Through Helsing's sponsorship of Formula Student Germany, we are backing three of Europe's leading teams – AMZ (ETH Zürich), TUfast (TU Munich), and KA-RaceIng (KIT Karlsruhe). Earlier in June, we hosted the teams at Grob for HEAT, our first field trial with them. This is the first in a series of posts on why we are getting involved with Formula Student and what we are finding in it.
In early June, I visited Grob Aircraft's airfield for the first time. It was a gorgeous late spring day, and the airfield itself was eerily quiet. As I turned the corner approaching the airfield and headed towards the hangars, I met 4 groups of engineers, who were busy toiling away at their stations; some with laptops in hand, others disassembling components.
This scene would not be out of place in a workshop or at a field-test – however, these weren't Helsing engineers, and they weren't working on an HX-2 or SG-1. They were students. And they were building race cars.
Engineering, Deployed
Deployed engineering – that is, getting your engineers out into the field to go do the thing – has been an innate part of Helsing's success. It became so key to our early identity that it formed one of our core values: "The truth is in the field".
At its essence, this means reducing the distance from the people responsible for the outcomes, to the outcomes themselves. It's not "finished" until it flies, swims, or walks. This requires an inherent flexibility and a willingness to see your own role as malleable – your job is to make it work, and everything else is a detail to getting to that state. The outcome is what really matters.
At Helsing, we look for outcome-focus in all of our roles – however, none more so than the Deployed AI Engineer role (it's in the name, after all). These are the folks that bring our Software capabilities into the field, in whatever way the situation needs.
The "core" of the DAE role is the same as our Software Engineering role, so much so that they actually share most of a hiring pipeline. Same interviews, same bar, same coding ability. So what's the extra thing that differentiates the two?
Unfortunately, there is no single trait. In some folks it's a complete absence of fear of the unknown. In others, it's a fixation on needing to see the thing work in real life before they can put down the task. They're almost always intensely curious and spongelike in their ability to pick up new skills, technical or otherwise (so much so, that we often jokingly refer to our DAEs as “do anything engineers”!).
These are rare traits, and even today, after 4 years of refining the process, only about a third of all of our SWE-like hires end up as DAEs. And yet they are vital to moving swiftly and pushing the frontier of what is possible.
Because racecar
What struck me in the hangar that weekend was that Formula Student... is deployed engineering. The values overlap almost one to one. The truth is on the track; if you're not getting better times, it's irrelevant. The only outcome that matters is how fast it goes on race day. Everything else is a distraction.
These were students from a variety of backgrounds, studying a wide selection of subjects – but they had all picked up whatever toolset and role was needed at that moment to make it happen. What connected it all was the target of making the car go fast.
And then, in this microcosm of software-meets-hardware-meets-execution, it was more evident than ever that deployed engineering isn't something that's only about the software. Software is only one fragment of what makes the cars successful on the track. It's the full stack that counts, and how it works together – including the people. Software, Hardware, Execution.
Closing thoughts
If, reading this, you thought of your own version of that hangar – the project you couldn't put down – then you already understand the instinct everything here is built on. Take that instinct and join us in applying it to something that matters.
Not a software engineer? Deployed Engineering is more than just software - you'll see more on that in the posts to come.
We've got more planned with Formula Student, and I'm excited to see what they're going to go and achieve at Hockenheim later this year.
The truth is in the field, after all.
Author: Luke Tomlin