THE LOST SOUL OF THE ENGINEER PART ONE: The Mystique of the Engineer

THE LOST SOUL OF THE ENGINEER:

PART ONE: The Mystique of the Engineer

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 7, 2014

REFERENCE:

This was published originally in the Short Circuit magazine, The Newsletter of Engineering Empowerment, Spring 1993.

There once was a man who lived on his lawn in a mobile trailer while he built his dream house.  For some reason he continued to live in his trailer after the magnificent structure was completed, leaving it empty.

After a time, opportunists noted this oddity, and took possession of the house, and laid claim to the dwelling as if their own – possession being nine-tenths of the law.  At first, the bewildered builder was exasperated, then disbelieving, and finally full of angst, as he found that all attempts to redress this wrong were driving him deeper into litigious and moral depression.  He was the odd man out.

By the accident of circumstances, he stepped into a world not of his making, a world of words which was not his forte.  He was a maker, not a taker, a doer, not a transgressor.  His world was of predictable outcomes, not nefarious deeds, a world of moral certitude far removed from the reality of a pernicious society.  

Time passed and he took comfort in the fact that at least he had his trailer, even though the opportunists had fenced it in, separating him from the house he had built.  He did nothing.

Then one day, while enjoying his morning coffee, an eviction notice was served, giving him forty-eight hours to pack up and vacate the property, or else.  His world, and all that he held dear, was suddenly destroyed – and like Kafka’s The Trial (1925), he had done nothing wrong.  Or had he?

In Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of the New Machine (1981), we are introduced to the genius of a superb team of engineers who take on the nearly impossible task of creating a new supercomputer in a finite period of time, only to find they were the equivalent of a vestigial organ once the magnificent machine – called “The Eagle” – was complete.

These engineers put their hearts and souls into the work, sacrificing everything, being made persona non grata in the end and they had done nothing wrong!

They, too, built their dream house, and left it to the wordsmiths and spin doctors to describe; and for corporate executives to take ownership.  Before long, marketing added their insults to injury, rechristening the Eagle, as “Eclipse MV/8000,” and getting it mentioned with suitable hyperbole in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, but nary a word about this crew who had turned an idea into reality.

The final humiliation came in an elegant luncheon at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.  Untutored in the social amenities of high rollers in hype, uncomfortable in their ill-fitting new suits as the mandatory costume, confused with the showy formalities, the engineers sat helpless and hapless, not knowing whether to take the plate of salad on the right or on the left.  They all felt like fish out of water, as they were meant to feel.

Consequently, they hovered together like youngsters at their first high school dance.  Far from being awarded for this supreme effort, they were made to feel as outsiders, intruders, and compounded this by feeling they were being punished for what they had done. 

Those who were in touch with this contretemps took the message as intended, packed up their belongings, and went on to other things.  A year later, one Eagle engineer, reminiscing about the whole affair, said, “I felt like a hired gun in an old Western, sent in to rid the town of the bad guys, only to be run out of town once respectable citizens could again sleep easily at night.”

The engineer seems to have a fatal attraction for exploitation, and therefore for getting hurt rather than rewarded.  Is this masochistic behavior?  If so, why?

The Mystique of the Engineer

From birth, there are subtle forces at work conditioning us as to what we will become.  The engineer is the prototype of our technological culture.  He is more interested in studying the phenomena of nature, facts that can be replicated, occurrences reified, and circumstance observed or observable in nature.  He is far less interested in the ambivalence of people, including himself.

We know precious little more about ourselves today than that espoused by Plato in The Republic more than twenty-three centuries ago:

Education is not what it is said to be by some, who profess to put knowledge into a soul, which does not possess it, as if they could put sight into blind eyes …. our own account signifies that the soul of every man does possess the power of learning the truth and the organ to see it with; and that, just as one might have to turn the whole body round in order that the eye should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world until its eye can bear to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the Good …. our aim would be to effect this very thing, the conversion of the soul … not to put the power of sight into the soul’s eye, which already has it, but to ensure that, instead of looking in the wrong direction, it is turned the way it ought to be.

Today, we refer to the soul (psyche) when we are discussing the self or the mind.  Plato’s point is that we see what we want to see.  We see the fantastic explosion of technology and are both mesmerized and bewildered.  It implodes into our very consciousness.  

We wonder, “How will man prevail?”  But we are looking in the wrong direction – it is not in the gadgetry of a changing world outside ourselves where truth lies, but in the reality of man’s relationship with man.  For the engineer, this has become a personal and professional disaster.  The comfortable world of algorithms is not enough for him to survive, surely not enough for him to prevail.

Clearly, the engineer is the preeminent builder of the modern world – he has automated the workplace, ending the factory system.  Moreover, the body of genetic engineering has revolutionized agriculture with biotech laboratories that produce natural products such as vanilla, coconut oil and other staple farm products. 

A select corps of electronic engineers has created the 24-hour-a-day financial trading system, which in turn has facilitated a truly global economy.  The globalization of industry and services now permits multinational corporations to switch production operations from one country to another.  This has benefited the power brokers, but where has it left the engineer in the sharing of the spoils?

Once the system is invented and implemented the signs read everywhere, “No engineer need apply!”  How could this be?  How could the engineer with his clear view of the future, driven by a sense of duty and honor, a penchant for excellence and a keen perception of a rational world be left out of the sharing of the booty of modernity?

How has the engineer become a homeless soul?

No question, the engineering mentality has decisively influenced the present shape of technological society, and the consciousness of us all.  One characteristic of technology is that many things are going on at once.  This is as true of social systems (relational processes) as it is of technical systems (technological development).

The engineer has kept in touch with the technical, but generally shown an aversion even contempt for the social.  Yet his relations to both are critical to his success.  Unwisely, he has assumed that the challenges of the technical world exceed the complexities of the social world.  Actually, the reverse is closer to reality.  Our knowledge of the vagaries of human nature differ little with Plato’s time, while our knowledge of the universe far exceeds that known in the time of Galileo.

With more technical change in the past thirty years than the previous three hundred, modernity has driven our consciousness to the brink of despair.  I see this as a failure to recognize the soul mate relationship of the technical to the social system.

Denial of this fact generates a particular tension around complexity, often with the precipitous human response expressed in the statement, “Not my problem!”  It is accentuated with the surly rejoinder, “Let them (whomever “them” may be) worry about the big picture.  Leave me to my work!”

This implies that engineering work is free of ambivalence and ambiguity as engineering work has the clarity and certainty of 1+1 = 2.

Engineers have never been comfortable working with non-engineering functional groups.  Socializing (consensus building) is for those who have nothing better to do.  This attitude is reinforced by engineers showing a reluctance to develop good writing and presentation skills.

The approach, although traditional, has had precarious consequences for the engineer.  As social compression impacts the work situation, dissolving barriers between functional groups and disciplines work takes on the character of being personal, informal, and interdisciplinary with the implicit edict “You will have fun at work!”  

This masks a panic driven bottom-line urgency, which for the engineer, leads to dis-identity, self-estrangement and a sense of powerlessness.

The constant pressure of social irrelevancies (non-engineering bureaucratic demands) finds the engineer in rapid retreat from these disruptive perturbations and therefore from the essence of his work.

Meanwhile, the engineer’s counterpart, the bureaucratic technocrat, who actually thrives in this social ambience, and who plays the environment like a musical instrument, especially the high notes of political intrigue, survives redundancy exercises while the engineer is the last hired and the first to go.  

Increasingly, the engineer is being treated as an indentured worker, hired for projects, a vagabond with a modem and microprocessor.

Remember, the technocrat grew out of technology.  The most successful technocrats were once die-hard engineers feeling the necessity to leave engineering for economic survival.  Once they took the quantum leap, they came to find bureaucracy, unlike engineering, is not intrinsic to a particular goal although the rhetoric might suggest otherwise.  

If one has set himself the goal of producing a computer, there is no way of doing so except through discrete processes of technological production.  If, however, he chooses to be involved in licensing agreements and contracts for marketing and distribution, he enters the whole new arbitrary world “of the deal.”  There bureaucratic processes take over and the engineering world is subsumed under these processes and essentially left out when the spoils are divided.

The fundamentals of logic may dominate engineering-technological production, but bureaucracy takes over thereafter which is mired in vacillation and doublespeak.  Due to its nonchalance, bureaucracy develops a sense of humor about itself, giving it greater variability than possible in a strictly engineering (“This is serious business!) production sense.

But when the two interfaces – bureaucracy and engineering – are organized in a complementary cognitive style (Skunk Works™) work proceeds circumventing typical problems and exceeding expectations.  

Both interfaces are necessary.  Engineers would characteristically think otherwise, seeing the bureaucratic world filled with waste, stultifying intrigue, unproductive amenities, and time consuming rituals, while failing to see engineering’s contribution to this problem in failing to make work user friendly to non-engineers.  Failure for engineers to make connection with the bureaucratic world has been at both their peril.

In the non-engineering world, politics reign supreme with the genius of bureaucrats contributing to the muddle.  To wit the engineer measures things in terms of competence (ability to do the job); the technocrat in terms of influence (power).  The technocrat is a pyramid climber always campaigning for the next job; the engineer is always looking for results in the job to which he is assigned.  Therefore, the technocrat measures his ability on the impression he makes on those in power positions; the engineer on his capacity to perform productively and earn the respect of his engineering colleagues.

Finessing the engineer because his mind is facing in the wrong direction is a piece of cake for the technocrat.

Still, to the engineer competence is everything.  Being able to apply a particular skill to a task is crucial to his sense of worth.  An engineer is baffled by the technocrat’s bureaucratic style in saying so easily, “I’m not equipped to deal with (this or that),” having no qualms or problem getting someone else to do his bidding.

Time is of the essence to the engineer, while rules and time-consuming procedures are of the essence to the technocrat.  

Bureaucratic “competence” is tied to the idea of “nothing left out,” or the coverage of everything, even if much that is covered is nonessential or irrelevant to the project.  The outcome or results is incidental to the process as long as all the “t’s” are crossed and all the “i’s” dotted.  Technocrats are the inventors of documentation.

Bureaucracy is propelled by its own inertia furthering the notion that all behavior must be governed by a body of rational “policies & procedures” and where accountability, not competence rules.  

With bureaucracy the focus is on control not customer requirements or satisfaction, although, again, this is preached.  Meanwhile, social reality finds bureaucracy growing exponentially with the growth of organization.  This chases more than a few exceptional engineers out of mega-corporations.  But, alas, there is no escape.  The next company, if there is a next company, may be worse with even more sophisticated bureaucratic processes.

Denying these two interfaces, these two worlds, ignoring corporate’s penchant for rules and its non-systemic approach to operations, ridiculing its obsession with means and calloused disregard for ends, while battling its fixation with explicit abstractions (treating everyone as numbers), does not change the fact that bureaucracy occupies the house and carries the authority that engineering built.  

How did so resourceful a profession allow this to happen?  More importantly, what can be done about it?

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NOTE:

PART TWO: Profile of the Engineer versus the Technocrat

(This will follow soon)