Thingo X900
a slightly interactive parable
You are a loyal employee of ThingoCorp. A Metric Thingolator is the machine that produces your employer's flagship product, the Thingo X900. If a Thingolator is provided with Wotz Juice (measured in milliliters) and small mechanisms called Squidgets (which you buy from another company upstate), shiny new Thingo X900s will roll off the line.
A fellow engineer supplies you with a simulator of the Thingolator that accurately predicts how many Thingo X900s it will produce per hour.
| Wotz Juice (mL per hour) | ||
| Squidgets (per hour) | ||
| Thingo X900s (per hour) |
Your boss comes to you one day and asks:
I say, what do you suppose is more important to getting the most performance out of the Thingolator — is it the Wotz juice, or the Squidgets?
Shall we focus on getting more Wotz juice more cheaply, or should we be hunting around for a different Squidget supplier? Both? Neither?
The next week you find yourself assigned temporarily to a ThingoCorp office in a far off land. There they have an Imperial Thingolator, which works exactly the same as the metric Thingolator, except it measures Wotz juice in gallons.
You manage to modify the old simulator of the Thingolator to make accurate predictions about the new machine.
| Wotz Juice (gal per hour) | ||
| Squidgets (per hour) | ||
| Thingo X900s (per hour) |
A few days after arriving there, you turn around to find your new boss asking you:
Hey so which makes the most difference to Thingolator performance, Wotz juice, or Squidgets?
I gotta make that presentation to the VPs tomorrow and they asked me about it last meeting — so which one is it?