> The fact that they're "human" is a flaw Ladies and gentlemen, behold! Eight words -- eight syllables -- laying bare why so many engineers tend to have such a

> The fact that they're "human" is a flaw Ladies and gentlemen, behold! Eight words -- eight syllables -- laying bare why so many engineers tend to have such a hard time dealing with politics and people, on every scale from the picayune to the planetary. I've never seen it put so succinctly. I'm still baffled as to why it's such a common problem, though. The essence of our shared discipline is to bridge the gap between a perfect idea and an imperfect world. This being the case, in our professional lives we must either be capable of recognizing and accepting such imperfection, or be incompetent; there is no third way. So why is it that, in the interpersonal realm, so many of us prefer to demand impossible perfection than to exercise the same capacity that serves us so well in the technical work of our field? There's no sensible way of understanding how the imperfect human world works, save to begin by redressing ignorance through observation. Instead, many of us (some days, I think, most of us) flee into any number of idiosyncratic political fantasies -- just-so stories about how that world should work -- and refuse outright even to consider the possible value of discovering how that world does work. Such refusal hampers us in any number of ways, professionally and otherwise; three of the former sort, right off the top of my head, are office politics, client interaction, and user interface design. Engineers are, of course, famously incompetent in all these areas, and unlike a lot of stereotypes, this one I've observed to be much more often accurate than otherwise. But I'm still struggling toward a conception of how this unhappy state of affairs comes to be.