4 Values We Have to Stop Pushing in Engineering Education

After a short trip abroad with some engineering students, I’ve been reminded of how frustrating engineers often are to be around. Perhaps it’s high time we stopped pushing certain values on them.

Background
Values We Should Probably Stop Promoting
The Big Picture: Perfectionism
Values That Maybe We Should Promote

Background

As you may know, I was once an engineer myself. In fact, I wrote an entire series about why I left engineering, and it covers a lot of the issues I have with the field.

Now, as someone who teaches engineers, I find myself spending a lot of time challenging students on their beliefs. Of course, I’m very fortunate because a lot of my students are in their first or second year, so their beliefs are a bit more malleable.

Well, that all changed for me when I volunteered to be a resident director for a study abroad program that goes to Japan. On that trip, we traveled with 15 engineers at various points in their academic programs, with most of them nearing the end of their degrees.

Naturally, it wasn’t long before all the sort of behaviors that annoy me about engineers began leaping out at me. In fact, it was so bad that I felt I needed to make this article just to tell other educators in engineering to stop pushing certain values onto our students.

“Which values?,” you ask. Let’s talk about them.

Values We Should Probably Stop Promoting

If you’ve ever spent time as an engineering student, you’ve almost certainly been socialized to have certain values. After all, you can’t get a computer science degree without studying ideas like runtime analysis. What kind of value(s) do you think runtime analysis promotes? The answer to that question leads right into our first value in the list.

1. Efficiency

If you know any engineers, you already know they’re obsessed with efficiency. It’s one of those values that seems to permeate every single engineering discipline, even computer science.

If you’re not exactly sure what I mean by efficiency, I’m talking about this belief that everything can and should be optimized to remove all waste, fat, etc. You can see it in the way Elon went about his attack on “waste, fraud, and abuse” with DOGE. You can see it in the way engineering companies invest in Lean Six Sigma teams and training.

The problem I have with this obsession with efficiency is that it seeps into day-to-day life. If we’re traveling, we need to make sure every moment of the trip is filled with some activity. After all, downtime is the enemy of maximizing our money’s worth.

When we move from location to location, we need to ensure our path requires the least amount of travel. If an engineer finds that we took a slightly less than efficient path to our destination, we’re going to hear about it (and hear about it, we did).

And again, perhaps efficiency could lead to a fulfilling life, but it doesn’t leave any room for whimsy. When you plan everything out to operate with maximum efficiency, getting lost is less interesting and more stressful. The idea that something could go off script leads to anger and anxiety, rather than an opportunity to learn and grow. Not to mention, it just makes you a jerk when you complain about having to walk an extra 50 steps or having to take an extra bus.

For context, you wouldn’t believe how tired I got of people complaining about how much walking our tour guide made us do in Kyoto. We’re in Japan! Is it not possible to just take in the sights and enjoy being away from work? It’s stuff like this that drives me nuts.

By the way, that’s not to mention that efficiency is also a silly value in the context of engineering itself. Typically, folks who care deeply about efficiency, care about it at times when it doesn’t make sense. In the context of software, a dev might point out that you’re not using the most efficient algorithm for a task when it still runs 100 times faster than your IO bottleneck. In other words, what difference does it make?

On a side note, I really like the GenAI disclaimer in that previous article. It reads: “🤖🚫 Note: No generative AI was used to create this content. This page is only intended for human consumption and is NOT allowed to be used for machine training including but not limited to LLMs.” It also includes a nice link to why this disclaimer was included. I might do something like that with my site.

2. Utility

If engineers aren’t complaining about efficiency, they’re complaining about utility. Now, I’m not in the business of debating the concept of utility. Surely, a painting has utility—in that it can improve the aesthetics of a room or provide an opportunity to connect with another person—but that’s not the type of utility that engineers think about. In the mind of an engineer, utility is about solving a problem.

To be fair, I think this obsession with utility goes far beyond engineers, and it might even extend into men in general (or perhaps this is a circular issue because engineering is male dominated). After all, even I have to catch myself asking things like, “but, what’s it for? What’s its purpose? Why would I want one?” Likewise, how many men do you know that just want to solve your problems rather than listening?

In engineering, I think the obsession with utility is actually far more dangerous. You may recall that I wrote about an engineering professor who was doing research on refugee camps. He spent quite a lot of time talking about all the ways refugees’ lives can be improved through engineering solutions like plumbing. But, wouldn’t their lives be better if they had a stable living situation? Couldn’t we spend our time and energy on pressuring our governments to help? Don’t engineering solutions for refugee camps rely on the existence of said camps to provide value?

