Gaining engineering knowledge and experience is a hard won thing.
I means developing a rigorous discpline in logical thought and reasoning, and it means having to actually prove things or be shot down badly.
Anyone working an a field where such things are absolutely necessary understands the differance between having an opinion and having knowledge.
It is very frustrating when you try to get a certain technical point across to someone who cannot be bothered to understand the absolute basics, even when given an analogy a scholloy could understand, and that person wilfully fials to grasp any of the salinet points.
It gets worse when the unenlightened one keeps asking ‘why’ without reason, and ‘spoon feed me twenty or thirty years of experience’ within the limitations of a single post on a message board.
When engineers talk, they could use jargon, but oten there are so many fields and so many overlapping areas, that one engineers will find it works well enough to explain their specialism when talking to another, its not just professional respect, it is a way of understanding who is likely to know what they are talking about.
If you are not of such a disciplined background, you cannot hope to understand why some things are and why they are not possible without putting in at least some effort on your part, and wondeful as the internet is, it will take some independant study on your part.
That might seem too much like hard work, engineers do it all the time, its called ‘keeping up to date’, and to those who just want an instant fix of knowledge without any of the effort, you come across as childish, ignorant and lazy.
For those who do make some effort, it is greatly appreciated, engineers are always having to justify their stance to managers who have business degrees but not a thing about rationality.
We used to run diesel generators that would use up lots of lubricating oil, used it by the ton.
When we placed an order for a couple hundred more tons, our accountant administrators asked wether we could do without the oil and what did we need it for!!!
Even after explaining, they could not understand why we needed more than enough to fill a few ambulances(This was in a hospital)
It was only when we asked the accountantants wether the hospital needed the electricity and the heating that they began to slightly understand.
Any engineer on this board would look at that last and shrug their shoulders in recognition.
It would be interesting to if a few engineers put a few of their stories about idiot managers here, then you might understand why engineers are sometimes a little sharp with their remarks.
“What’s the problem with the project”
“Something you have never heard of, ineracts with something you don’t understand and stops something doing something you wouldn’t realise it needed to work”
Engineers get well sick of such folk.
) Other people he isn’t so kind to.