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Opposition from mediocre minds July 14, 2010

Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering.
Tags: engineering, personality, workplace
4 comments

A couple days ago, I read an article on the ‘culture war’ between scientists and engineers. (HT to Uncertain Principles.)

Being back with both feet firmly planted in Engineeringville, this topic has been on my mind a lot. Surprisingly enough, this same conflict resides entirely within engineering as well as being a conflict between engineers and scientists.

I’d say that the one thing engineers all have in common is that they like to make things. If you go into engineering, you’re not usually looking to reinvent the wheel. If you’re on the research side of engineering, you’re looking for a better way to make things, or even new things to make. To do this, they spend a lot of time training on what are the most efficient ways to design things. They don’t spend time learning how to reinvent the wheel: they learn from others mistakes.

Scientists, in my experience, are more interested in exploring ideas and figuring things out. They like to pull things apart, and figure out how they work. They like taking something seeing how changing things will affect its behavior. By spending a lot of time tinkering or thinking about things, they like to come up with a way to describe what they see or a theory on how it works. Whether or not it has a lot of practical use is simply not relevant (to many of them), but whatever they’re picking apart is usually pretty interesting.

But back to engineering, I see the same sort of conflict described in the article only in engineering. At one extreme, you have people with grandiose ideas, some of which have poorly defined details. At the other end are the people who have a set of skills which they know how to apply in a very narrow way and don’t like to budge outside of that comfort zone.

When you get these two types of people into a room, it can be very explosive. The person with the grandiose idea goes all Einstein, announcing that the other people involved “don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish! They have mediocre minds!” At the other end, they see Einstein’s crazy hair but no brain: “She doesn’t know anything about this process. She can’t use it that way, so she must be wrong.”

I think a lot of this has a lot to do with individual ideas about what is “engineering”. It’s a very poorly defined concept. There are a lot of engineers who are very ‘big picture’. They like to be innovative and try new things.

And this completely discomfits those who like to have things very clearly defined.

I think some of it could be solved with communication. I think that engineers who are comfortable with the big idea could spend more time working out the details with those who prefer more guidance. I know some people who make an effort to do this, though not all of them do so effectively. Unfortunately, it seems like the effort to broaden one’s horizons and deal better with open questions on a project isn’t an effort often made by those who prefer things nailed down, and I’m not sure how to motivate such people. Even the desire to make something only seems to apply to situations where they know in advance how to get there and what the end result will be.