Part I. The American Dream
Chapter 1. Black Monday
When George drove to work on that fateful Monday, October 7th, 2002, he had no idea this day would be forever etched in his memory. It became known as Black Monday, the first day of the worst 9½ months in the professional lives of his teammates at Lightning DNA, a 4-year-old public startup soon to be brought to its knees.
Like most people, George hated Mondays. At least the commute wasn't as bad as in his native Silicon Valley. He'd moved to San Diego a year ago to join this hot biotech startup.
Why leave the world’s greatest tech hub? George had just crawled out of a bitter divorce. Then Bob, his old boss, dangled an interview with LDNA’s engineering team. George got the job—a clean slate and some badly needed distance from the reminders of his ex. Her girlfriends were stunned she’d let go of such a good-looking, kind man. But when the chemistry between spouses dies, so does the marriage.
At LDNA, admiration came quickly. Witty, sharp-tongued, and effortlessly funny—who wouldn’t want a teammate like that? His day job was bridging engineering and manufacturing. He moonlighted as an entertainer, bringing fun and endless jokes into the lives of both teams.
George parked his car and walked into the LDNA building, whistling. Last week had gone well for him. All he’d left to do was to put finishing touches on two instruments, which were about to make history as the company’s first customer-bound sale.
The instrument was named Sherlock—the world's greatest detective in the discovery of genetic secrets. Of the three Sherlock Holmes’s most important accessories—the smoking pipe, the deerstalker hat, and the loupe—Sherlock featured only one, a lens tucked deep in the machine’s optical gut. And, before you ask—yes, there was also an instrument called Watson, but that’s a different story.
The size of a beach cooler, Sherlock stood twenty inches tall. The magic of building Sherlocks happened in instrument manufacturing, a small, cozy room lined with a few workbenches. Its white walls and linoleum-lined floor made it resemble an OR, if not for a bunch of mechanical tools scattered around. Jenn and Cesar, manufacturing techs, turned mountains of parts into living, breathing machines. The newborns came into this world blind. George gave them sight, tuning their optics into focus.
Two Sherlocks sat exactly where he’d left them Friday afternoon, side by side on a workbench, waiting for their final alignment. He expected to finish them in the next day or two. LDNA’s executive leadership and the Board were holding their collective breaths. The first instrument sales in the company’s history. What a press release it would make!
Before leaving on Friday, George had turned off the Sherlocks and lights. When he arrived on Monday, he found Jenn and Cesar assembling the next two instruments in the brightly lit room.
George greeted Cesar with "Buenos Días" and Jenn with "Happy Monday," bestowed his charming smile upon them, and approached his Sherlocks. He turned on one, then the other. The internal fans started humming, as they should—but nothing else happened. No lights, no lasers, nothing on the computer screens.
"Hmm," George said aloud, "let's try this again." Well, I'm sure you know where this is going. But George hadn't realized it yet and kept switching them on and off, apparently expecting a different result, famously defined by Albert Einstein as insanity.
To George's credit, he was perfectly sane, just confused and agitated because he couldn't figure out what was happening. He looked at Jenn and Cesar, "Did you guys work on these Sherlocks by any chance?" hoping they would explain the mystery. They shook their heads, shattering his hope.
As this seemed to be an electrical problem, Sam was the person to turn to. As the only electrical engineer on the Sherlock team, he had designed all the instrument's electronics.
Unlike George, Sam wasn't stunning-looking. He was balding, wore glasses, and felt self-conscious about both. Nevertheless, he was happily married to his high school sweetheart, Emily. The couple had weathered two immigrations (from Ukraine to Israel to the US), which strengthened their bond. Sam had just celebrated his first anniversary with LDNA and loved his job as much as George loved his.
Sam had just finished his morning beach run, drove straight to work, and was about to shower when George caught up with him:
"Hola, amigo! How are you, George?" Sam greeted his buddy with a smile, using about ten percent of his Spanish vocabulary.
But George didn't respond to Sam's greeting or crack one of his usual morning jokes; words were frantically flying out of his mouth like bullets:
"Sam, I swear, I didn't do anything, I didn't screw this up. You gotta come with me and fix those Sherlocks."
Sam had never seen George this distressed.
"Alright, alright, no worries. Daddy’s here for you," Sam said overconfidently. "Let me hit the shower first."
"No time, hermano, please come now. I promised to finish the alignment by Tuesday. Every minute counts!"
Like his teammates, Sam adored George and wasn't about to let him down. He followed George as he was, in running trunks and a sweaty T-shirt.