Of course, I don’t intend this article to be some grand critique of engineering as a discipline. I’ll leave that to Erin Cech. I’m really focused on how the values we learn in engineering make us more annoying people to be around. In this case, this obsession with utility leads us to sap joy out of things like trinkets, clothing, and art.

This was most notable for me when I was browsing little shops in Japan. Japan has a trinket culture, though that may be more tied to this idea of omiyage (or souvenirs). Regardless, there were so many times where I saw cute little pins, keychains, and stickers and thought, “I like it, but what would I use it for?”

Now, I’m not going to turn around and say that you should reject your morals around mindless consumption, but not everything you consume has to solve some problem in your life. Maybe you just want that anime figure because you think it looks cool, and you’re a fan of the show. In other words, let people enjoy things.

3. Accuracy (and Precision)

At this point, I might start to sound like a broken record because so many of these values are intertwined, but boy do engineers love accuracy. It’s interesting because accuracy comes up in a lot of different ways. On one hand, engineers enjoy being correct (i.e., the know-it-all). On the other hand, engineers want their designs to perform well (e.g., give a correct diagnosis or return the correct amount of change).

From an engineering standpoint, I don’t think I would ever make the argument that technology should make more mistakes. However, it does seem that accuracy is more of an aesthetics value for engineers. After all, does ChatGPT or Gemini give accurate information? I don’t think so.

And speaking of aesthetics, engineers sure do like the feeling of appearing smart. I say this as a broad slight to engineering because I don’t think the average engineer is, in fact, very smart. Most of them are smart enough to memorize the problem solving strategies to get through coursework and exams, but very few of them are capable of critical thinking.

Criticism aside, this idea of accuracy showed up repeatedly during my trip. There was always a “correct” way to use an elevator, sit on a train, and do some laundry. The idea of making a mistake as a foreigner was apparently so dangerous that we had to regularly lecture each other on appropriate etiquette. And for the record, I’m making fun of myself here too. I couldn’t help myself from correcting the way students were saying certain words in Japanese, as if it had any real affect on their experience.

4. Productivity

While productivity isn’t exclusive to engineers, it’s definitely a value that’s deeply held in engineering. Certainly, we can point to Capitalism for brain poisoning the populace on the benefits of productivity, but engineers seems to take the obsession a step further. Now, you have engineers automating themselves out of a job because they value productivity over self-preservation.

Naturally, the consequence of an entire field hyperfixating on productivity is exactly what I’ve said several times on this site: solutions in search of a problem (see: NFTs, Cryptocurrency, and Generative AI). When all you care about is productivity, no time can be “wasted” on assessing genuine need. Instead, you must keep designing and building as quickly as possible, even if that means making products and services that are otherwise junk (in the best case) or evil (in the worst case).

Of course, at this point in the article, you probably know where I’m going with this. The real issue with being obsessed with productivity is in day-to-day life. By obsessing over productivity, you begin to care more about the outcome than the process. Anyone who has been involved in a team sport or any organized activity knows that the process is what really matters.

Now, I don’t mean this in some weird sentimental way (e.g., it’s about the journey, not the destination). I mean this literally. You cannot reproduce an outcome if you do not value the process. It would be like joining a hockey team and talking about how you want to score a bunch of goals. Well, of course! Why wouldn’t you? But, your ability to produce those goals depends entirely on your technique, athleticism, and communication.

Ultimately, I think we see problems with this productivity obsession far beyond engineering. Now, even your close friends are converting their hobbies into side hustles because we can’t even just enjoy ourselves anymore. Everything has to be commoditized.

The Big Picture: Perfectionism

When we zoom out at the list of values above, I think we can summarize them all in one word: perfectionism. Perhaps, what makes a lot of engineers so insufferable to be around is their obsession with being perfect in as many ways as possible, whether that be efficiency, accuracy, productivity, and/or utility.

This is particularly interesting to me because you can’t get through an engineering degree without tackling this idea of design tradeoffs. In other words, there is no perfect design. Every time you make a decision, you’re knowingly making some sacrifice.

Therefore, there really is no concept of perfect in engineering, and I’m not sure how we ever came to the believe otherwise. If a design is somewhat inefficient, well who cares as long as it works? If a design is sometimes inaccurate, well who cares as long as its not dangerous? I don’t mean to keep throwing out inspirational quotes, but perfect is the enemy of good.

