The Trick..

Not the Ark

If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats onboard, how old is the ship's captain?

This question did the rounds about 4 years ago. It was on a test in China aimed at 10 to 11 year olds.

The internet had a field day with day it. “How can children answer this?” The school said that the test had intended to:

"examine... critical awareness and an ability to think independently"

A few bright sparks came up with the following solution:

"In China, if you're driving a ship that has more than 5,000kg of cargo you need to have possessed a boat license for five years. The minimum age for getting a boat's license is 23, so he's at least 28."

What’s the issue here? The issue is that this is all wrong. The answer to the question is:

“There is not enough information to come up with the correct answer”

That’s the trick here. You could spend a lifetime coming up with complicated solutions, however, you will never will be able to truly validate if you are correct.

Root cause analysis shows us that this question originated over 40 years ago and was posed by French researchers. They demonstrated that even presented with incomplete and unrelated data, people will still try and use the data they have to come up with an answer.

Pole 2 Pole

So here’s another one. There’s the famous Amazon 2 poles apart question.

A cable of 80 meters (m) is hanging from the top of two poles that are both 50 m from the ground. What is the distance between the two poles, to one decimal place, if the centre of the cable is:

10 m above the ground?

Now you can solve this using lots of complicated maths. But is there a trick? Of course there is. Imagine the cable is touching the ground. Lop off the bottom 10m of both poles. You’ve got an 80m long cable between two 40m poles.

Remember, the cable is touching the ground. This means the cable must be folded in half! The poles are 0m apart! Touching each other.

No need for too much maths there.

Okay, one more and then I’ll get onto my point.

Stupid Facebook Question

These types of question are primarily on Facebook for a few reasons:

• To increase engagement/reach and ultimately traffic
• To steal your personal data
• To generally scam you

But anyway, one such question is:

6 ÷ 2(1 + 2) = ?

Some people will say the answer is:

6 ÷ 2(1 + 2) = 1

Other people will say the answer is:

6 ÷ 2(1 + 2) = 9

Also some people will get the answer even more wrong and say it’s something else.

I’m old so I use BODMAS instead of the other one to work this out. But, when looking at BODMAS it’s easy to forget the precedence. This is one of the few diagrams that illustrate this nicely.

The main bit to remember is:

if both are in the same calculation, complete them left to right.

I’ll leave it up to you to calculate what the correct answer is ;)

So, is that the trick here? No, the trick is to not write your sums in an inane and potentially confusing way.

The point of the trick

How does the trick relate to software development? Quite often the trick is the simplest solution that gives you the biggest bang for your buck; the “quick wins”.

Teams should be praised on value and not effort.

By identifying the appropriate – and not obvious – approach, you can cut down on work and simplify your software estate.

However, this is far easier to write, than to do. Constraining by time and extreme focus can help identify the trick. Being aware that other people, not just yourself, could come up with the trick helps a well. One person cannot do everything.

You need to avoid going into analysis paralysis trying to identify it. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, there may be no trick. The trick to searching for the trick is knowing when to stop.

A simple example to begin. When I was a developer, we were constantly bombarded with urgent requests to update tracking pixels on the corporate website. The change generally was to insert some simple JavaScript into the header/footer of the website. Due to “reasons” this required a software release which was painful to do at the time.

The trick here was to add one final piece of Javascript. The script for Google Tag Manager. Then everyone else could add and remove tracking scripts to their hearts content. Allowing people this kind of access via GTM has its downsides, but none of those were realised.

A more interesting example, is that customer A wanted the ability to favourite items in a shopping application. Customer B wanted the ability to create lists. The team involved spent time creating the feature to favourite items. Then they moved onto implementing the lists functionality. The customers were happy and built integrations around these two new features.

Now, what everyone missed at the time was that the team could have implemented some basic tagging and attribution. This would have enabled both customers to create both features and many more which they hadn’t thought of yet.

But… here it comes, everyone missed a trick ;)

Thank you for reading this article! Please leave a comment below if you have any questions or feedback.

If you enjoyed this article then please consider buying me a coffee:

Chris Sheldon is a Project Manager for DataArt Ltd. DataArt are a global software engineering firm that takes a uniquely human approach to solving problems.

In his career Chris Sheldon has been a Software Developer, Scrum Master, Development Manager and more. He’s decided that people are harder than process, so this is where his attention is now targeted!

Chris graduated in the UK from Reading University with a degree in Electronic Engineering and Cybernetics.

A bit of a Agile enthusiast, productivity nerd and Wantrepreneur Chris really needs to decide what he wants to do in life and focus.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or by visiting his website, ITsChrisSheldon