Sam was relaxed and confident. After all, he knew Sherlock's electronics inside and out, and there hadn't yet been a technical problem he couldn't solve.
As they walked down the long hallway, Sam told a joke to put George at ease.
"A guy's car broke down and wouldn't start. A car mechanic happened to drive by, stopped, introduced himself, and offered to help.
'Yes, please!' the driver says.
The mechanic pops up the hood, looks inside, pulls a hammer from his toolbox, and hits the engine.
'Try starting it now,' he tells the driver.
The car starts like clockwork!
'You owe me five hundred bucks,' the mechanic announces.
'Are you crazy? Five hundred for hitting my car with a hammer??'
'Nope. Only ten bucks for hitting your car. The remaining four hundred and ninety for knowing where to hit.’" Sam delivered the punchline.
George squeezed out dry laughter:
"Ha-ha, Sam. Bring your hammer. Or the entire toolbox, I don't care. Just bring these Sherlocks back to life. Please!"
Chapter 2. An Ode to Troubleshooting
If you've ever slapped a vending machine that swallowed your hard-earned dollar or desperately rebooted a frozen computer, you already know what troubleshooting is about.
In dry dictionary terms, troubleshooting means “investigating and solving technical problems.” Sometimes, it requires some thinking before making a move; other times, it's trial and error.
But there's more to it than meets the eye. It isn't merely a skill; it's a tango of science and art, logic and intuition until the problem gives in to a solution. It’s like a detective identifying suspects, investigating each, and finding the guilty by scrupulously studying evidence and eliminating the innocent from the suspect list.
Sam enjoyed troubleshooting and excelled at it. Born with a technical intuition, akin to a composer with a musical ear, he developed and fine-tuned it through countless hours of fixing things. Beyond his own electronic creations, he repaired devices designed by other engineers: washing machines, TVs, cars, computers, printers, you name it. He never hesitated to charge in, guided by his gut, often clueless about where to even start.
Growing up in Soviet Ukraine, Sam experienced the misery of terrible product quality firsthand. The entire country was a military-industrial complex; consumer products were neglected, forcing people to learn troubleshooting from the cradle.
For as long as Sam could remember, he helped his dad repair things, from a temperamental water boiler, which occasionally refused to produce hot water, to the family's Zaporozhets car. It was fittingly nicknamed "Zapor," which means "constipation" in Russian. It was also branded "A Tin Can" in a popular Soviet-era comedy.
When Sam returned from a two-year compulsory military service, his dad handed him the keys: "The tin can is undrivable. If you can get it running, it’s yours."
This was tricky: Zapor had a manual transmission, and once Sam started the engine, shifting gears became impossible. This was the '80s; there were no YouTube tutorials. Sam theorized that the engine and transmission had become inseparable, probably because the engine's flywheel was stuck to the clutch disc. From there, it should've been simple: disassemble it, unstick it, clean it, and reassemble it. Right? Wrong! Soviet cars were designed to torture people, leaving them without time or energy to think about politics, let alone revolt against the regime. Disassembly would have required hours of back-breaking work in an extremely tight space.
Sam, eager to impress his fiancée with his driving skills, like any 20-year-old, had boundless energy but little patience. Like Alexander cutting the Gordian knot, Sam pushed the car to a straight stretch of back road, shifted into first gear, and turned the ignition. Zapor began moving even before the engine kicked in, propelled by the starter. Once the engine came alive, he simultaneously slammed the accelerator and brake pedals, and voilà—the clutch broke free! Dumb luck or cleverness? Fortune favors the brave!
Courage and luck joined forces again when he tried to show off his skills to the in-laws, who had bought their first Western TV in Israel. Just one year old, it quit without a warning. Sam slapped it onto its side like a vending machine and spotted a bright spark through the back ventilation slots. Undaunted by the intimidating 32,000-volt vacuum tube, Sam removed the back cover and slapped it once more. The spark, now unobstructed, appeared bright as lightning. Looking closer, he saw a loose wire touching a solder blob. When he shook the TV, the wire vibrated, bouncing off the blob and creating sparks. A touch of a soldering iron, and the TV was as good as new. He earned instant respect from his in-laws and an admiring look from his young wife. The real cherry on top was the "problem solver" nickname Emily gave him, after Mr. Wolfe from Pulp Fiction.
On a different occasion, during his annual three-week reserve service in the IDF, an officer learned Sam was an electrical engineering student and asked:
"Can you fix a printer?"
Brazenly, Sam nodded and, in typical Israeli fashion, answered with a question:
"Got any tools?"
