Inside the Mind of an Engineer: How to Make Societal Issues Worse

Engineering is responsible for a lot of the world around us, and it's something I am thankful to be a part of everyday. Recently, however, it feels like things have shifted in the mindset of the average engineer, and we're unknowingly (in my most charitable interpretation) making the world a worse place to live. To kick things off, I want to share a couple of stories about my time as a graduate student in engineering education. Then, I want to take the lessons we learn from those stories and map then onto engineering more broadly. Don't worry! I'm not going to paint with a broad brush. A Little Anecdote A couple years into my doctoral program, I went to a seminar to see a speaker discuss their research. At the time, I remember the speaker sharing their experience with refugee camps—presumably a noble cause. To be honest, I don't really remember much about their work, but I imagine it involved engineering solutions for refugees (e.g., plumbing, water filtration, etc.). However, I do remember that as the talk went longer, something began to eat away at me: is engineering the only way to help refugees? Better yet, is engineering even an appropriate way to help refugees? In my mind, I was wondering what other options were out there. For example, were there ways we could donate to these refugees? Could we contact government officials to let them know we want them in our communities? Could we encourage our managers to hire refugees? Was there anything else that could be done other than treating them as an engineering experiment? Those who know me know that I tend to be on the quiet side, so these questions were really eating away at me. With these thoughts wandering through my head, I decided to ask what else could be done for the refugees. Because the speaker was an academic working with refugees, I had assumed (perhaps falsely) that he would be prepared for a question like this. After all, you can’t even fill out an Institutional Review Board (IRB) form without disclosing the risks and benefits to a population under study, and most academics (at least in the social sciences) would argue that IRB is only meant to enforce a minimum standard of ethics. You absolutely should be doing more in your academic work. Yet, when I asked my question, I didn’t get a thought-out response. In fact, I didn’t even really get a response. Instead, he kind of brushed me off in a small fit of anger, as if to imply one of three things. In my most charitable interpretation, the speaker brushed the question off because he believed that engineers should leverage their strengths and leave non-engineering tasks to others. In my slightly less charitable interpretation, the speaker believed that engineers do not have to think about things other than engineering. In my least charitable interpretation, the speaker believed that such concerns were beneath him. Because the speaker responded so angrily, I am somewhat inclined to believe that he felt that non-engineering work was beneath him. Given that refugees (and their camps) must exist for his work to exist, the thought probably never crossed his mind that maybe the goal should be to help refugees find places to call home. Therefore, in engineering, refugees are a problem that needs to be solved rather than a people who need to be helped. Yet Another Anecdote Much earlier in my graduate studies, I recall taking a course where we learned about how to craft research studies. One of the instructors for that course was a prolific researcher in engineering education, but they always rubbed me the wrong way. Perhaps the first time I got frustrated with this particular instructor was around a discussion on first-generation status. In academic contexts, first-generation status is tough to pin down, but it's usually reduced to neither of your parents having a 4-year degree. I always found this definition frustrating because there's no nuance: either your parents went to college or they didn't. Of course, that definition wouldn't be so much of an issue if it wasn't being used as a proxy for income. I think the general assumption is that people whose parents do not have a college education must automatically be poor. As someone who grew up working class, I have a hard time with this definition because neither of my parents were college educated until I was almost a teenager. In other words, whatever financial gain I would have experienced wasn't available until I was nearing adulthood. The irony of this being that the one college educated parent I have has since passed away from lung cancer. Can people with dead college educated parents consider themselves first-generation? When I tried to explain this to that particular instructor, they sort of shifted the conversation away from income and toward "capital." In other words, apparently because my mom attended college while I was growing up, I supposedly got insights into college that "real" first-generation students do not. For anyone who has been 10 years old before, you probably don't remember thinking about anything but homework and your favorite hobbies. Of course, that's more of a minor gripe of mine. What this instructor admitted to later was far more gross. Specifically, they were the "lead" author on an autoethnography of a Black woman in engineering—I hope you can already see the problem. Anyway, the autoethnography follows the story of a Black woman fighting her way out of poverty and into college. Unfortunately, I don't think her story has a good ending, which makes the instructors actions all the more heinous. I distinctly remember the instructor using this paper to engage us in a conversation around ethics. However, the conversation once again left me with a sour taste in my mouth because it centered around the ethics of "stepping in." In other words, when is it appropriate to help a study participant? In this case, the instructor shared a few stories about this woman who was trying to complete her degree but was falling behind on bills and ended up living in her car (with a child, if I recall correctly). This was the scenario presented to us as if the obvious choice wasn't to step in and help. At this point, you might be wondering what the counterargument could possibly be. Well, if you help a participant, it might taint your sample. Your influence may change the outcomes of the work. Therefore, to maintain objectivity, you should let that participant suffer in solitude. To me, this goes against not just basic morals but also research as an institution. The philosophical underpinning of interpretivist and critical research paradigms is that the researcher cannot isolate themselves from the research. Whether they're making interpretations of the data or playing a part in the generation of the data, there is no way to separate the researcher from the work. In other words, objectivity is a myth. If that is the case, then I would argue that you have a moral obligation to step in. The idea that we would ever knowingly watch someone suffer to maintain some thin veil of objectivity is a thought that never crossed my mind, so it was a tough moment for me. Taking a Critical Lens to Contemporary Engineering When you read the two previous stories, you might be inclined to treat them like a couple of one-offs. After all, there's no way these mindsets are the norm, right? Aside from the literature on this topic, which I may cover later in this piece, my main counterargument would be that the people above are supposed to be the exceptions. Each of them were in engineering education contexts, which is explicitly informed by more human-centered research paradigms (e.g., interpretivism rather than post-positivism). Therefore, the argument I would make is that if engineering educators are supposed to be the shining examples of humanism then actual engineers must not see humans as people at all. And if you don't believe me, look no further than the tech industry. While I've written extensively complaining about issues like cryptocurrency, NFTs, and generative AI, you don't really have to get that deep in the weeds. Look at any billionaire in tech right now. Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeffrey Bezos are all in a race to get off this planet as soon as possible. Do you think they have any plans to bring the rest of us? No, they're deluded into thinking that earth is a lost cause and that they can escape it using enough slave labor. Or, you could just watch Elon throw—not one but two—Nazi salutes. Do we really think that guy has our best interests in mind? I don't think he sees any of us as human. Of course, you don't need my commentary to know that engineering (and tech broadly) has its issues. You can just read a study about how students care less about public welfare as they progress in their degrees. You can also read about how certain ideologies like meritocracy and depoliticization allow engineers to ignore the impacts of their work. While you're at it, you might also consider reading about how rigor is arbitrarily defined to promote only certain types of work and identities in engineering. The Future of Tech When looking to the future of tech, I have a favor to ask of educators around the globe. We have to teach our students ethics and morals. We have to get our students to take and appreciate humanities courses. We have to foster a feeling of community for our students. We have to teach our students that people aren't a problem that needs solving. If we can do that, I will look to the future of tech as a positive force. One in which we aren't mass producing deep fakes of women. One in which we aren't stripping people of their privacy and their agency. One in which creatives aren't having their work stolen. One in which information isn't only afforded to the rich. Until then, I'll keep writing about my complaints. In the meantime, I hope you'll take a moment to support the site. You can do that by reading one of the following articles or by checking out my list of ways to grow the site: Checking Up on Google Search in 2024: It’s Worse Somehow Maybe Generative AI Is Just a Symptom of a Broader Problem in Tech 11 Reasons Why I Quit My Engineering Career Otherwise, thanks for sticking around!