How Good Is Good Enough?

I’ve been having a few discussions recently about the continuum of quality in design, from negligence through competence, good practice and best practice to perfection.

This is an issue I deal with a lot in expert witness work. Naturally, in this context, I don’t see an awful lot of perfection, but my views on what best/good practice and barely competent mediocrity look like in engineering have certainly changed over time.

In truth, there isn’t much best practice going on in everyday engineering. Best practice is exceptional excellence, something only seen in a few places which make a great conscious effort to attain and maintain it. Best practice wins awards. Now I know there are engineers who disagree with me on this. Some even believe that best practice is synonymous with competence; my first job in design was at a company which aimed for the highest standards, defining “good enough” as good/best practice, so I do get it.

But competence is actually set at a far lower standard, that of mediocrity rather than excellence. And, in any case, best practice is all too often simply out of the question. Engineers have to produce plants which meet specification, and they have to do this in the face of a range of economic, geographical, technical and human constraints. If the plant meets the spec, then the engineers’ work is done. Anything beyond bare competence tends to be imposed on companies from regulators and/or their supply chain.

So, everyday competence in engineering is not about perfection, it is about the ‘good enough’ – , or to put it another way, the not very good.

Quite a few engineers would disagree with this too because terms like “mediocre” and “not very good” can be viewed as insults, a polite way of saying substandard, or even incompetent. British English tends to soft-pedal things a bit. “Not very good” can be a polite way of saying bad, rather than “good enough”. Mediocre can be taken to mean “less than average”, rather than “average”. When I was first exposed to the standard which I now know (with an additional thirty years of experience) to be mediocrity, I thought it was “bad”.

Good practice is theoretically reasonably commonplace. Every company which operates an ISO 9000 series quality system should be working to good engineering practice (GEP), as should everyone regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration (because GEP is a subset of Good Manufacturing Practice), as well as all companies which aim to work to the US’s “Recognized and Generally Accepted Good Engineering Practice” (RAGAGEP). All these management systems are however capable of subversion, producing bad engineering outcomes which are exquisitely well documented with five levels of thoughtless signoff. At the end of the day, competence is a characteristic of individual engineers, rather than systems. Good engineers are good wherever they are – if they are not allowed to do their job properly, they tend to move on.

A reasonably competent member of our profession is not going to win any awards. They may be mediocre, but that's good enough to practice engineering competently. The courts and the PEIs agree. That said, I have however noticed a reduction in competence over the last ten years amongst junior engineers, and a lack of systems to correct them. This is not just in expert witness practice, as I discussed in my last article. New graduates are being produced who have been able to rely entirely on modelling and simulation software, and LLMs such as Chat GPT. We rather hoped that computers would increase human potential, but it seems to me that they have instead decreased it. A new graduate, plus software, is somehow less competent than an old graduate with a calculator. My generation of graduates had heads full of mathematical formulae and facts. Nowadays, students are given all of the formulae when they do exams. In my experience from lecturing, they don’t even reliably know their times tables. They have never had to retain any knowledge for longer than it takes to pass an exam. Without a computer, they are lost.

Since the standard of competence is set at the average performance of practitioners, if engineers are going to become less competent, we will have to move the line. In that sense, today’s mediocre engineer may be ‘worse’ than their counterpart from ten, twenty or thirty years ago, but young engineers are not to blame for this. In my view the responsibility lies with company management, grateful for the cheapness of new graduates and their ability to use computers to generate a lot of bad designs really quickly. If they properly priced in for the checking and correcting of this work, they would see that getting someone who knew what they were doing to produce one good design would be better.

I don’t however think we should move the line. I think it should be held. Young engineers should be trained to meet the current standards of competence as soon as possible in their first jobs, even if they don’t know why they need it.

The reason why they need it is that a green graduate on day one of their working life is expected by the courts to be competent. The person writing an expert witness report investigating an issue of competence is likely to be far older than them, and to be expecting them to be as good as the current average engineer at a minimum. If that expert is my age or older, and has not stayed current with the drop in average standards, their view on where the line is might be even more stringent.