The officer, equally Israeli, responded with another question:
"What tools do you need?"
"What tools you got?"
"A set of screwdrivers, pliers, a hammer, electrical tape, and a soldering iron."
"That'll do."
Sam removed the printer's plastic cover and noticed mouse droppings. He'd read somewhere that mice and rats are attracted to the strong plastic smell from electrical wire insulation. These rodents chew through whatever they can get their teeth on, from power lines inside building walls to Navy ship cables. The fix was as simple as soldering the chewed-through wire ends together. The officer was speechless! Almost, as he uttered: "Sam, you're off sentry duty." Sometimes, all you need is a bit of luck with a touch of chutzpah.
During his student years in the 90s, the Digital Decade, he moonlighted as an IT guy in a large high school's computer department, fixing software and hardware. Thanks to the school's meager budget, it was a mixed bag with three generations of computers, most over five years old.
Not yet a fully-baked engineer, Sam thought and acted like a technician, identifying which part had failed based on what stopped working. Computer won't start? Must be the power supply. No video? Video card problem. Won't boot? Software issue. The school had no budget for spare parts, so Sam mastered the art of cannibalization, harvesting parts from older computers and leaving them lifeless to serve the living.
At his first engineering job, Sam designed electronics and troubleshot his own creations. It was a whole different level, not just replacing parts without understanding the causes of their failure. He learned to think like an engineer, using his intimate design knowledge.
As a technician, he'd quickly identify failed parts; as an engineer, he'd systematically determine the underlying cause. This combination of both troubleshooting approaches became his superpower, molding him into a fast, confident troubleshooter. On Black Monday, he was at the top of his game.
Chapter 3. The Post-Mortem
Walking into instrument manufacturing, Sam figured he'd be done in ten minutes, then shower and grab breakfast. Life was good.
About two hours later, still in his jogging gear, Sam was getting nowhere, sweating even more than on his morning run. His creation, Sherlock's main electronics board, exhibited no signs of life. The Main Boards in both Sherlocks were DOA.
Sam designed the Main Board less than a year ago, pouring his knowledge and heart into it. The board had already proven itself a workhorse, running without a hitch for months on multiple Sherlocks.
However, even with his intimate design knowledge, troubleshooting bore no fruit. Two hours later, he was no closer to understanding what was happening than when he walked in.
George finally begged, "Sam, please, just replace the dead boards. I can't afford to wait anymore."
How could Sam say no to him?
"You got it, partner!"
After the boards were replaced, both Sherlocks came back to life. What a relief! The duo ran tests to make sure everything was in order.
George was elated that he could continue his work. But Sam was troubled. For the first time in his glorious troubleshooting history, he had no leads, not even a working hypothesis. It was time to step away from the problem to gain some perspective. Stepping into a shower was a win-win for Sam and everybody around him.
This short break helped him gather his thoughts. The good news was that the problem was localized to the Main Board. Now, it was about dissecting both dead boards; if they failed similarly, it would suggest a common problem. The failure of two boards rather than just one was a blessing in disguise.
Refreshed after the shower, Sam downed a quick breakfast, eager to start the investigation. Optimistic about his action plan, he headed to the electronics laboratory, known among the cool kids as the e-lab.
It was every electrical engineer's dream, a sanctuary where electrons flew freely. The lab was so small that it fit only a couple of workbenches and as many rolling lab stools. The shelves were stocked with diagnostic gear and tools that would make any electronics enthusiast envious. The only window, cut into the lab’s door, made the lab look cozy.
Sam spent the rest of the day investigating the dead boards. On each, he checked every single one of the sixty semiconductor integrated circuits, or microchips in layman’s, or simply chips.
He identified half a dozen dead chips on each board. This was alarming. In his experience, only one or two chips would usually fail at a time. Six was hard to explain.
Even more puzzling was the absence of a common pattern, usually indicating a systemic problem, which would be easier to fix than an intermittent one.
To avoid missing anything, Sam created a new Excel file and entered all the failed chips in two adjacent columns. FPGA, a reprogrammable computer chip, the Main Board’s brain, was the only one in common. It appeared that the FPGA, connected to most chips via copper traces, was the culprit.
Sam dove into his FPGA code, searching for a bug. Having single-handedly developed it, he knew the dozens of code pages inside and out.
The chase was exhilarating. U.S. Marshals, pursuing a fugitive, must feel that way. But after hours of mining the code, he had nothing to show for it.
The adrenaline began wearing off, leaving only a sense of disappointment.
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