The Perilous Perspective

As someone who entered engineering with an open mind, I started to realize pretty quickly that you have to conform or be cast out (thanks, Rush). That's because the entire industry is conditioned by society to have a very similar perspective or outlook on life. That perspective was formed by older generations who thought being an engineer and working a corporate job was the pinnacle of existence. Conformity Of course, why wouldn't engineering be the pinnacle of existence? Aside from Hollywood, engineers have some of the highest paying jobs in the country. In addition, engineers get to work on some pretty cool topics while getting benefits like insurance and travel. Who wouldn't want to be a part of this elite group? I don't need to answer that. When I first started putting together this article, I got to thinking about what made it so hard for me to feel comfortable in an engineering environment. And, it goes back to this issue of conformity. Engineers tend to have a lot of pride in their work, and that pride sort of mirrors that of a nationalistic society where outsiders are rejected. As a result, the only way to thrive in this sort of environment is to close your mind to the outside. That same scenario is why I was a bit of an outcast in my home town. The Toxic Culture The reason I want to talk about this perilous perspective is because the engineering industry has one of the most toxic cultures in Corporate America. In this section, I plan to highlight some of the aspects of this toxic culture. Narrow-Mindedness If you've ever spent a lot of time in one place, you start to forget how the rest of the world operates. After all, you only know that small piece of the world, so it isn't really your fault. I noticed this close-minded phenomenon a lot while growing up in a small town. People tend to live their entire lives within a ten-mile radius. As a result, they don't really get a whole lot of exposure to the rest of the world. Of course, I'm sure the locals have plenty of reasons why they stuck in one place, but you have to feel somewhat bad for them. Their fixed perspective destroys any chance they have of expanding their horizons, so the issue sort of perpetuates itself. Think about one person from your hometown that matches the description above. Now, take that person and fill a small community with them. Over time, you'll develop a major group of like-minded people who are sort of stuck in their ways. Again, you can't really blame them. All they know is exactly what they've experienced, so their model of the world is a bit skewed. View from my fake hometown. With that analogy in hand, try applying it to a major engineering firm. Think Westinghouse, General Electric, and Lockheed Martin. Alright, what you have now is a group of Kool-Aid drinkers. We're talking about a group of people who spend at least 40 hours a week together at one of the most influential companies in the world. You can probably expect some arrogance, but you can definitely expect plenty of conformity. Greed We all talk about innovation, but do we ever actually seek it? Ask Ex-Google engineer, Steve Yegge. The engineering industry is almost as guilty of fraud as most politicians. It's despicable, and it's frustrating. In my opinion, the real heroes in innovation are researchers in academia. Anything of importance comes from research, but you won't hear about that in the news. I assume that's because researchers actually want to contribute to the greater good rather than scoring the next big paycheck. Instead, it's about reshaping our world for the better. If engineering was a benevolent discipline, then we'd already have solved most of the problems that actually matter in society. I'm talking challenges like clean energy, climate change, cancer, world hunger, etc. All of these topics and more would have already been solved. Unfortunately, the problem is the norm just generates too much money in the engineering world. Do you think BP wants us to eradicate the use of fossil fuels? Their entire industry relies on destroying the planet just so a few people can go home with a paycheck. If I haven't highlighted greed enough in this series, it's the primary driving factor for the entirety of the engineering world. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad motivator if it was making the world a better place, but it isn't. We actively reverse positive changes in society in the name of greed. Pride While pride typically has a positive connotation, I feel it's out-of-place in engineering. As stated before, the industry essentially takes credit for the work of researchers. Sure, engineering does a great job of bridging the gap between concept and reality, but that's the easy part. It's simply manufacturing at a higher level. To prove it, here's an assembly line analogy: Researcher invents some new way of accomplishing a task in software.Researcher polishes and perfects the idea through peer review.Researcher publishes new idea as an open-source library.Engineering team discovers new library which addresses their needs.Engineering team snaps library onto a project like a bolt on a car.Engineering team ships product and makes a bunch of money.Engineering team brags about their success like they built it from scratch. Now, I don't mean to diminish the efforts of engineers, but I want to simply point out that engineers don't really have original thought. Instead, they tend to piggyback their efforts on the shoulders of knowledge that already exists. Again, the lack of original thought goes all the way back to this idea of conformity that seems to permeate the engineering world. As an engineer myself, I never really understood the pride in that kind of culture. When You're In, You're In I think one of the worst experiences I had with this perilous perspective was when I first told my program manager about my plans to go back to school. At the time, the business was going under. Company stock was crashing while the market was growing, and the business was forced to make major cuts. Just take a look at what the company was dealing with: Obviously, I hated my job, but I also wanted some sort of job security. After all, I still had loans to pay. In addition, I was in Atlanta for at least another six months, and I wasn't moving. So, I decided to explain the situation to my program manager. Unfortunately, they weren't quite comforting. When I admitted all that to my program manager, they acted as if I was crazy for wanting to leave. If you're an employer, don't ever do this. You'll just make the situation harder for everyone. What do you expect to happen? Do you really expect to guilt the person into staying? That's not going to work in the long-term. Of course, the whole situation is kind of funny to me now. Just two months after I left, my old company was merged with another business. Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid. Let's Be Real When I worked in engineering, I saw all three aspects of this perilous perspective on a daily basis. From cost-based decisions to narrow-minded projections, I felt like I had seen it all. In fact, this engineering culture was magnified because the business was cutting hundreds of manufacturing jobs while retaining positions in engineering. At that point, the pride started to go to people's heads a bit. So, I got out. I got tired of people telling me I was stupid for wanting to leave. I was never going to conform to a system that values money over people and outcomes over excellence. Engineering just wasn't for me.

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