Engine Room Kid

Have you seen the movie “Snowpiercer”? If it’s first time hearing about this movie, let me help you. “Snowpiercer” is name of a perfectly designed train. It’s designed to survive an eternal winter. It’s supposed to run like forever. (Sounds kind of like a dream of every engineer, right?).

However, just like perpetual engine cannot exist in real world, the law of nature that nothing is permanent applies here too. After a while some parts went extinct. Extinction wasn’t a concept applied to animals in the situation. Without engineers who can design and materials to be built with, extinction could be applied to stone cold objects too. In this harsh situation, something, or someone, has to deal with the problem. Since the ancient, ancient past such as stone age, manual labor has solved many problems. It applied to them too. This time, the solution was to send a kid down a box-sized container below an engine room.

To be honest, we, software engineers, frequently meet situations like this. Many parts of works become manual labors. Most companies start small, and small companies cannot start with all shiny tools and methods. There is no optimal choice here, and sometimes there isn’t a time to decide which is optimal too. We could imagine an ideal world where everyone solves every problem with well-oiled, hard-discussed, automated and scrutinized-to-the-end way, even if it takes some resources. But, well, it’s really “ideal”.

I was in my first or second year from when I started working as a software engineer when I was that naive. I was like “I could automate most of the things in a company where I work in. That’s what software engineer is for!” And I didn’t listen to my coworkers who worked longer than me when they said sometimes we have to do manual work. I didn’t care about company ROI or ROI of myself.

In reality sometimes companies just don’t have the resource to plan and execute. Sometimes companies have to push workers to deal with problems manually, if that’s what they can do rightaway with the least possible resources. Most of the time people like automation and want to achieve it, but they simply might not have the resource to do that.

If problems are not addressed in the right time, some manual works are left as remnants of the ugly past, making someone have to take the key. Like old saying goes, “If it works, don’t touch it.” Soon the plan to automate the work is deprioritized than other important things, and people start to think the current way is the golden way. Then the “engine room kid” is born. Without them, company work is delayed.

Taking the role as this kid could give a honored feeling to themselves. Think about it. The company might be in severe pain without you! Doesn’t that make you feel very important? That’s C-level-ish importance to the company, even if you aren’t that level. Since you’re like sacrificing your life to do manual work, it almost feels sacred doing the thing.

However, it shouldn’t be taken as glory.

Kurtis

Not many things aren’t at least semi-perpetual in real world and so is any industry. The engine room kid will eventually grow, gets bigger, his limbs and his torso grow, then his body won’t fit into the confined box anymore. Soon the kid is not fit to the work. Or the work itself might be changed due to newly introduced problems, so that the kid is not fit to the work anymore. In either way, the kid isn’t an useful tool anymore.

Worse part is the kid won’t have anywhere to go even if he gets out of the box. Does he have skills to live by himself? No. Well, at least he’ll be like prodigy at using spanner or else though, but it’s hard to expect decent social skills from him, so the person has to live with their sad, sad underdevelopment.

Taking ego to enjoy keep doing the manual work is like that. Being this “engine room kid” is hard to be beneficial to oneself, and the work itself eventually becomes legacy too. Ego is one of the biggest enemy to self development. It might make you like your sacred manual work. It might also blind you from moving away.

But fortunately, I think this industry has already introduced the best practice for this situation. Solution to a problem in a closed system is to introduce a solution from outside the system. If someone is blind, another person can be their eye. We already know some methods to have a look at what others are doing. Do periodic stand-up, have some coffee chat, and do some bi-weekly retrospective meeting. Solving their problem and relieving from their labor would be the best, but we don’t usually expect others to do that in business situation. Just poking the person to tell the truth you see might change their view.

In the movie, Kurtis, the protagnoist, saves the kid by sacrificing his arm. Be like Kurtis if you can. Save the kid, but expect some tradeoffs. But if you can’t, that fine. Just tell them they don’t have to keep working like that.

Before wrapping things up, there’s one last thing we should keep in mind. Things doesn’t get scary until you‘re asked to become the engine room kid. Since the engine must keep rolling, or in other words the show must go on, someone must take the key. When that happens and no one has prepared for it, same situation goes on and on. You don’t have to do that.