eBay game camera hadn’t decided that exact moment would be opportune to gently fry one of its quarter-cent capacitors, because we lost like a whole week that way.
