Big Decisions....

I've been thinking quite a bit about the Koen article this week. Aside from some gender issues that I noticed and tried to ignore and the clumsy way he made several of his points, I did feel there were some interesting ones.

His implication that engineers make big decisions struck me. (This was one of his clumsy points.) But if you think about it, engineers are in on the decisions of what gets made, gets produced, is put on the market. They aren't the only ones at that decision table, but they are there. That discussion reminded me of the reason that I became intersted in engineering.

When I was a child, my dad would come home from work frustrated and upset with the engineers. He was a construction electrician and before that worked on an automotive assembly line. He would say that the engineers just wouldn't listen to his ideas, and that he could do things faster/better/more efficient than the plans called for. I asked him what an engineer was. His comment went something like this: I don't know what an engineer really is. But I do know this. If you want to be where the action is, if you want to have a say in what gets made and what doesn't, then you have to be an engineer. He was saying that engineers make big decisions. And that's the part that really interested me. He was an "outsider" to engineering, and I wanted to be an insider. I wanted to make decisions and shape the future.

Koen's argument about uncertainty also struck a chord. "The engineer doesn't know where he is, where he is going, how he is going to get there, or is anyone will care when he does." I think this is another clumsily made point - I don't think he gives engineers enough credit. While there is certainly lots of uncertainty in any engineering problem solving situation, engineers are not as clueless as he makes them seem. And the entire Koen article talks in a way that makes it appear that engineers work in solitude. As we all know, they do not. And there is usually enough knowledge on the team that there is a pretty good idea of where they are, where they are going, how they are going to get there, and that someone will care when they do. The uncertainties are not as large as Koen makes them (but they are vastly larger than what we teach our students about). (Look, another tension!)

I could go on with other points (i.e. scientists look for "the" answer, engineers look for "an" answer), but it's late and tomorrow is another day for big decisions.