I hate to paint with too broad a brush, but are engineers, regardless of discipline, naturally untidy or even slovenly, and if so why? It seems counter-intuitive to me as they seem to have highly ordered minds. My only evidence is the experience of having throughout the course of my life 3 roommates that were engineers: electrical, civil, and software, respectively who were all shockingly dirty people. They just could not clean up after themselves, and it wasn’t simply laziness. It seemed like something else was at work, and they couldn’t function personally as ordered as they were professionally. In fact, the drying rack for dishes actually seemed to confuse one of them.
I doubt if there’s a GQ answer to this question, but as an engineer I would question whether engineers have “highly ordered minds”. Engineers should have the ability to think analytically. But that’s not the same thing.
My guess, in the absence of a study with a larger sample size than three ;), is that some engineers are very tidy and some are very messy, and most are somewhere in between.
“Highly ordered minds?” I’m not even sure what that means, but I know a lot of engineers who, for example, believe weird conspiracy theories and otherwise do not show signs of having “highly ordered minds”.
For what it’s worth, I’m a software engineer and I’m extremely slovenly in real life, but very tidy when it comes to organizing my computer and code. There might be a “care” factor there-- I don’t really care how messy my bathroom is, but I definitely care about the code that represents me professionally.
In my experience about 2/3 of engineers are slobs (me and my wife included) and 1/3 are absolutely anal in making sure everything around them is meticulously ordered. Of course my sample size is in the range of around 20 so it’s probably not statistically significant.
that brush may be broad, but it covers me.
There is something to your observation. I work in IT/engineering and most of my coworkers are slobs. I am mediocre at best yet I look like the neat one. If you want to put a flattering explanation on it, we just spend too much time inside of our own head to focus on the outside world that much. We also have our own ways of organizing things that may not look great but work for us.
No one but me can read my notes for example and it isn’t because my handwriting is that bad. I cover entire pages with notes and the words or pictures can take on various sizes and won’t even be oriented in the same general direction but I can still read them months later. I have whole bulletin boards filled with such pages. Some of it comes with the job as well. You can’t be neat and actively working on multiple physical projects at least not at full speed. Things get moved around and as long as you know the system, it doesn’t matter how it looks. That isn’t confined to engineers. Have you seen a working artist’s studio?
It is basically the same stereotype that scientists sometimes wear mismatched shoes or socks because they are too deep in thought to care about such things. There are plenty that really do things like that but also the neat freaks in the bunch too.
My home is very clean however especially since I got a Roomba.
I work with hundreds of engineers and know dozens fairly well at work. I would say they are no different than non-engineers in terms of their distribution across the range of sloppiness/neatness. I will say, however, that I have noticed that they tend to have a relatively poor since of fashion compared to the general population, imho.
how can you tell if an engineer is an extrovert?
when he talks to a woman, he stares down at her shoes instead of his own.
what did they enjoy as youthful hobbies?
EE had a bench or two full of parts and projects in progress, shelves of parts.
Software would have a table or three full of computers, manuals, printouts.
Civil would like be the neatest, who has room for concrete in their parents house.
you carry on as you have grown up.
Married to an engineer and know a lot of them. I think the preceding observations are pretty accurate. My husband feels a fleece vest stuffed with a multitude of items up to the size of a coffee cup, over a worn-out polo shirt, highwaters, white socks, and filthy cross trainers is a very practical set of garments appropriate everywhere. Can take apart a laptop and put it back together without losing one minute screw (using just the tools secreted in his vest) but has vast powers of unobservation concerning domestic life. He is somewhat extreme but there are others in his lab farther out there on the continuum. My theory is that people who have laser-beam focus are both drawn to engineering and make crappy housekeepers.
The really tidy engineers I know ended up becoming managers. Possibly because they will dress for a meeting.
Thirty years of nagging has had some effect; many engineers can be housetrained, albeit slowly and unsatisfactorily.
I was a Lit. major.
As a retired engineer, this applies to me. I produced super-efficient and error-free software and circuit designs, but with very sloppy desk, bedroom, etc. I don’t know what the pyschological correlation is. Could the “tidiness” of one’s work output somehow eliminate the “need” for personal tidiness?