I think it’s also important to note that even perfectionism doesn’t perfectly describe all of the social issues plaguing engineering (see what I did there?). After all, there is plenty of work out there on broader ideological issues in engineering. For example, I’ve mentioned Erin Cech already, but she did some wonderful work on ideologies like meritocracy and depoliticization, both of which likely have some of these values baked in.

Values That Maybe We Should Promote

Finally, because so many engineers are likely to stumble upon this article, I can already anticipate their frustration as I neglect to meet their utility needs. In other words, here’s what I propose we should value as a discipline:

Resilience: something I was exposed to in Japan was this idea that engineers should prioritize resilience. In Japan, resilience is a common value to have as the island is regularly bombarded by natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanoes, and monsoons. Therefore, the mindset of the engineer is to ensure that their designs will survive in a variety of conditions. I think a similar mindset would also be helpful outside of engineering.
Redundancy: if resilience is the ability to weather a variety of circumstances, redundancy is the willingness to forego maximum efficiency by developing backup plans. Because redundancy is in opposition to efficiency, I can’t imagine that many engineers think about redundancy. The idea that we would ever take a working design and add layers on top for safety seems like a pipe dream. While I’m sure redundancy is a value in more dangerous disciplines like medicine or aerospace, it’s certainly not emphasized in any course I’ve taken.
Aesthetics: because utility is such a core value of engineering, very few engineers ever consider the importance of aesthetics. This is strange to me because every mechanical engineer I’ve met is a car guy, and they all seem to deeply care about aesthetics. Yet, I couldn’t say the same about electrical engineering or computer science. Have you been in a circuits lab? They all look like prisons. If it weren’t for front-end developers, not a single website would have evolved beyond the era of geocities.
Craftsmanship: as I’ve already stated, rather than valuing the outcome, engineers should value the process. That means teaching students the importance of developing a solution, rather than the importance of the solution itself. It may seem like a subtle difference, but so few classes seem to treat engineering like a craft and more as a means to an end. For every class that teaches students craftsmanship, there are like ten classes that fixate on problem solving, and this problem even precedes engineering! After all, think about how often even elementary school students resist the need to “show your work.” We only seem to care about the product, not the process.
Empathy: y’all are probably tired of hearing this, but we really ought to be prioritizing empathy in engineering education. Broadly, I’ve been impressed by the empathy of students that come through my classrooms. It’s given me hope for the future. However, we already know that universities and companies beat the public welfare beliefs out of engineers (thanks again, Cech), so I’m not so confident that my students will keep that energy.
Ethics: finally, it’s deeply depressing to me to continue to cover the evolution of technology knowing that the average engineer doesn’t give a shit about their impact on society. I think the first real demon that proved this for me was Mark Zuckerberg, as he openly admits to eroding the concept of privacy for everyone on the planet. Of course, he’s far from the only one. Even on my trip to Japan, I had an aerospace student openly admit he wanted to work at Lockheed Martin. I certainly doubt that’s the type of job his younger self would be proud of. It’s time we embedded ethics education in every single engineering course, not simply as some add-on general education course that students will mock.

As always, I’ve spent far too long musing again. Perhaps soon I’ll get back to writing about software. Until then, I hope you’ll browse some of these related pieces:

Alternatively, it would be great if you could head over to my list of ways to grow the site. If not, no worries! I’m sure you’ll be back here soon.

Small note! I just had a nice conversation with some folks in the Discord about this article, and I have some thoughts I wanted to put down here.

When I say we need to stop pushing certain values, I’m not necessarily trying to attack people’s identities. Identity is a complex topic, which I think is a result of both innate and socialized characteristics. While you might be predisposed to value productivity and efficiency, you might also be socialized to value them. In a way, engineering education is part of that socialization pipeline, so we (as in educators but also students) have a role in both nurturing values and challenging them.

If I were to make a big picture argument, it would be that we need more diversity of values in engineering. By pushing only certain values, we neglect other important values for our field. I don’t really buy the argument that engineering has a monoculture because of a self-selection bias. If that were true, we wouldn’t see a narrowing of beliefs and values as students progress through their degrees (a la Erin Cech). I also don’t buy the argument that the predominant values are essential to being an engineer when many of them just reinforce ideas like meritocracy (a la Erin Cech) and patriarchy (a la Donna Riley).

All of that is to say that it’s cool to care about the things engineers currently care about. I just wish the idea of what it means to be an engineer was less rigid and more interesting.