Know Nothings

This is by no means the first generation of young people who thought that they knew everything, but it is the first one where the grown-ups took them seriously. I’ll leave aside the broader societal impacts of this, (which are by no means trivial) and instead concentrate on the implications for process design.

I was recently in a situation where I was reviewing a set of design documents produced by reasonably new graduates. The company in question had a culture in which only the two lowest grades of staff had job titles ending in the word engineer, and everyone wanted to be a “manager” ASAP.

Consequently, the people who were supposed to be checking the engineers’ work had spent the minimum possible time as an engineer after graduation. In other words, these lower grades of management were the people checking the calculations, but they didn’t know how.

There were some Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who were supposed to be providing overall guidance, but they acted with exaggerated respect towards the green graduates who were employed as engineers.

The calculations I reviewed were not even like good quality student work, but the SMEs did not send the learners back to try again or try harder, as I would have done. Neither did they offer them a model answer, or a reference to a book or paper where the proper way to do such calculations might be found.

Instead of acting like the hardnosed older engineers who taught me how to be an engineer, they acted like the most indulgent parents imaginable. Even where they were clearly giving feedback that I could tell was a very polite way of telling the author of some calculations that they were 100% wrong, these young engineers couldn’t hear them over the roar of their own awesomeness.

Consequently, at the point where I became involved, a lot of time and money had been spent going a long way down a wrong road. Several of the incompetents responsible for the documentation I reviewed had been promoted on the strength of their leadership qualities.

I saw internal reviews of this sub-student quality work in which senior management described it as best practice. Luckily, I was never exposed to what they would have considered negligence. It might have proved fatal.

This is not a one-off. I have worked on several expert witness assignments in which new graduates are taken at their own self-evaluation, and given the responsibility of designing something which is really going to get built. The errors they make are the foreseeable consequences of attempting to do in real life what they were taught to do in academia by people who never designed a thing in their lives.

One of these expert witness cases in particular might have taught a truth about the respect with which these young people are being treated. When I asked why an undergraduate had been allowed to effectively promote herself to chief design engineer, I was told “she is like a tiger!”. Perhaps those older engineers don’t respect these cocky youngsters at all. Perhaps they are frightened of them.

As well as specific areas of incompetence, there is a general lack of knowledge amongst graduates of how real engineers do things. The tools used in academia, such as Matlab and Mathcad, are replaced by MS Excel in professional life.

Modelling software is also far less commonly used and, where it is used, it is used as an adjunct to design, not as a substitute for it. Professional engineers dislike novelty, and do not even have access to the primary scientific literature which academia enjoys. Doing the thing that would have got you a good mark in academia is reliably not what you should be doing in professional practice.

The number of people in professional life with real design experience appears to be diminishing. In fairness to those SMEs, they didn’t have the time to correct all of the errors being made by hundreds of incompetents and, even if they did, these kids have never received negative feedback on anything before. They were at least as likely to think “OK, Boomer” and ignore criticism, as they were to learn anything.

Academia expects “industry” to teach people to be engineers, whilst they focus on the noble causes of teaching students how to think and how to learn. It seems to me that they have instead immunized them against learning.