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"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? ... They take them out and shoot them."
by gryfft 4y ago
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? ... They take them out and shoot them."
- astrange 4y agoEngineers have the strange tendency to turn into cranks (physics, politics, medical… take your pick) once they get old, so maybe it's not a bad idea. Maybe related to why they're overrepresented in cults and terrorist cells.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoI think they turn into cranks much earlier. Part of this is that I think despite engineering not actually functioning that way, engineers can often get away with falling into cult logic (there is one true path) in a way that other disciplines are more resistant to. Look at hackerrank and whiteboarding- wtf is that if not straight cult logic.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoWe shall have a brand new world, without middle management, a clean architecture, tabula rasa, begin a new, without self deprecation. >>rm -rf --no-preserve-root / Shall be our battlecry. To drive the heathens, in acceptance of error states, to heaps and set ablaze will be our mission. Creativemode aka god wills it!
- yellowapple 4y agoHell, I was probably born a crank. I think the causal relationship is more likely to be "cranks become engineers" than "engineers become cranks".
- hirundo 4y agoAs an engineer I resent that. The causation is reversed. I got into engineering because of my tendency to, uh, think independently, not the other way around. It just took a while for me to think independently about physics, politics, medical...take your pick, and arrive at independent conclusions.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoYou wanted to be god, creating a miniature world in perfection, a system in your image. With purity of concepts.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoI think this tendency is mainly one for /successful/ engineers, ones that society has repeatedly rewarded for completing engineering projects to the satisfaction of others. Somebody works hard through a couple decades of looking at difficult but project-based problems and coming up with solutions. These projects start small and well-defined ("design the least expensive $thing that can accomplish $goal using this library of components") but are of increasing complexity and eventually start to look a lot like politics and sociology ("build a team that is capable of creating a successful product for the $industry industry"). They succeed at all of them, possibly even because they are actually very smart, and so come to the view that life is a series of projects that can be completed successfully, after which they will be rewarded with money and admiration. When engineering projects of sufficient ambition cease to become available (there are only so many Channel Tunnels or moon rockets to organize and build), they jump sideways into other disciplines with this template. Often that other discipline is politics, and their methods and mental models are just wrong because the engineering that these people know (not all engineering) is about completing projects within constraints, but politics has poorly defined constraints and is not a "project" (because there is no end). This isn't really limited to engineers. All of us are in danger of thinking that our experience has prepared us for more than it really has. If anything, its more of a danger for lawyers and MBA types.
- as1mov 4y agoNot sure if this a common joke in the industry or you're actually quoting the movie Primer
- cableshaft 4y agoKind of both, I think.
- gryfft 4y agoYep, kind of both.