Blog – Page 19 – The Renegade Coder

Honestly, if you've managed to read through this series this far, you understand how arrogant engineers can be. Even I probably give off some arrogance. It's just the reality of dealing with engineers. We tend to think that we're all pretty smart since our jobs are considered highly valuable to society. Unfortunately, a lot of engineers aren't the most intelligent. It seems they hand out the title to just about anyone who's willing to put in the work. That's why I'm starting to suspect that engineering is filling the manufacturing void. The Downfall of Manufacturing Why bring manufacturing into an article about engineering? Well, as it turns out, manufacturing is losing its battle to automation, and there seems to be a lot of people who are arrogant enough to think manufacturing—as we currently know it—will be around forever. A similar arrogance is flooding the engineering community, so I fear for the future of the discipline. Oh, and I kind of wanted to talk about unions a bit. Union Arrogance When the United States was forming, labor unions helped lay the foundation. Because of unions, we have important labor laws like the right to equal pay for equal work and the right to rest and leisure. Unfortunately today, unions sometimes do more harm than good. I know this opinion is a bit political, but hear me out. I've seen the union tear apart my own hometown. Let's just take a look at their average income. On average, the union earned around $35/hour before its downfall. That's outrageous. Assuming a 40-hour work week for 52 weeks, that amounts to $72,800/year. That figure doesn't include overtime and all the other important benefits the union typically demands. At the time this article was published, the average household made roughly $33,000/year in my hometown. That means on average, people working a basic manufacturing job could earn over twice as much alone as most families in the same area. That kind of greed is what makes unions so dangerous. Granted, I can't blame the unions entirely. After all, they're the reason we aren't working 100 hours a week for slave wages. Part of the blame has to go to American regulations since they force companies to move jobs overseas. Regardless, that's a topic for another time. Industrial Automation On top of everything described above, manufacturing in general is being phased out by automation. This makes sense as maintaining a machine is much cheaper and easier than paying and protecting several employees. Honestly, it's a no-brainer. This is what failure to innovate looks like. Unfortunately, society thinks automation is some sort of travesty. We would rather keep these soul crushing jobs than progress to a point in society where we can focus on what makes us human. That's right. This is a plug for the arts and humanities as well as academia and sports—oh, and the 30-hour work week. These are things that I wish we focused on as humans, but they tend to take a backseat to things like capitalism, war, and crime. Perhaps one day we'll progress to this point, but I'm unlikely to see it in my lifetime. Skill Cap vs. Skill Floor With manufacturing jobs disappearing across the US, engineering is filling that void. While engineering is not a manual labor job, it also doesn't require that much skill to be successful. I thoroughly expect that statement to turn heads, but it's true. Don't believe me? Consider the following video game concepts: skill cap and skill floor. In video games, skill cap refers to the limit placed on a player's effectiveness due to game mechanics. In other words, the player cannot possibly get any better because they are limited by the game. Meanwhile, skill floor refers to the minimum skill required for a player to be effective. In other words, as long as the player meets the skill floor, they will enjoy playing the game. Now, these terms are most often used in games where mechanics can vary by class or character. However, I feel like the terms map well to actual professions. For instance, I think engineering has a low skill floor. In fact, I would even go as far as to put engineering on the same level as the disappearing manufacturing jobs. In other words, the average person is probably a LEGO set away from being an engineer. That said, I believe engineering has a pretty high skill cap. Think of all the areas that can be explored and mastered as an engineer. Not many of us could even hold a conversation with some the greatest engineers of all time: Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, James Watt, etc. Of course, the engineering discipline receives its prestige from these greats, so anyone who has the title gets a little bit of their fame. As a result, engineers seem to think that they're somehow more intelligent than everyone else—including other engineers. This is readily apparent if you've ever spent time on a college campus. In which case, the arrogance of a typical engineering student is palpable. Enter: Software Engineering While I probably shouldn't speak for other engineering disciplines, I can say with confidence that coding has a skill floor comparable to manufacturing. After all, I believe that most people can learn how to code if they work hard enough. In fact, coding education is so accessible that a four-year degree isn't even needed anymore. People can learn how to code off of websites like mine then go off to a coding camp and come out with a certificate. At that point, they're considered employable. In fact, I've seen people pulled out of college early because they already had the skills to kickoff their career. Now, to be fair, I don't think that software development has a low skill floor. It's incredibly difficult and can take years to get a feel for the process. For every project, you need to be able to develop a solid architecture, prototype it quickly, develop