So an engineer that made a system that was 1/5000 the speed and thousands of times the cost of a $45 computer wouldn't be a smart engineer. They'd be history's shittiest engineer ever.
>any idiot can make a high quality product by using expensive materials, but good engineering is bring a high quality product to market at an attractive price.
it's a cute sentiment, but it throws out on-the-edge engineering work that produces little product, or engineering that is subsidized elsewhere where the cash value is of little importance.
For example, I never thought the fine folks engineering at NASA were idiots, nor the people at defense groups like Northrop Grumman -- but i'd hardly call their wares a good 'cash value'.
> There’s also another category of people. Good (sometimes brilliant, even) engineers who know exactly what they’re doing but who simply don’t care enough to do the right thing.
Sometimes not doing the right thing is the right thing to do.
> The 1x engineer talks about their car and weekend, the 10x engineer talks about technology.
Probably because the 1x engineer isn’t a complete moron.
You would have to be a complete moron to really care about any of this crap, unless of course you’re helping people. However- you’re not. And if you are, good for you.
> an engineer is someone working on something they know everything about.
That seems completely contrary to my engineering training. The engineer motto is about "be prepared for the unexpected" i.e. escape hatches, manual override, overprovisioning, assume that your temporary "train", "power plant", "airplane" will be in service for 40 years instead of 20, make it serviceable even without infrastructure.
>I trust any engineer who responds with an “it depends..” over someone who has an absolute answer.
That heuristic matches on the hordes of liars who try and sound smart while hedging their claims with a liberal application of weasel words to avoid being provably wrong. And those people outnumber the "good engineers" probably by at least an order of magnitude...
> I had my excuses. I don’t know crap about aesthetics. I majored in engineering– it’s almost a badge of pride to build something that looks awful. “I majored in engineering — it’s almost a badge of
pride to build something that looks awful.”
I guess whoever did the pull-quotes was also an engineering-major...
If we are going to generalize, I would have to say the exact opposite. In my experience they are definitely smart and capable, but usually extremely naive and somewhat sheltered by western standards.
[edit] Achshually "An engineer can do for a dollar what any fool can do for two" - Arthur C. Wellington
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