Comment by lwansbrough
6 years ago
Not the point of the story, but I wonder if engineers would reach the solution faster than non-engineers due to their practice debugging. As soon as I read the guy was driving to the store to pick it up I knew it had to be timing due to store layout.
If the story is to be believed then a smart engineer took several days to figure it out while it only took you a minute. I suspect there are other factors than simply being an 'engineer' that will help you arrive at the solution. I personally would never have guessed that store layout would be a factor. However, one question I had immediately was "how do you get home if your car doesn't start?" and if the reply was "I wait and eventually the car starts" then I would probably have closed in on the answer after that.
The situation described is basically a textbook perfect example of heat soak.
If you tell someone with experience repairing vehicles that your car starts fine when cold and find when you shut it off for a short while (e.g. buying gas they are going to nearly instantly hone in on "something is hot that shouldn't be".
> I knew it had to be timing due to store layout.
Even the "store layout" part is nonsense. Really, only vanilla is quick to pick up, and even for chocolate and strawberry (or whatever the next most popular flavors are) you have to take the slow path? Nobody would organize their store like that.
(Also, are dedicated "ice cream stores" a thing in the US? As in, not ice cream parlors that also sell stuff to go, but something you would really call a "store", that is dedicated to ice cream specifically?)
Well remember that this is second hand and paraphrased, so "ice cream store" could just mean "the place where my family goes to pick up ice cream"
And as for the layout - I have definitely seen freezers with a pile of easy-to-access vanilla ice cream in one section then a "miscellaneous" section where chocolate/pecan/whatever are either mixed in a pile or grouped (both require a couple of seconds to pause and search).
The story does seem too perfect, but this part does definitely check out
I knew it immediately too, but only because I'd heard this story or something very like it before. For the same reason, I might quickly figure out a problem related to janitors and vacuums, or light sensors on the inside of cabinet doors. That's probably the only correlation with being an engineer - not any systematic skill, but exposure to a certain kind of folklore.
My guess is yes. Especially if you're doing debugging, your whole day is hypothesis testing. You have a model of how a program works and from there you come up with potential explanations, you try to reproduce the problem under various conditions, you collect data, and so on.
I'm going to guess no.
Had the guy just asked anyone who's used to driving old beater cars from the late carb/early EFI they probably would have guessed vapor lock or heat soaked ignition components right off the bat (probably with a little skepticism because new cars very rarely do that) and then tried to confirm/rule it out.
Vapor lock is a basically solved problem (and has been for 30+yr, the OEMs test for those kinds of things before they scale up production) the engineer will likely weight it lower as a possibility than the more oddly specific things. It's kind of like how a 2nd line IT person may miss rebooting a device as a potential solution because none of the problems they chase down have easy solutions like that.
And also equipped with a firm knowledge that flavor of ice cream can't be the problem. Thus naturally looking at all other variables