3 Lessons from a Japanese Master Craftsman
Writing beautiful code, benevolent mentors, and the mind body connection
Prologue
I am a hardware engineer, yet there is nothing tangible in today’s 3nm semiconductor engineering. I feel like a software developer because I write code all day. Sure, it’s the type of code that turns into transistors, but still, for the most part I’m sitting at a computer staring at a screen. Mechanical watches with their intricate movements quench my thirst for tangible hardware engineering.
This insightful 5-minute video below is a conversation with craftsmen/women from Grand Seiko, a respected Japanese watchmaker. They are famous for inventing a revolutionary movement known as the Spring Drive.
Lesson 1
I think that being able to warm up the body before starting work is the best.
If the condition of the body isn’t good, then from starting in the morning until heading home, you can’t concentrate.
Minute 2:00
The level of creativity and quality of your work as an engineer is determined by more than just your intelligence, knowledge, and experience. For instance, one bad night’s sleep makes me operate like my kindergartner who was refused ice cream (cranky, stumbling, fumbling and incoherent), rather than demonstrating my 15+ years of experience.
Exercise feels like a super drug, the simplest method to break out of a rut when stuck on a problem.
Lesson 2
In making such a complex device, it is important that the next generation is able to service them since we are the ones that made them.
And, naturally, I will tell the younger workers 100% of what I know. Because I think that passing along these skills is such an important thing.
Minute 3:27
In my first job out of graduate school, one of my assignments was to help bring up the high speed SerDes interface on a chip that had just arrived in the lab. We were at least a week (or two?) into the bringup and these interfaces just wouldn’t function. I could feel the heat in the room, and the bosses' hourly update requests were nerve-wracking.
I was provided with TCL scripts, a stack of intimidating C-firmware, and a 600-page user guide of the SerDes PHY IP, with terms like DFE and FFE which I didn’t quite understand. I was a good student and graduated with honors, but no amount of books or classes can adequately prepare you for your first chip bringup under the watchful eye of your manager.
The only reason this episode had a happy ending was that I was fortunate to have a benevolent mentor who sat down with me, helped me comprehend the problem, but also gave me the space to learn, ask dumb questions, experiment, analyze and reach my own conclusions. When we finally got things working, I felt like I’d earned my moment in the spotlight.
As a senior engineer now playing the role of a mentor, I try not to forget this. It takes the right kind of mentorship to help a junior engineer overcome their impostor syndrome and gain confidence in their engineering abilities.
Lesson 3
This is the minimum requirement in making a beautiful watch: First, each individual part must be beautiful
Minute 0:35
This reminds me of a system architect I once worked with, a true 10X engineer. While the systems he architected were innovative, robust, and made the company a lot of money, I was always in awe of the code he produced. At the lowest level, even simple things like where he chose to place an empty line in a code block, his brief but self-explanatory variable and function names, and the premeditated flexibility he added to the code for future enhancements were stunning.
That’s it for this issue, see you in the next one!