I don’t recall colleagues with crackpot ideas when I was working, beyond “conspiracy theories” about IBM business practices, many of which were factual. But one finds a lot of AGW deniers at Usenet groups like sci.electronics.design. Recently I chatted with an ex-engineer who was not only a denier, but insisted we needed Ron Paul to save us from the “New World Order.” :dubious:
… Of course with my own ideas about the Elephantine Temple and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, some may consider me a conspiracy theorist. 
I’m an engineer (chemical), and I’m a slob.
Not in personal appearance I’m always clean and tidy, and I dress pretty decently (compared to my other techy colleagues.)
But my work-spaces are always a hot mess. My desk? Coffee cups everywhere, papers scattered. About once a quarter I’ll give it a good cleaning.
My lab? Also usually a mess. Doesn’t help that the particular chemicals I work with are a sticky goo. But I’m a bit bad as well about leaving samples all over the place and having filler dust (powders, usually CaCO3 and CaSO4) all over the place.
And my condo? Don’t ask, it’s really a mess.
One observation I would add is their ability to lay ahold of what they want in the mess.
It was really dumb luck, but I may have saved my company a fine. I was entertaining an OSHA inspector in my disgrace of an office. I reached into my file drawer and instantly pulled out a graph of my employees’ declining blood lead level. I think I conveyed my honest concern about them. After a few hours of sampling the air and finding low levels of lead, he pack up his gear and left. My boss said he never heard of an OSHA inspector leaving without levying a fine.
Yeah I’ve seen this time and time again.
You walk into an engineers office, piles of papers, folders and books on every surface and say “Hey Bill I need that data on the the vibration levels of the new bearing line - the 3/4” roller and the 1" ball if you got 'em"…
Billl reches to a pile on the back of the desk and pulls a folder out of the middle of the stack, “Here ya go!”
I’m a librarian and not an engineer, but I’ve worked with engineers and once did a DISC personality assessment with a bunch of them as a team building activity. I don’t take that sort of thing too seriously, but most of the engineers came out with a high score in the “C” category, which has to do with being structured and organized and doing things by the book. (When I’ve taken this assessment with other librarians we also tended to come out with high “C” scores.) However, the information the session facilitator gave us indicated that while high C types like structure they are not necessarily very tidy – they’re more the “I know where everything is in the piles on my desk” types. It’s the high “S” types who supposedly put things away neatly.
Anyway, regardless of what one thinks of personality assessment tests, I have certainly observed that there are people – myself included – who care about organization without being very concerned with tidiness. If documents of type X always go in the pile to the left of the telephone on the desk then that’s an organization system with specific rules, even if these aren’t obvious to outsiders and the result looks messy.
FWIW, in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Pirsig defines 2 ways of seeing the world, Classic and Romantic. Classic is concerned with underlying form, reason, and laws; Romantic with immediate appearance, feeling, intuition, esthetics. Engineers are obviously the former. 
Electrical engineer here. My desk always looks like a bomb exploded. However, many if my colleagues keep their spaces quite tidy. Most are in between, and there are two or so other engineers at my office that are similarly messy like me (both are also electrical, FWIW)
I grew up with an engineer for a father. He knows it’s time to sweep and mop the kitchen when the weekly alarm on his phone goes off.
He has a lot of … stuff … in the electronics graveyard that is my parents’ basement. I wouldn’t call it messy, but the jumble doesn’t look in any way ordered to me. However, he can find that piece that he stashed down there 20 years ago that might solve this problem in no time flat. It’s mysterious.
What I find is that people that use the word ‘denier’ are people who don’t understand climate science and simply accept AGW as a matter of faith. The biggest skeptics about AGW are people that don’t think computer climate models have any predictive value. The thing is that computer models are engineering, not science and engineering people tend to be very skeptical about computer models. It is interesting to note that some of the leading skeptics are Meteorologists who use similar models every day.
Moving from GQ to IMHO.
Colibri
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