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Not Invented Here vs Form Follows Function
I had an interesting day yesterday, took a project that I have been nurturing from conception, with the client, to the engineering works who will be building it.
Before I get into that, there is something that needs to be explained.
When I turn up with documentation and drawings and artwork and all the other biz, you are in effect looking at a picture that an artist has painted.
You can look at the picture and admire it and say what you see, but you cannot have any hope of knowing or understanding why or how each part of that picture got painted.
You cannot look at the Mona Lisa and see the paintings that Leonardo did not paint in order to paint Mona, you cannot look at it as see the order in which certain methods of painting were rejected, and why, you cannot look at it and see what Leonardo was trying to paint either.
Not Invented Here (NIH) vs Form Follows Function (FFF) crackles into life like Frankenstein's monster.
So there we are, sat in a circle, I'm showing my stuff, and the youngest guy in the "crew" is effusive, keen, and asks all the right questions, while the older guys are nice, but I can see the "Not Invented Here" gleam in their eyes.
Thankfully for me I'm old enough and ugly enough that I've been there before, so all the documentation is littered with references that, with 20/20 hindsight, will make every instance of NIH hard to justify. I'm also old enough and ugly enough to know that in engineering Form Follows Function, there are only so many ways in which you can vary the design of a straight razor and still have a useful straight razor.
But NIH means that instead of taking a body of work that clearly represents a far greater hidden body of thought, and then using that as a starting place and grilling the artist, people prefer to start with a blank sheet, and duplicate every last bit of effort, while the combination of NIH and your body of work means they will try and repeat it in such a way that it is unmistakably "all their own work" and not a clone or derivative of your work.
The loser in this scenario is FFF, FFF has to be sacrificed to NIH.
My design was elegant in its simplicity, excluding fasteners (socket screws etc) which are all hidden anyway, presenting a nice clean design, it comprised of 84 parts in total, and that pile of 84 parts was made up from only 24 unique parts. My design was simple and fast to manufacture and assemble, I could walk into a machine shop and have short runs turned out for 500 quid a pop.
More importantly, my design was 100% FFF, there was no precedent so NIH didn't make an appearance, so my design just plain works.
At this point I should perhaps admit to enough experience and arrogance that frankly I don't care that much if NIH means the design never makes it as a commercial product, as far as I am concerned my design is pure FFF and does not require any further external "validation" by hitting shelves. _I_ know it is *bloody* good. That is enough.
But all the personality faults and foibles of the character set that makes up a good engineer asise, this whole issue of NIH vs FFF is an interesting and important one all by itself, and an issue that is not dealt with adequately by the likes of wikipedia.
While the next 3 to 6 months will be interesting for me personally, as it await the end result of the NIH vs FFF dynamic, far more interesting is the human aspect, and the implications, as this NIH vs FFF scenario is far more common in day to day life than people imagine, and far more pervasive.
NIH is, in my experience, symptomatic of maturity and time spent in a stable environment, it is symptomatic of not exploring the boundaries, it is symptomatic of committee peer review, whereas FFF is symptomatic of a more youthful approach, one which pays less attention to the benefits of a stable environment, less attention to the opinions of others, and more attention and focus on discovery and research and personal growth and opportunity.
The one young engineer who instinctively grasped what I was presenting from a FFF viewpoint and wanted to run with that ball was also the only one who took the time and effort to bring to the meeting a sample of the device that this product will work with (please do not ask me to be more specific about this, it is irellevant to the discussion) and to try to work the whole thing together in his head.
The more mature engineers instead instinctively grasped the data I was presenting as a broad outline on canvas, an art from, in oils, a portrait of the mona lisa, and what they brought to the meeting was an eagerness to collaborate on creating a series of copies of a new portrait of a young woman, maybe in oils, maybe not.
Years ago in my youthful, rebellious, HD riding days I owned a tee shirt, blain black, with white lettering, it said;
"As you are now, I once was. As I am now, you will never be."
The point being the young FFF engineer may survive to become an old FFF engineer, but the fact that most young engineers are NIH and that most environments with older engineers are NIH means that the likelihood is that he will turn from a young FFF engineer into an old NIH engineer.
Which is a shame.
It is a shame from everyone's point of view.
It is a shame from the client's point of view, because it means that things that have absolutely nothing to do with engineering or product marketing, but everything to do with conservatism, will be the most important and influential factors is determining whether or not his brainchild ever hits the shelves.
It is a shame from the publics point of view, because it means that the stuff they are able to buy has been built to conservative values that have nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the personalities and culture of the builders.
It is a shame from an economics point of view, because vast amounts of original effort are simply discarded, and vast amounts of effort are duplicated time after time, as NIH takes precedence over FFF.
Now I'm no Leonardo, but I'll bet body parts that his attitude about his work was the same as my attitude about mine, he didn't care what Tom, Dick or Harry thought of it, he did it for himself (even if he was paid and commissioned) to please himself, and it is only an accident of fate that some of those things survive to this day, and have won almost universal acclaim for their beauty.
I met and occassionally conversed with one of the descendants of Juan Miro, and he was the quintessential essence of not giving a damn what other people thought of his work, and I remember quite clearly being told that his own favourite examples of his own work were simply ignored, much less merely misunderstood.
Miro understood NIH vs FFF, he understood first forming the opinion, then looking at the art, and any oft enough repeated opinion becomes a Way Of Life, the opinion holder becomes a Conservative Thinker.
I have deduced that the flux in balance between the proportions of NIH and FFF varies pretty much in tune with the state of society during the formative years of the citizenry, in easy times living off the fat of the land we get very few FFF thinkers, in tougher times we get a far greater proportion of FFF thinkers, but the NIH thinkers are always there, like a governor, to prevent the FFF crowd from inventing transport devices so fast they will suffocate the passengers, bombs so powerful they will consume the entire atmosphere of the planet, and grey goo so avaricious it will consume everything it touches.
Science Fiction, Horror Stories, even the more mundane social manias from the You Tube generation excesses to Man Made Global Warming and Enviromental Collapse, all, in my mind, are examples of the perennial struggle between NIH and FFF.
My own little creation. It doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
The most interesting thing about it, by far, is the NIH vs FFF.