A publisher recently sent me an anonymous review of a proposal I had submitted for a future writing project, which was clearly written by some quite junior academic. Peer review of this kind, to my mind, demonstrates what happens when you give people the right to criticise others anonymously, without any responsibility or potential consequences. Some people – just as we have seen when this right was more widely extended via the internet – will be hateful.
This particular troll (as such people have become known) thought fit to include a statement that I was nearing the end of my career. I’m sure people like him wish this were true (I find it difficult to believe this person was female), but I’m not sixty yet. Just last year I was criticised by a pair of coffin-dodging fellow expert witnesses for my relative inexperience, on the grounds that I ‘only’ had thirty years’ work as an engineer behind me. There is presumably a sweet spot between being inexperienced and past it, which I seem to be occupying. I have no intention of retiring – I love my work, and it is a key aspect of my purpose and identity. I don’t do engineering: I am an engineer.
As it so happened, the day after I received that review, one of my LinkedIn contacts posted a picture of themselves with the legendary Norm Lieberman. They were onsite, and Norm was in coveralls and hard hat. Norm has been an engineering consultant for fifty years. He graduated in 1965. He’s in his eighties, and he’s not just still working, he’s still in a hardhat.
I’ve been seeing some nonsense on LinkedIn that the answer to engineering graduate oversupply is for all of the experienced engineers to retire early, so that we can be replaced by green graduates, as if experience counts for nothing, and engineering degrees make you an engineer. These ideas tend to be popular with academics, including the troll I referenced earlier. Lots of academics seem to support the idea that engineers with thirty years of experience have really had one year of experience, repeated thirty times over. Even if this were true, it would put them a year ahead of the overwhelming majority of todays’ academics.
As far as the idea that engineering graduates are engineers, many academics speak out of both sides of their mouths at once. Whilst mortally offended by the idea that engineering graduates without professional experience (such as themselves, in most cases) are not engineers, they are equally offended by the suggestion they should turn out “oven ready” graduates (that is, with any commercially useful skills at all).
Of course, even if we were to follow this stupid idea, academia would simply be stimulated to produce an even greater oversupply of clueless green graduates, and within a few years, (assuming there were any survivors from the continual hail of crashing airliners and exploding nuclear and chemical plants caused by them having been designed and operated by beginners), they would have to invite the beneficiaries of the previous purge of experience to resign to make room for the latest glut of cocky know-nothings.
So, I’m happy to disappoint those who think that my career is almost over. I haven’t even hung up my hard-hat yet, and when I do, I plan to continue in less strenuous areas, such as expert witness work for as long as I can manage it. I hope however to have better judgement in this regard than one of those two “experts” who thought me too callow to have a worthwhile opinion. He was apparently the only person in the court who wasn’t aware that he was either past it, had drunk his breakfast, or possibly both when he gave evidence. There’s no fool like an old fool, except possibly an overeducated and underexperienced one.
My father was made redundant at 49. He was not over the hill, since this turned out to be the mid-point his 70 year career.
In his 70s he was carrying out site surveys, sometimes going into crawl ways.