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'.
> 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.
> They're full of very smart people, but they have had some very sloppy goofs over the years.
That's because smart people tend to overestimate their abilities and think they are invincible. In fact the comment posted just below this one is jumping to conclusions that this probably only applies to the inferior-intellect mechanical and electrical engineers.
I'm mid-level engineer. Honestly, several staff+ engineers may not be spitting tech mumbo-jumbo, but they do dump all other kind of BS. Political BS, "tactical tornados"[1]. May not necessarily mean they were good at engineering, but just good with people skills. Obviously, not everyone is like that, but I would say many are.
> 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.
>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 seriously doubt you'd be able to identify the engineers from what they wrote.
This isn't meant to be funny, but I bet you could identify good engineers from what they wrote rather quickly. What does a good engineer do when they discover a faulty resistor while debugging a circuit? Cut it out, throw it in the trash, and replace it with a working one. They never pause to consider the moral impact of suddenly removing it from the board, attempt to rehabilitate it, or try to empathize with it. They cut it out and move on.
If you apply engineering principles to societal problems, the die-hard engineer may come up with a similar result. I'm only speculating, but their line of reasoning could resemble... "these (good productive) citizens do not harm other citizens, and they support their economies through labor and taxes.... discard every other citizen that does not do this, and replace them with a working one".
> 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.
It's interesting that you use the pejorative "smartass" and imply the demand is unreasonable. This couldn't be a clearer example of the low social status engineers have.
There's a quote: engineers can do for $1 what any fool can do for $2 (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1009994-an-engineer-can-do-...)
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.
Web3 people aren't good engineers. At all.
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