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Welcome to “That’s my (User) Story and I’m sticking to it!” Tech tales for the curious and short of attention span.
You’ve probably heard this one before: the one where the engineer spots an inefficiency in production, fixes it, and transforms the way the company works.
- What was that engineer’s title?
- Senior Application Engineer?
- Chief Technology Officer?
- Master Enterprise Cloud Architect Extraordinaire?
- How about factory worker?
Let me tell you a quick story about Brandon Schenz.
It was the 90’s, and Brandon was in his early twenties, and he was going through a rough patch, trying to get back on his feet after his first marriage fell apart. He was living in Columbus, Ohio working as an insulated glass unit assembler in a factory for Schwartz Glass.
His job involved preparing glass windows. The conditions Brandon worked in were dangerous, especially by my office-worker standards. Craziest of all was the requirement to not wear gloves while handling sharp glass! He and his partner prepared the glass by stacking the panes from largest to smallest, like one of those ring-tower toys for toddlers.
The challenge was that the work orders were NOT in the same sort-order as the glass. So the factory workers spent a lot of time reading the work orders, calculating the size of the glass based on the dimensions, and putting them in a meaningful sort-order before even “starting” their work.
If there was a software engineer handy, maybe they could figure out how to use a computer to do that in the blink of an eye! But, like I said, this was the 90’s. Software solutions weren’t around every corner and under every rock just yet. Plus, Schwartz was a somewhat small operation, and not on the cutting edge of technology.
That’s where Factory Line Worker Extraordinaire Brandon Schenz comes in.
Using a discounted VB3 development environment he got from his college student bookstore (and, presumably, a piece of gum and a paperclip), Brandon wrote a program to do exactly that.
When it was finished, his program improved productivity by a remarkable factor of 3X! Brandon continued to iterate on and improve his program at Schwartz until he eventually left a few years later. (Funny enough, his next role was sales associate for a tennis racket company…. Where, as you can imagine, he stepped out of his lane to deliver more software. I guess his calling wasn’t obvious to him, yet!)
When I heard his story, I had to ask him what drove him to go above and beyond like that. Because, in hindsight, it might sound obvious to write a program to automate that. But put yourself in a factory worker’s shoes: your job doesn’t even involve using a computer, much less programming one. Plus, why rock the boat? Why take on additional responsibility? Why risk failure?
He said he might have been inspired by his co-worker’s dad, who installed the nation’s very first computerized telephone switching machine. (Which, if you don’t know what a telephone switching system is, then think of Rosemary from Hong Kong Phooie… And if you don’t know what Hong Kong Phooie is, then nevermind). He also acknowledged that he was in school for it, so maybe that’s why it was top-of-mind for him. But I know Brandon. We work for the same company, and I’m friends with him from hanging out at our C3 (Code Craft Community) meetup. I think he might not phrase it this way, but he just has that stuff inside him that makes him that makes him want to see things work better.
By the way, in case you were wondering, he is happily re-married to this day (sorry, ladies).
