C’mon everyone, the OP is a dumb one, granted, but it’s true that engineers sometimes do possess a special kind of arrogance.
It’s the type of arrogance that results from years of shaking at the mere sight of a dodge-ball, only to find yourself magically transported one day to a life where you are valued for your creative thinking and innovation. they show it off. Especially in front of people who remind them of those dodge-ball hurling neandertoads.
This is usually combined with fairly rigorous training to be accurate, but not necessarily genial, especially when it comes to communicating.
Yes, the whole world is out to get you. That explains it much more clearly than the remote possibility that you might just be a tiny bit off base with your original assumption.
But that would require you to take into account ideas which aren’t your own and possibly change your stance. Is the earth still flat in your world? :rolleyes:
We work hard for our degrees. We can’t bullshit or pad our work with fancy wordsmithing to snow the instructor. We have to derive the equations and crunch the nimbers. If it’s wrong, there is no “alternate but equally valid opinion”, and we have to design and build things that work in the real world. Usually, it is something that was underbudgeted, under a ridiculously short schedule, , with inadequate staffing, and then have to explain the problems to people who don’t care enough to understand the thing just won’t happen - the very same ones who made all the impossible promises (for someone else to actually deliver on) to begin with. Then we get something that does work, and someone wants to change it - for no good technical reason. So, we tend to get short with people who show themselves to be willfully ignorant. We get disgusted with people who have the data, numbers and graphs right there, and then go out of their way to ignore the info and do the opposite. Then there are the assholes who change the data to suit their own “views” but leave our name on the false info. Finally, when it goes to shit because the dumb fuck changed the info and gets caught, we are expected to fix it and come up with their excuses - that’s when I always go into “hang the bastard” mode.
We get tired of having to play nice with deliberately stupid people who don’t know or care about what we do. We get tired of people who dismiss everything presented, with endless bullshit “what abouts” and “what ifs”, when we know they are talking out their asses. We hate people who don’t do shit themselves, but harangue us with “paradigm” and “outside the box” bullshit talk. We hate bullshiters. It isn’t arrogance, it’s fatigue.
But, you’re ignoring the simple fact that bridges can be held up by marshmallows and hope. Hope is what’s most important to society! The children are our future, and we need bridges of hope. That’s my opinion, and opinions can’t be wrong!
Steve, I wouldn’t argue with you about what conditions are like for engineers, but you do realize that most professions could write a rant like yours about unfair/unpleasant working conditions, right? Working in an accounting department for a multinational oil and gas company, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to getting invoices approved and paid on time was engineers who like to collect invoices and build little forts with them on their desktops. Just saying that nobody’s completely wrong or completely right.
I actually see a lot less anti-engineer sentiment than what people here are expressing, or else I mainly don’t notice it. Most of who I work with are people who desperately need engineers, and engineering, and as a result I don’t get the flack back that some would. But within the engineering world itself, there is a pecking order as well. When I moved into management many years back (I still do most all of my own engineering as a consultant), I started to notice the “pure” engineers (the ones that never wanted to see a client, contract, invoice, or anything other than a spec) distancing themselves from me a bit. You have to fight hard to maintain respect when you move into management. I hear engineering jokes occasionally, but it’s quite stunning to me, as they don’t apply to many I know at all.
The average Engineer in my office is no different than most Americans, and that’s really sad in a parallel manner. They come to work from 8-5, eat a sack lunch or sometimes go out to the “all you can stuff in your gob” Mexican buffet, then go home at night and turn on the latest CSI . dreck and turn their brains off, and on the weekend they watch College football on Saturday and NFL football on Sunday. They always talk about their lawns, their kids, their dogs, and, of course, the ever-present opiate of the masses, football. There are a few that are different, but most are dreadfully boring, and not even interested in science and technology any more than our secretaries and marketing folk are.
It should be noted that there are other pecking orders as well involving engineers. Some PE’s have a resentment towards non-PE’s being allowed to call themselves “engineers”. Engineering techs don’t like engineers, thinking that their 2-year degrees qualify them “better” than a 4-year one. And the reverse applies there as well. Lots of people attach “engineer” to their name for some reason and actually have no engineering degree at all, like CompSci majors (I’m excluding those who have a degree in “Computer Engineering”). And then you have titles which water down the profession of Engineering, such as “sheet metal engineer” (auto shop guy), “food products engineer” (grocer), “procedures engineer” (marketing person), and of course “sanitation engineer” (garbage truck driver), all which I’ve actually seen IRL as job titles.
To poke at the OP, I’ll post my creds too out of arrogance: MS-ME, P.E.
Good point, but that’s just managerial bullshit. We get that in IT all the time, and I’m sure anyone else who deals with doing actual constructive work faces the same thing. Probably some of us are pretty arrogant too, but, it happens less because the field isn’t reguated the way engineering is and we come from broader backgrounds.
I should clarify this last point. By implying that engineers have narrow backgrounds, I’m referring to the fact that they all go through more or less similar training, which engenders esprit de corps, and that can lead to a great deal of pride in what and who they are. In most people, I think this is a good thing, but there are always some bad apples.
With IT people it’s different, we come from a variety of academic backgrounds so we don’t have that. I’ve worked with extremely competent people who were business, history, and liberal arts majors, as well as CS majors. In short, we have so many different kinds of people in the field, academically speaking, that we don’t have the same kind of feeling about ourselves and our field.
I was going to post in this thread but then I noticed that there are many non-engineers contributing. I wouldn’t soil my hands by appearing in public with the likes of them.[sup]1[/sup] :rolleyes:
1 This should give the OP at least one cite of an arrogant (retired 24 years) engineer post.
I put it in quotes for emphasis as the “subject at hand” or under discussion, to call attention to it. I do in fact consider it a “real” engineering degree, even though I note there is a difference between it and many other engineering degrees, because there is not yet a PE license in any State that I know for Computer Engineering (which actually makes a significant difference to me, in that I can only hire people whose degree allows them to sit for the PE; thus all my engineering programmers are EE’s, ME’s, CE’s, etc.) . That doesn’t necessarily make it “lesser” or “greater”, just “different”.
