The similarity In Engineering Cultures

Sean Moran 09/03/2020

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I'm just on my way back from Central America, and as usual when I work abroad, I am struck by the similarity in engineering culture, from Panama to Pakistan. Our discipline is the same across continents, and also through time. The nature of the work of an engineer sets the priorities, the boundaries, and the relationships between the parts of the engineering enterprise. All engineers must approach their work in an outcomes-based way, because outcomes are what people are paying us to produce.

Our paymasters care about making the specified outcome happen on time, for the money we told them it was going to cost, so we have to care about it too. This comes more naturally to some than others. There are some safety “experts” who insist that you can't put a price on a human life, but of course you can – doctors and insurers do it all the time. Like their environmental equivalents, this is just lazy holier-than-thou arse-covering masquerading as something more noble. A real expert knows exactly what human life and the environment is worth: as much as people are willing to pay to save them, a figure which varies from time to time and place to place, and is never infinite.

What has changed is the speed and medium of communication, but international standardisation of deliverables happened before my time. I had little difficulty reading the first Turkish P+IDs I ever saw, even back in the days of dyeline prints. The near universal use of international standard drawing symbols and usually the same numbers as we are familiar with makes it easy for anyone experienced.

What is also the same across time and space is the relationship between engineers and managers. Whilst engineers should not be as risk averse as those safety charlatans mentioned earlier, neither should they be as cavalier as some managers I have come across. Engineers and managers tend to differ in their risk aversion. Managers want to get it done. Engineers want it to work, and we know about the iron triangle of design- “Fast, cheap or good – pick any two.” Managers tend to want us to give them all three.

All of this was a mystery to my colleagues when I worked in academia. Their idea of professional engineering tended to have been sourced from the kind of managers who got out of actual engineering as fast as they could. Those guys think “Subject Matter Experts” like me are at best anoraks who didn’t have the sense to get out of boring and unforgiving engineering and into the well paid bullshitting, brownnosing and backstabbing they do. I think many of them almost pity us. But I love being an engineer, and I learn new things every week. I get to go to interesting places, meet interesting problems (and people). I prefer the problems. You can solve problems. You can't solve people. You can't even dissolve people.

But to return to academic misconceptions, there was a widespread notion that the nature of engineering practice varied on a short timescale, and was unrecognisable from country to country. Consequently, there really was no such thing as professional engineering practice, and even if there were, it would be different tomorrow, and is already different one country over, so trying to teach it would always be out of date, therefore why even try? What a great excuse to teach your research interests as these will surely be the basis of the future, just like Bill and Ted's music.

But this is nonsense. I am certain that some things about engineering, (every kind of engineering) have been conserved since the first engineering project, before the pyramids and Stonehenge. I am certain that those who designed and built Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China had more in common with each other and today's engineers than they would with academics. Things have to happen in a certain order. They require certain resources. There is a finite amount of resources. The wall, or whatever, has to meet specification (not falling down, keeping out hordes etc.) Anyone given the same task today would face many of the same constraints, and a professional would approach the task in the same way.

This is one of the key advantages of engineering – portability. Lawyers, accountants and the like are only licenced to work in one place, but we can go anywhere and be at home with a problem inside a day. Even those of us as stubbornly monolingual as me….