Good enough isn’t enough

Jens Le is neatly dressed in a white shirt. He’s in a small office with a pale curtain hanging in soft folds behind him. We’re speaking over video, and he smiles almost the entire time, despite feeling uncomfortable about being interviewed.

“I’m probably quite a boring person. I don’t do much worth bragging about. I keep to myself and don’t like being the centre of attention.”

After an hour with Jens, that’s hard to square with the person I’ve met. He seems to thrive on questions, ideas and finding ways to make things work better.

As a child, even a ballpoint pen could spark his curiosity. He would take it apart to find out how it worked. Why does the button stay down when you press it? Where does the ink come from? And what exactly does that spring do?

“I’ve always wanted to understand how things work, even things that don’t matter.”

At thirteen or fourteen, he begins to find a language for that curiosity. In physics, Jens learns that a moving car can be represented by a block, a few forces and a couple of vectors.

“That was a real wow moment. That you could take something so complicated, simplify it and then do the calculations. That was when I started thinking I wanted to be an engineer.”

But understanding how something works isn’t enough for Jens. He wants to know whether it could work better.

I’ll have to try it first

Growing up, he notices that all his friends seem to have their thing. So Jens sets about finding his.

“I tried football, basketball, volleyball and martial arts. I wanted to fit in and thought I should have something too. So I kept trying things until I could say for certain: no, sport isn’t for me.”

That methodical approach is typical of Jens.

“If I’m buying a fragrance, I like to try all the options before deciding which one I want.”

He takes the same approach to an engineering problem.

“If there are several possible solutions, I like to run the numbers for each one until I can say: on this measure, this one is the best. I’m not satisfied just knowing it meets the requirements. I want to know it’s the best. The optimal solution.”

A useful quality in an engineer. At least until there are a hundred possible answers.

A week’s work in the bin

After school, Jens studies civil engineering at Chalmers. Three years become five when he decides to stay on for a master’s in structural engineering. For his thesis, he deliberately looks for something out of the ordinary.

“In Sweden, we mostly work with static loads. I wanted to learn how to calculate dynamic loads too — the kind we don’t deal with as often here.”

Jens and a fellow student write their thesis as part of a RISE research project investigating brick walls exposed to explosions.

“Brick is one of our most common façade materials, but we don’t normally analyse a brick façade in the same way as the load-bearing structure. And in an explosion, pieces of the wall can become projectiles,” Jens explains.

Modelling this is tricky. Brick and mortar behave differently, making the walls difficult to represent in a model. So they build a tool to automate the process.

“You enter the width, height, brickwork pattern and distance from the blast. Then the tool builds the model and runs the analyses for you.”

But a single analysis can take hours. Jens leaves one running when he goes to bed, only to wake up the next morning and find that the computer has given up halfway through.

“It felt hopeless. I thought we should find something else to do.”

Sometimes they spend a whole week on an idea, show their supervisor the results and discover they’ve been heading in the wrong direction.

“That was a week down the drain.”

But they try again. And again. At one point, Jens has four or five analyses running on different computers at once. Eventually, they get the whole process working.

“I could press play and it would run 80 analyses, one after another, over 24 hours. That was when I could finally see the finish line.”

When is enough enough?

But the finish line keeps moving. Jens keeps finding more things to consider.

“Halfway through, we had about ten ideas but only enough time to test three. That was a wake-up call. I realised I had to learn to limit the scope.”

For the first time, the man who wants to try every fragrance has to choose without even sniffing seven of them. And once he starts working as a consultant, that lesson really hits home.

“Now I have to keep an eye on the time as well. If I sit there thinking through every detail, it costs money. I have to simplify things,” Jens says.

Four hours. Then a propeller.

When he’s not working on structural calculations, Jens likes playing computer games. Preferably against other people.

“I like games where you’re ranked and can work your way up.”

But gaming is also about spending time with friends.

“For me, it’s the same as going out with your mates, just online. Some of my best memories are from gaming.”

Like the time he played GTA 5 with a group of friends. They’re trying to rob a bank and, by Jens’s own admission, they’re pretty bad at it. After several hours, they’ve almost made it.

Then one of his friends jumps straight into a propeller. Everything goes to hell, and they have to start again.

“Our brains just switched off. We were shouting at each other and joking around. It was complete chaos.”

Jens laughs as he tells the story. Then his grown-up self takes over again.

“When you’re a kid, you have all the time in the world. You can’t do that sort of thing any more. There’s more responsibility and less free time.”

And there, as he briefly lowers his gaze, you catch a glimpse of two sides of Jens. One wants to spend his time doing something worthwhile. Solving a problem or reaching a goal. The other still loves playing with his friends and doing things just for the fun of it.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Jens takes responsibility seriously. He had to take it on early.

The eldest of four

He grows up in Borås, the eldest of four brothers. His parents moved to Sweden from Vietnam.

“I joke about it, but I really was paying bills when I was very young.”

Jens picks up Swedish faster than his parents. From an early age, he helps them make phone calls and deal with salespeople on the phone.

“It was hard when I was little. But now I understand why I had to do it.”

At home, the family speaks Vietnamese and eats Vietnamese food. At school, Jens eats traditional Swedish dishes. His friends think it’s strange that he doesn’t have meatballs at home.

“When you’re little, you want to fit in. Sometimes I wondered why I was different.”

For a long time, he tries to work out where he belongs. Sweden or Vietnam. But unlike the sports he tried, he can’t simply cross one off the list. There’s no answer he can calculate. Now he’s stopped trying to solve that equation.

“Maybe I don’t fit into either group. But maybe I don’t have to.”

And for once, Jens seems happy to leave a question without a definitive answer.

A company on his wavelength

At a Christmas dinner, an acquaintance mentions that Poji is recruiting.

“I hadn’t heard of them. But when I read about how they automate calculations, it sounded like my kind of thinking.”

“If I’m doing the same thing over and over, I want to automate it. If the computer can handle a repetitive task for me, there’s no reason to keep doing it by hand.”

For now, Jens is learning how things work at Poji. He’s carrying out structural calculations for modules and learning to think like a consultant rather than a student. But he’s already found the next thing he wants to take apart.

Grasshopper. A software tool Poji uses to build its digital tools.

“Someone gave me a quick introduction. It looks incredibly complicated, almost like a circuit board. I really want to learn how to use it.”

For now, Grasshopper is that spring inside the ballpoint pen.