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As a professional scientist, i think most of what i do day to day is engineering. There is no product or customer, but you are absolutely working within a set o

As a professional scientist, i think most of what i do day to day is engineering. There is no product or customer, but you are absolutely working within a set of design constraints to make a tool to perform a task. It makes a tremendous difference whether your engineering budget is being paid by basic research grants or venture capitalists. Funding science is a proven method of producing new tech which may subsequently be of interest to the for-profit people. The kinds of innovation that come out of big government funded science projects can never be produced exclusively by organizations whose purpose is to demonstrate growth to shareholders quarter over quarter.

mturmon 6y ago
The GP comment did over-reach...I agree that many scientists do indeed do engineering. I work at a lab that builds expensive, highly-specialized scientific instruments, and the scientists who lead that kind of work are right at the edge of what's possible in engineering an instrument that can make a scientific measurement. They get super-excited about stuff like new CCDs, exotic semiconductor doping, high-precision clocks, and detector cooling technologies. But there are also other scientists who aren't engineering-focused in that same way. They mostly want someone else to make the measurement, and to scoop up the data later and analyze it. Although come to think of it, many of those scientists do have a focus on the technologies for analysis - say, machine learning or large-scale cloud computations. One way I used to conceptualize whatever science/engineering divide there is, is in terms of the Myers-Briggs [* ] J/P distinction. Namely, J = judging = engineering, P = perceiving = science. I.e., "build a gizmo to figure this out" vs. "think abstractly about the consequences of theory." [* ] Subject to the usual caveats.

mturmon 6y ago

The GP comment did over-reach...I agree that many scientists do indeed do engineering. I work at a lab that builds expensive, highly-specialized scientific instruments, and the scientists who lead that kind of work are right at the edge of what's possible in engineering an instrument that can make a scientific measurement. They get super-excited about stuff like new CCDs, exotic semiconductor doping, high-precision clocks, and detector cooling technologies. But there are also other scientists who aren't engineering-focused in that same way. They mostly want someone else to make the measurement, and to scoop up the data later and analyze it. Although come to think of it, many of those scientists do have a focus on the technologies for analysis - say, machine learning or large-scale cloud computations. One way I used to conceptualize whatever science/engineering divide there is, is in terms of the Myers-Briggs [* ] J/P distinction. Namely, J = judging = engineering, P = perceiving = science. I.e., "build a gizmo to figure this out" vs. "think abstractly about the consequences of theory." [* ] Subject to the usual caveats.