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I wonder who the target audience here is. It is a short article composed of quotes from Randy Pausch, some generalizations about engineers, and sports metaphor

I wonder who the target audience here is. It is a short article composed of quotes from Randy Pausch, some generalizations about engineers, and sports metaphors. > I’ve had the privilege of spending my entire career in technology surrounded by wicked smart engineers. I’ve always been drawn to their raw intelligence, Spock-like rationality, sincere honesty, dry humor and quirkiness. With the immense popularity of the sitcom, “The Big Bang Theory”, I suppose I’m not alone in my appreciation of them. Almost none of the characters on Big Bang Theory were engineers, they were physicists. This article seems to conflate 'nerd' with 'engineer' on an incredibly surface level exploration. ... and before anything is actually stated, it moves over to use sports metaphors to accent how important teamwork is. The awful truth is that arrogance, inability to delegate, poor communication, poor ability to react to feedback are traits that are rampant in pretty much every industry, including VC. Picking out engineers are some type of specific 'archetype' especially bad at these skills is buying into awful stereotypes about engineers as if we have no social skills.

deleted 8y ago
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justicezyx 8y ago
Given that engineers are usually the one who do not talk about running a business, then it pretty much leave them as the only target of being arrogant, because they are not going to pin another group of people as arrogant...
ISL 8y ago
The caricatures on Big-Bang theory have some basis in truth, but are generally unlike the physicists I work with every day.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  I don't know any engineers who are obsessed with comic books, Star Trek, or Frodo.
s-shellfish 8y ago
There are lots of experiences that are very specific to technical people. These experiences are not easily communicated. It's possible that we all go through similar quirky experiences that yield absurd and seemingly arrogant behavior because of these particular intracicies of working so closely with machines. It's also nice to have personal privacy when we know we are responsible for so much data and information about people. It's possible that this winds up looking like arrogance, but isn't actually. It's just people going through a thing that honestly, most humans just don't go through. Not every person experiences life in the following way. I'm around tons of people I could see as arrogant or judgemental or whatever ( and myself the same, if not much more so than everyone else I know ) but honestly it's more like, when software doesn't work correctly, there becomes an odd sort of recurrence relation between the source of the issue and the outlet, and how that maps onto how one sees their self and others. And I honestly think most people who work with machines are so used to seeing that pattern that they understand the dynamic enough to not judge, just slowly hope their additions to the systems they work on get noticed enough to improve the whole process. So yes, it's an inability to communicate, but we understand one another, because we can explain it with math or code, which most people don't care about. Golden rule. You don't give a shit about my knowledge, I don't give a crap about yours. If you think I'm being arrogant, please try to figure out whether you'd actually like to experience life like this first, where everything is chaos and crazy and nothing the world says makes sense, because most people just don't want to deal with the details of actually understanding how hard it is to get a machine to do exactly what they want it to do, and how hard it is to avoid having that character defect mapping over into one's own social life at all times, as though one must be on constant guard for the oh so you're terrible exhibition of being both aware of being smart, and actually being intelligent at the same time. We don't have social skills like most people. That's fine. Why is that a bad thing? Those people wear lack of knowledge of logic and mathematics as though it were some badge to be proud of. Which is again, fine! Just don't force me into your archetype of having social skills.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > winds up looking like arrogance I'm seeing more and more accusations of arrogance leveled at "engineers" (but usually they mean programmers). I think this is because they're no longer allowed to stuff us in our lockers and push our heads in the toilets, so they have to be more subtle when they bully us.

deleted 8y ago

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justicezyx 8y ago

Given that engineers are usually the one who do not talk about running a business, then it pretty much leave them as the only target of being arrogant, because they are not going to pin another group of people as arrogant...

ISL 8y ago

The caricatures on Big-Bang theory have some basis in truth, but are generally unlike the physicists I work with every day.

skookumchuck 8y ago
I don't know any engineers who are obsessed with comic books, Star Trek, or Frodo.

s-shellfish 8y ago

There are lots of experiences that are very specific to technical people. These experiences are not easily communicated. It's possible that we all go through similar quirky experiences that yield absurd and seemingly arrogant behavior because of these particular intracicies of working so closely with machines. It's also nice to have personal privacy when we know we are responsible for so much data and information about people. It's possible that this winds up looking like arrogance, but isn't actually. It's just people going through a thing that honestly, most humans just don't go through. Not every person experiences life in the following way. I'm around tons of people I could see as arrogant or judgemental or whatever ( and myself the same, if not much more so than everyone else I know ) but honestly it's more like, when software doesn't work correctly, there becomes an odd sort of recurrence relation between the source of the issue and the outlet, and how that maps onto how one sees their self and others. And I honestly think most people who work with machines are so used to seeing that pattern that they understand the dynamic enough to not judge, just slowly hope their additions to the systems they work on get noticed enough to improve the whole process. So yes, it's an inability to communicate, but we understand one another, because we can explain it with math or code, which most people don't care about. Golden rule. You don't give a shit about my knowledge, I don't give a crap about yours. If you think I'm being arrogant, please try to figure out whether you'd actually like to experience life like this first, where everything is chaos and crazy and nothing the world says makes sense, because most people just don't want to deal with the details of actually understanding how hard it is to get a machine to do exactly what they want it to do, and how hard it is to avoid having that character defect mapping over into one's own social life at all times, as though one must be on constant guard for the oh so you're terrible exhibition of being both aware of being smart, and actually being intelligent at the same time. We don't have social skills like most people. That's fine. Why is that a bad thing? Those people wear lack of knowledge of logic and mathematics as though it were some badge to be proud of. Which is again, fine! Just don't force me into your archetype of having social skills.

commandlinefan 8y ago
> winds up looking like arrogance I'm seeing more and more accusations of arrogance leveled at "engineers" (but usually they mean programmers). I think this is because they're no longer allowed to stuff us in our lockers and push our heads in the toilets, so they have to be more subtle when they bully us.