a test plan, and perform rework as necessary. In addition, you need to be comfortable with common algorithms, data structures, and optimization. As for some of the softer skills, you need to be able to estimate the time and effort needed to complete a task, and you need to be able to version control your code and provide a stable release strategy. These types of skills are what make a true software engineer valuable. The Coding Assembly Line The process of writing code, however, has a low skill floor. Pretty much anyone can be given a task and implement it in code—no critical thinking required. Of course, I'm talking about an existing architecture which has been broken up into small Stack Overflow sized coding tasks. With that in mind, coding is no different from an assembly line. Rinse and repeat! Coders should start wearing these hats. Companies have started to understand this and have chosen to outsource their jobs to countries where they can pay employees a fifth of an American salary. Likewise, in the US, requirements to be a software engineer have declined quite a bit. In fact, I've seen electrical and mechanical engineers in charge of writing code for major portions of control systems. These are people who have effectively no software experience, and they're being asked to contribute to a complex system. Today, it seems you just need one person to really lay out the logic then everyone else can get down to business. You don't end up with a very stable product, but by next year there will be a new one to take its place. That's the sort of sad reality we live in today: speed over quality. Of course, I'm not the first one to pose this idea. Back in February 2017, WIRED wrote quite the article about this exact subject which sparked a bit of debate across the internet. Despite the debate, it seems coding is already replacing manufacturing as the new middle class profession. At this point, it's simply skilled labor. The Role of Arrogance in Engineering With engineering filling the manufacturing void, you'd imagine that engineers would start to be humbled. After all, they're next on the chopping block. Unfortunately, the lack of manufacturing jobs only increases the level of arrogance in engineering. It's like being a kid playing king of the hill. As you push more people off the hill, you start to gain more confidence. However, in this odd analogy, engineering isn't the biggest kid on the hill. It's research, and research will always be doing the dirty work for engineering. Perhaps one day, engineers will find themselves losing their jobs due to arrogance and automation. We're All a Little Bit Arrogant While much of this article has focused on software engineering, that doesn't mean it's the only form of engineering that exhibits this arrogance trait. In fact, I've probably touched on this a few times, but it seems most types of engineers exhibit some form of inferiority complex. It's likely due to all the bullying we receive growing up, but I'm sure the fact that it's really easy to become an engineer plays a part as well. Everyone thinks engineering is hard, so no one gives it a shot. With this low turnout, schools are forced to lower their standards. For instance, I can't tell you how many times I've taken an exam where most people should have failed only to be saved by a more than generous curve. Fortunately, I learned this pretty early on in college, so I often didn't put in as much effort as everyone else. After all, what's the point. Everyone was going to pass anyway. The thing that kills me is I went to a pretty decent school. It wasn't an Ivy League, but it's generally a well-respected research institution. That means that there are thousands of people graduating from sub-par institutions with the title of engineer. Now, I'm not saying good engineers can't come out of bad schools. I understand that finances are sometimes a deciding factor when it comes to schools, so sometimes very intelligent people have to make a compromise. However, the majority of the people who come out of these schools are sub-par as well. Fortunately, a good portion of engineering has a low skill floor, so it's not like these engineers are not capable of being engineers. The problem is that they think they're smart because society told them so. This is dangerous, and it's probably the number one reason why I can't stand working with most engineers. Arrogance in Practice Perhaps one of the worst experiences I ever had with this was at a leadership training. At this training, we were asked to get into teams with people we never met to solve a design challenge in a handful of days. The design challenge was simple: develop an autonomous robot out of LEGO which could complete 9 tasks in 2.5 minutes. This was a fun little engineering challenge that brought together several disciplines to design and implement a LEGO robot. Yes, the plural of LEGO is LEGO. I love this sort of task because I enjoy hearing different perspectives. It reminds me a lot of when I took a college game design course which brought together software developers and artists to make a real video game. I was exposed to a lot of different thoughts I might never have had otherwise. Establishing a Pecking Order Unfortunately, when you get a bunch of engineers together, this sort of collaboration devolves quickly into a pecking order. Usually, that involves me going toward the bottom because I don't feel like dealing with politics. I'll gladly let someone else lead us to our demise just because they feel like they're better than everyone. After all, I love a good learning opportunity. By the time we got together to work on our robot, I noticed that my teammates were already treating each other like idiots. In particular, there were two engineers from another business that had asserted their dominance in our team. To be honest, I'm not sure