I have been reading about Boeing’s ongoing issues with the 787 battery. In the process, I read an interview with the (90-year-old and still teaching) inventor of the lithium-ion battery, currently a Professor of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at UT-Austin.
For a while, I was mentally pronouncing his name as “god-den-ow”, and then I realized exactly what I was looking at.
I give you -
John Goodenough
He looks kinda like Alan Alda.
Ah, “good enough!” A concept so alien to engineers that someone put up a sign at one place I worked that said, “There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineers and start production.” I nodded in recognition of God’s Own Truth, but another engineer, who had a degree in it and everything, objected to it strongly.
We eventually had to put him down so production could start.
I always figured the name Goodenough must be an Anglicized form from the Russian Godenov.
90 and still teaching!
I want to do that.
It’s written Godunov, actually. And not to be confused with Badenov. 
IANA engineer, but isn’t “good enough [to meet specs]” all you need? I thought anything more would be considered overengineered.
Hahahaha. I was married to an engineer once. There is no such thing as “over engineered” to an engineer.
Some engineers fail to accept that engineering is often the science of compromise, and sometimes that compromise is not as perfect as you’d like. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad design - it just means that, as Mick says, You can’t always get what you want! So, yeah, it’d be great to tweek your design so your car gets 50MPG, but if you’re getting 48MPG right now, get that puppy to market!!
I’m an engineer and a realist.
“Funny, it’s not supposed to do that,” is the line I always associate with engineers.
How does the old saying go? You can have your pick of two out of better, faster, and cheaper, but you can’t have all three.
I’ve seen it as a sign:
[INDENT][INDENT]
[ul]
[li]Good[/li][li]Fast[/li][li]Cheap[/li][/ul]
Pick two.[/INDENT][/INDENT]
Pfft, if it meets all the current specs that just means that it’s time to add in all the amazing features the bean-counters made you take out. 
At most two. Some days you’re lucky to get even one; or at least I am.
I was going to mention this; it’s pretty much axiomatic in the software world too, albeit with the proviso that there is an amazing amount of freely and legally available apps and other downloadable software out there. But even allowing that an app may be a free download, and that it may perform well generally speaking, some of the qualities that go into making a product good–e.g. performance, security, or modifiability are often at odds with each other.
His economics equivalent is Efe A. Ok.
Seriously, I dunno what industry you’re in, but in mine it’s the opposite. I’m frequently the engineer saying “Looks good, customer wants a trial batch in a few weeks, let’s try it once in a production batch”. It’s the damn managers and PhD chemists saying, “Oh, no, no, no! We must do a 36 month DOE study on it before we even consider it!”
:mad:
