TORONTO, ONTARIO - Back in March, this blog spent several posts looking at the opinions of Henry Petroski, the Duke University professor who has argued that the United States undervalues engineering relative to science. One of the side points that Petroski made was that scientists have larger egos than engineers. I mentioned that there might be a personality-based explanation for Petroski's observation, and it's time to provide it.
I want to repeat my disclaimer from the previous post: While Petroski may have a point on average, this observation is completely useless in generic interactions with scientists and engineers. In my lifetime, I have encountered a number of engineers with significant egos and plenty of scientists with much smaller egos than accomplishments. The variation in each pool is too large to make any assumptions about any individual scientist or engineer. I daresay that the distinction is basically a useless stereotype.
Yet, Petroski's observation may have its origins in the kinds of personalities that are most drawn to each discipline. Scientists are basically concerned with explaining the world around them and testing hypotheses about those observations. Of the four personality worlds identified by meridian theory, it is the "thinking" world that lines up most closely with that mind-set. The thinking world fundamentally deals with ideas, and it is novel ideas that usually are required to explain previously-unexplained phenomena. The analytical nature of the thinking world, jumping from one idea to another without concern for the details of the jump, serves them well in science. The "stomach" type within the "thinking" world is best-known for interdisciplinary thinking, bringing in ideas from outside disciplines to explain something perplexing in a defined field. The "brain" and "kidney" types in the "thinking" world are best-known for becoming extreme, deep experts in a field.
However, it is the "brain" type that also is well-known for arrogance, or at least appearing to be arrogant. The "brain" individual tends to exude an image of royalty, that their ideas are somehow to be deferred to, and others are less important. They don't tend to pay a lot of attention to the feelings of others, which are often imperceptible to them. It is likely the prevalence of "brain" types in science, or at least people in the "thinking" world with some "brain" traits, that lead to the observation that scientists have large egos.
Engineering primarily involves using scientific knowledge to make new things. This tends to attract people of action, which is to say the "physical" world. They tend to be good at putting things together, and then improvising to make them work. While not afraid of first principles, they will readily focus on what actually does the job in the real world, not in a book, if there is any conflict between the two. While the physical world can tend to be "macho" (both men and women), that doesn't come across as "ego" quite as strongly as the arrogance of the "brain" type.
Petroski's observation likely comes down to that--the "thinking" world (especially "brain") types in science come across as having bigger egos than the "physical" types in engineering. For those of us in the "spiritual" or "emotional" worlds that work as scientists or engineers, we just shake our heads at the stereotypes.
Showing posts with label Henry Petroski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry Petroski. Show all posts
Monday, August 30, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
Culture: It's The Fault of Software
TORONTO, ONTARIO - While I do not discount Henry Petroski's contention discussed earlier this week that the role of engineering is not understood and appreciated in North American culture, I probably differ from him in assessing the origin of that gap. I contend that engineers themselves created the problem by their behavior in engineering software.
A major component of the problem seen by Petroski is that engineering functions as the afterthought after scientific discovery that concludes a product is possible. The work necessary to turn that discovery into a reliable, marketable product seems inevitable instead of a challenge requiring skilled labor, time, and money. There is a small degree of truth to this--I've often joked that "any engineering problem is solvable given enough time and money--though you may not like the solution." Underlying the joke is the fact that skill and experience is required to minimize the time and money spent, and that within reasonable limits of each, there may not be something that meets the requirements for the product to have a market. That's why product engineers stick to processes of varying rigor (depending on the product) that avoid spending too much time and money on something that will likely not satisfy the market demand.
Of all the engineering disciplines, software is the one in which that ultimate failure is least likely in most applications, especially applications intended for mass consumer markets (as opposed to those running safety devices). Thus, for those markets, the processes developed for general product development have increasingly not been followed. I know software developers that not only don't use ISO or IEEE standards for quality processes or risk analysis, but they've never even encountered them anytime in their education or careers. The business people liked the shortcuts, since they appeared to save money and time. The result is software hitting the market from major companies that wouldn't have passed muster as an internal beta test version under most robust quality processes. The world became the beta testers of poor-quality software.
Gradually, this lack of discipline has extended to engineering fields beyond software. My personal educational exposure to concepts of risk management and quality processes was minimal, though I've had plenty of exposure in industry. The result is a similar, if less extreme, version of the same impact on the quality of product reaching the consumer. That gives the average person little reason to respect engineers.
Clearly, the general public is capable of appreciating good engineering. The success of Apple, which emphasizes ease-of-use and general user interface (or "user experience") issues in its products, demonstrates that engineering done well can make money and gain widespread adoption. Respected engineering has long influenced the automobile industry--not just in high-performance sports cars but in the traditionally well-engineered Japanese vehicles. I know people that wouldn't even look at other manufacturers after they were impressed with their Honda or Toyota.
In fact, it doesn't surprise me at all that it's starting to look like the root of Toyota's current quality problems may actually come down to poor safety features in its software. Just like engineering looks like an afterthought relative to basic scientific research, software can look like an afterthought relative to hardware engineering. Under pressure from cost-cutting management, it's easiest to try to take shortcuts on the quality of software. As Toyota may be learning the hard way, this is a serious mistake. Quality systems need to apply to every last aspect of a product; the quality of the overall product will be that of its weakest aspect.
Of course, engineers usually understand that. It's the accounting-trained businesspeople that want to cut costs in a way that inevitably leads to trouble. That may be the biggest problem for engineers trying to gain understanding and respect for their craft--as long as management imposes product decisions that ignore engineering input, there's little opportunity for them to demonstrate why they should be respected. The only way to break that circle is education, and considering who runs business schools, I don't see how it will happen. Henry Petroski may have a long battle.
A major component of the problem seen by Petroski is that engineering functions as the afterthought after scientific discovery that concludes a product is possible. The work necessary to turn that discovery into a reliable, marketable product seems inevitable instead of a challenge requiring skilled labor, time, and money. There is a small degree of truth to this--I've often joked that "any engineering problem is solvable given enough time and money--though you may not like the solution." Underlying the joke is the fact that skill and experience is required to minimize the time and money spent, and that within reasonable limits of each, there may not be something that meets the requirements for the product to have a market. That's why product engineers stick to processes of varying rigor (depending on the product) that avoid spending too much time and money on something that will likely not satisfy the market demand.
Of all the engineering disciplines, software is the one in which that ultimate failure is least likely in most applications, especially applications intended for mass consumer markets (as opposed to those running safety devices). Thus, for those markets, the processes developed for general product development have increasingly not been followed. I know software developers that not only don't use ISO or IEEE standards for quality processes or risk analysis, but they've never even encountered them anytime in their education or careers. The business people liked the shortcuts, since they appeared to save money and time. The result is software hitting the market from major companies that wouldn't have passed muster as an internal beta test version under most robust quality processes. The world became the beta testers of poor-quality software.
Gradually, this lack of discipline has extended to engineering fields beyond software. My personal educational exposure to concepts of risk management and quality processes was minimal, though I've had plenty of exposure in industry. The result is a similar, if less extreme, version of the same impact on the quality of product reaching the consumer. That gives the average person little reason to respect engineers.
Clearly, the general public is capable of appreciating good engineering. The success of Apple, which emphasizes ease-of-use and general user interface (or "user experience") issues in its products, demonstrates that engineering done well can make money and gain widespread adoption. Respected engineering has long influenced the automobile industry--not just in high-performance sports cars but in the traditionally well-engineered Japanese vehicles. I know people that wouldn't even look at other manufacturers after they were impressed with their Honda or Toyota.
In fact, it doesn't surprise me at all that it's starting to look like the root of Toyota's current quality problems may actually come down to poor safety features in its software. Just like engineering looks like an afterthought relative to basic scientific research, software can look like an afterthought relative to hardware engineering. Under pressure from cost-cutting management, it's easiest to try to take shortcuts on the quality of software. As Toyota may be learning the hard way, this is a serious mistake. Quality systems need to apply to every last aspect of a product; the quality of the overall product will be that of its weakest aspect.
Of course, engineers usually understand that. It's the accounting-trained businesspeople that want to cut costs in a way that inevitably leads to trouble. That may be the biggest problem for engineers trying to gain understanding and respect for their craft--as long as management imposes product decisions that ignore engineering input, there's little opportunity for them to demonstrate why they should be respected. The only way to break that circle is education, and considering who runs business schools, I don't see how it will happen. Henry Petroski may have a long battle.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Culture: Engineers vs. Scientists? Really?
TORONTO, ONTARIO - Yesterday, the main point of Henry Petroski's book, "The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems" was discussed and supported. There's an underlying tone, though, in Petroski's interviews, especially this one on KUOW's "The Conversation" with Ross Reynolds, that implies that Petroski doesn't care much for scientists and in fact seems to want to pit engineers against scientists. This strikes me as a very strange position to take that is neither necessary nor productive.
In the course of the KUOW interview, Petroski makes the case that "scientists have bigger egos than engineers" and are more interested in recognition. At one point, he even accuses scientists of "stealing" the Nobel Prizes, which he correctly states were intended to be for achievements in the previous year, after a group of chemical engineers decided they were more interested in making things than judging awards, and scientists stepped in to shape the awards to favor scientific accomplishments instead of engineering. I can't speak to the Nobel Prize origin, but I can evaluate egos of scientists and engineers I have encountered in my life, and there have been a number of engineers with significant egos and plenty of scientists with much smaller egos than accomplishments (for example, Richard Zare, to cite a somewhat public figure). I could make a personality-based argument that Petroski might be right on average, but the variation in each pool is so large that classifying the group of scientists as having bigger egos than the group of engineers is not useful in interacting with individual scientists or engineers.
Petroski also makes the bizarre argument that engineers aren't paid enough. He mostly meant in relation to lawyers and managers, but tell that to scientists! Chemistry and chemical engineering are arguably the closest science and engineering degrees, and yet chemical engineering graduates make on average $10,000 a year more than chemistry graduates. Interestingly, the gap between the two is considerably less in Europe; one of the disadvantages of working in Europe when I was investigating the possibility was that I would have taken a significant pay cut, to the approximately the same level paid to scientists on both sides of the ocean. Furthermore, because of the salary gap, in the United States engineering tends to attract people interested in money--I'll never forget how many of my chemical engineering peers at MIT who suddenly became very interested in investment banking when they realized how much more money they would be paid, while I had no interest that kind of career at all.
As mentioned yesterday, I have experienced poor management from scientists in development situations which Petroski emphasizes as a problem, as they seemed to think a product would appear instantly once they had shown something was feasible once or twice. However, that really had less to do with the fact that the people involved were scientists than the fact that they were poor managers. I've also worked with scientists that understood how to get out of the way of engineers as they moved a program along toward commercialization and just supported the engineers as needed. The key to product development is not to have an engineer be in charge, but to have a functional team that listens to one another. I'd like to think that when I was managing scientists that I gave them the room to do their research projects and provided a framework for that work to feed into the product pipeline, and more than one scientist told me that they preferred working for me since I was less prone to micro-manage their activities. Any manager that is smart enough to hire competent experts--both scientists and engineers--and listen to them in the development process will likely find a stream of products headed out to customers.
In the end, the goal of most technology companies is to make products that generate a profit. In most cases, they need both scientists and engineers to get the job done. Both need to feel valued, and Petroski has a point that engineers probably feel less valued right now in many companies, regardless of salary. However, just because engineers should be more valued doesn't mean that scientists should be less valued. I don't find it constructive to pit scientists and engineers against one another. Furthermore, the development process works best when they interact efficiently, and that's what managers--whether scientists, engineers, or MBA's--should be seeking to achieve in their companies.
In the course of the KUOW interview, Petroski makes the case that "scientists have bigger egos than engineers" and are more interested in recognition. At one point, he even accuses scientists of "stealing" the Nobel Prizes, which he correctly states were intended to be for achievements in the previous year, after a group of chemical engineers decided they were more interested in making things than judging awards, and scientists stepped in to shape the awards to favor scientific accomplishments instead of engineering. I can't speak to the Nobel Prize origin, but I can evaluate egos of scientists and engineers I have encountered in my life, and there have been a number of engineers with significant egos and plenty of scientists with much smaller egos than accomplishments (for example, Richard Zare, to cite a somewhat public figure). I could make a personality-based argument that Petroski might be right on average, but the variation in each pool is so large that classifying the group of scientists as having bigger egos than the group of engineers is not useful in interacting with individual scientists or engineers.
Petroski also makes the bizarre argument that engineers aren't paid enough. He mostly meant in relation to lawyers and managers, but tell that to scientists! Chemistry and chemical engineering are arguably the closest science and engineering degrees, and yet chemical engineering graduates make on average $10,000 a year more than chemistry graduates. Interestingly, the gap between the two is considerably less in Europe; one of the disadvantages of working in Europe when I was investigating the possibility was that I would have taken a significant pay cut, to the approximately the same level paid to scientists on both sides of the ocean. Furthermore, because of the salary gap, in the United States engineering tends to attract people interested in money--I'll never forget how many of my chemical engineering peers at MIT who suddenly became very interested in investment banking when they realized how much more money they would be paid, while I had no interest that kind of career at all.
As mentioned yesterday, I have experienced poor management from scientists in development situations which Petroski emphasizes as a problem, as they seemed to think a product would appear instantly once they had shown something was feasible once or twice. However, that really had less to do with the fact that the people involved were scientists than the fact that they were poor managers. I've also worked with scientists that understood how to get out of the way of engineers as they moved a program along toward commercialization and just supported the engineers as needed. The key to product development is not to have an engineer be in charge, but to have a functional team that listens to one another. I'd like to think that when I was managing scientists that I gave them the room to do their research projects and provided a framework for that work to feed into the product pipeline, and more than one scientist told me that they preferred working for me since I was less prone to micro-manage their activities. Any manager that is smart enough to hire competent experts--both scientists and engineers--and listen to them in the development process will likely find a stream of products headed out to customers.
In the end, the goal of most technology companies is to make products that generate a profit. In most cases, they need both scientists and engineers to get the job done. Both need to feel valued, and Petroski has a point that engineers probably feel less valued right now in many companies, regardless of salary. However, just because engineers should be more valued doesn't mean that scientists should be less valued. I don't find it constructive to pit scientists and engineers against one another. Furthermore, the development process works best when they interact efficiently, and that's what managers--whether scientists, engineers, or MBA's--should be seeking to achieve in their companies.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Politics: Understanding Innovation
TORONTO, ONTARIO - Who was the best engineer in the history of the world? Unless you are a railroader and thought of Casey Jones, likely you were dumbfounded, and perhaps came up with Leonardo Da Vinci or Thomas Edison after some thought. Engineers are not normally glorified in the United States culture the way sports figures, politicians, businessmen or even scientists are (bet you can think of a few of those), which is part of the argument made by Henry Petroski in new book, "The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems." More importantly, Petroski argues that engineering needs to be more valued because science alone won't solve our problems. The arguments that Petroski is making on his current book tour deserve some attention, and I will respond to some of the points he is making in subsequent posts. For today, I want to focus on his core point, that engineering needs more cultural and political emphasis in the United States.
Petroski claims to be driven to write his most recent book as a result of the Obama administration's emphasis on promoting science as a means to innovation. In his view, the government doesn't seem to understand the difference between science, famously described as "describing what exists" (in ever-increasing levels of insightful detail), and engineering, "the creation of things that have yet to exist." The process of innovation, almost by definition, necessarily involves engineering, the creation of something new. Scientists could come up new explanations as revolutionary as Copernican astronomy, nuclear physics, or the periodic table of elements, and it would have no significant impact on the economy unless an engineer created something with it.
Strictly speaking, of course, Petroski is correct. However, in theory, scientists could perform the innovative task of engineering and do the invention themselves, just as engineers often have to do scientific research in order to come up with an idea that works. As much as he tries to draw a bright line between the two professions, the best engineers I know are good scientists, and the best scientists I know occasionally dabble brilliantly in engineering.
Yet, from a cultural perspective, I think Petroski is right. There seems to be a belief in the United States, in particular in its business culture, that the scientific discovery is the key part of the whole process, and the engineering is just an inevitable afterthought. The Nobel Prizes are the only technology prizes most people have ever heard about, and they are awarded on the basis of scientific discoveries, describing how things work. Many engineers haven't even heard about the engineering prizes, for actually making things, that do exist.
Personally, as a trained engineer (furthermore, one who has always tried to emphasize product development and commercialization), I have run into this lack of understanding of engineering repeatedly in my career. Whenever a non-engineer is placed in charge of the day-to-day product development process, a company is lucky to ever get a product out the door. Scientists seem to think that once they demonstrate something a few times in feasibility that a perfect product will shortly be finished by engineers at minimal expense. The details of devices that use their discovery (in the case of medical diagnostics or consumer goods), or manufacturing processes to mass-produce their discovery (in the case of pharmaceuticals) are regarded as annoyances instead of the barriers that will determine a product's commercial success. On the other hand, when engineers run the show, the problems to overcome those barriers are enumerated, attacked, and generally overcome close to original budgets and time lines.
The real problem, as I'll explore further in a future post, is not scientists that don't understand engineering, as usually they are happy to hand off commercialization problems for engineers to figure out, but business people. They are the ones that not only don't seem to understand the difference between science and engineering, but don't want to spend any money on the commercialization process because they feel they've already spent too much money on scientific research. When they start cost-cutting in the development process and products fail to appear as scheduled, they blame the very engineers that in many cases told them there weren't enough resources to finish the job. Innovation, just like scientific discovery, doesn't come for free, but business people seem to think it's a place to save money.
Petroski is right that the Obama administration, while talking about innovation, has put funding mostly into basic research through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. To fund commercialization resulting from government-funded scientific research (the actual innovation), small companies will still need to turn to private sources, whether they be partner companies, venture capitalists, or potential customers--and that's especially hard to do in a recession. Yet, it's almost more the cultural factor than the funding that needs to be addressed--getting the MBA's of the world to understand that they will need to emphasize commercialization in their companies if they want to be innovative. Nobody in the Obama administration is even saying things along these lines, so Petroski feels he needs to stand up and talk about it.
Interestingly, Canada has recognized that it has a much larger innovation gap than the United States, and it has responded completely differently. Noting that its academic institutions and basic scientific research seem to stack up on such measures as patenting, the current government has decided to focus on commercialization in its economic initiatives. In other words, Canada sees that its scientists are doing their jobs, but their engineers don't seem to be able to turn the discoveries into innovations that make a difference in the marketplace. I haven't yet heard Petroski's take on the Canadian initiatives, but I suspect he would say that Canada is doing exactly what he feels the United States should do.
Of course, as an engineer in Canada who has tried to make a career out of commercialization, I sure haven't seen the emphasis make any difference in my job search so far.
Petroski claims to be driven to write his most recent book as a result of the Obama administration's emphasis on promoting science as a means to innovation. In his view, the government doesn't seem to understand the difference between science, famously described as "describing what exists" (in ever-increasing levels of insightful detail), and engineering, "the creation of things that have yet to exist." The process of innovation, almost by definition, necessarily involves engineering, the creation of something new. Scientists could come up new explanations as revolutionary as Copernican astronomy, nuclear physics, or the periodic table of elements, and it would have no significant impact on the economy unless an engineer created something with it.
Strictly speaking, of course, Petroski is correct. However, in theory, scientists could perform the innovative task of engineering and do the invention themselves, just as engineers often have to do scientific research in order to come up with an idea that works. As much as he tries to draw a bright line between the two professions, the best engineers I know are good scientists, and the best scientists I know occasionally dabble brilliantly in engineering.
Yet, from a cultural perspective, I think Petroski is right. There seems to be a belief in the United States, in particular in its business culture, that the scientific discovery is the key part of the whole process, and the engineering is just an inevitable afterthought. The Nobel Prizes are the only technology prizes most people have ever heard about, and they are awarded on the basis of scientific discoveries, describing how things work. Many engineers haven't even heard about the engineering prizes, for actually making things, that do exist.
Personally, as a trained engineer (furthermore, one who has always tried to emphasize product development and commercialization), I have run into this lack of understanding of engineering repeatedly in my career. Whenever a non-engineer is placed in charge of the day-to-day product development process, a company is lucky to ever get a product out the door. Scientists seem to think that once they demonstrate something a few times in feasibility that a perfect product will shortly be finished by engineers at minimal expense. The details of devices that use their discovery (in the case of medical diagnostics or consumer goods), or manufacturing processes to mass-produce their discovery (in the case of pharmaceuticals) are regarded as annoyances instead of the barriers that will determine a product's commercial success. On the other hand, when engineers run the show, the problems to overcome those barriers are enumerated, attacked, and generally overcome close to original budgets and time lines.
The real problem, as I'll explore further in a future post, is not scientists that don't understand engineering, as usually they are happy to hand off commercialization problems for engineers to figure out, but business people. They are the ones that not only don't seem to understand the difference between science and engineering, but don't want to spend any money on the commercialization process because they feel they've already spent too much money on scientific research. When they start cost-cutting in the development process and products fail to appear as scheduled, they blame the very engineers that in many cases told them there weren't enough resources to finish the job. Innovation, just like scientific discovery, doesn't come for free, but business people seem to think it's a place to save money.
Petroski is right that the Obama administration, while talking about innovation, has put funding mostly into basic research through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. To fund commercialization resulting from government-funded scientific research (the actual innovation), small companies will still need to turn to private sources, whether they be partner companies, venture capitalists, or potential customers--and that's especially hard to do in a recession. Yet, it's almost more the cultural factor than the funding that needs to be addressed--getting the MBA's of the world to understand that they will need to emphasize commercialization in their companies if they want to be innovative. Nobody in the Obama administration is even saying things along these lines, so Petroski feels he needs to stand up and talk about it.
Interestingly, Canada has recognized that it has a much larger innovation gap than the United States, and it has responded completely differently. Noting that its academic institutions and basic scientific research seem to stack up on such measures as patenting, the current government has decided to focus on commercialization in its economic initiatives. In other words, Canada sees that its scientists are doing their jobs, but their engineers don't seem to be able to turn the discoveries into innovations that make a difference in the marketplace. I haven't yet heard Petroski's take on the Canadian initiatives, but I suspect he would say that Canada is doing exactly what he feels the United States should do.
Of course, as an engineer in Canada who has tried to make a career out of commercialization, I sure haven't seen the emphasis make any difference in my job search so far.
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