why they felt they were the smartest in the room, but I let them have at it. I thought maybe if I just let them do their thing, we'd get done faster. Naturally, that was a huge mistake. Instead, the two of them butt heads on literally every decision. It became a game to see who could micromanage harder. Missing Pieces During the chaos, I remember building this elevator-like structure by the directions. At some point, I realized we were missing pieces, so I told everyone to look out for extras. Of course, everyone was sort of ignoring me, so I dug around to try to find the missing pieces. Eventually, I ended up grabbing some similar looking pieces and swapped them in place. I mean we're dealing with LEGO here. I'm not too worried about getting everything perfect. As fate would have it, one of the other engineers caught wind of what I did, and they absolutely lost it. I can't tell you have many times I heard the word "perfect" in five minutes. This was day one of four, mind you, and I had already checked out. By day three, I was sleeping under the table. I don't think I did an ounce of work all week. Instead, I spent most of the week just observing team chemistry and eating free snacks. Sometimes I would go grab waters for the team just to get a breather. At some point, we had a complete robot which was based on something one of the leaders found on the internet. Ah, yes. Deliberate stealing of designs from someone else just like a good engineer. Rant aside, I remember I was assigned to develop software, but there was this silly rule where only one person could work on the software at a time. Naturally, one of the quieter team members ended up just writing the software and not letting anyone help. The arrogance was palpable again. Coding Conundrum If you've ever programmed one of these robots, then you know that it's not actually software in the sense that you use code. Instead, you use a set of coding blocks with inputs and string them together to form a program. Unfortunately, the genius working on the software didn't realize that you could program each data channel in parallel. For us, that meant our two independent wheels were being programmed in series. Just imagine a car that had to alternate between rotating the left side and right side tires. I thought our robot was having a seizure. I'm no expert, but I believe tires usually share an axle. Now you probably can't tell from all the ranting in this series, but I'm generally a nice guy. If I have some criticism, I tend to be tactful about it. Don't get me wrong. I'm pretty honest and forward with people, but some scenarios call for some sensitivity. In this case, I decided to propose the idea that maybe the starting code block could tie to more than one block at a time. I'm not sure the engineer totally understood, so I offered to demonstrate. Basically, I just grabbed another random block and tied it to the first, so two channels we setup in parallel. Let's just say that their mind was blown. That should have been a red flag for me. Planning Paths The following couple days were spent reworking code to follow some planned paths. This was perhaps the most annoying period of my life. The two dominant engineers just kept pointing out the obvious as if no one else had the same basic senses: *sees robot miss target*"Aww it just missed - turn it like 5 degrees to the left a bit"*tries again*"You turned it right, not left"*tries again*"You gotta line it up better in the starting area"*tries again*"Maybe like one more revolution"*looks at watch*"It's gotta be faster than that" Nothing that was said during that entire week was profound. Did I mention we were playing with LEGO? I mean it was ridiculous how seriously some engineers take themselves. While they were focused on winning a LEGO challenge, I was off spending time with the locals. You know, the whole reason we came all the way to Mexico. At least, that's why I went there. The Effects of Engineering Arrogance I'll keep this final section brief as I've already spent quite some time venting on the subject. That said, I want to just chat a bit about the effects of engineering arrogance on me and those like me. It's caused me to think a lot about what I really do on a daily basis and how it impacts those around me. Now I don't mean to just sit here and stereotype engineers from the comfort of my keyboard. After all, I carry the title as well. I got my undergrad in Computer Engineering, and I spent about two years in the industry. All I'm doing is challenging what I believe to be the accepted norm of engineering culture. It seems to be okay to fake it until you make it in this industry. While that motto works great for capitalism and the individual, its destructive for humanity. It's especially dangerous in engineering as the greater population believes we're experts in our field. Imagine if doctors had the same level of trust that engineers receive. We'd have a lot more people losing their lives on the operating table. Instead, the medical field has several processes in the way to prevent bad students from becoming bad doctors. I can imagine that process is extremely humbling, and I would love for something similar to exist in engineering. Then maybe engineers would actually be forced to earn their stripes—including me. With all that said, I'll leave each of you with a few questions that I've asked myself as an engineer. Perhaps they'll go toward leveling the heads of a few arrogant engineers. Maybe not, but I still have hope. Do I really deserve the amount of money I make?Am I really doing what's best for society/humanity?Am I simply a cog in the industry, and am I replaceable? As always, feel free to vent your frustrations with my article in the comments below. If you are also struggling with arrogant engineers, we can chat about it. Just send me an email using the link in the author bio.