Personality: Scientists and Engineers

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.

Economics: Not Just Pay

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This evening on the PBS NewsHour, an interesting discussion was aired on the public reaction to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Science educator Bill Nye, energy expert Amy Jaffe and technology forecaster Paul Saffo weighed in on why the spill was being perceived in the way that it is by the average citizen.

A fair portion of the discussion focused on the lack of public confidence in engineers, and the idea that "poor engineering" has been a hallmark of the United States for a generation. Bill Nye took it back "all the way back to the Ford Pinto" and emphasized the two space shuttle disasters as destroying the pride in engineering that had once existed in the country following the NASA missions to the moon in the 1960's and 1970's. Jaffe pointed out that many mathematicians and engineers are going to Wall Street and financial firms instead of working in engineering, a phenomenon I have written about before on this blog.

Yet, I think there is a separate trend here being highlighted in talking about the quality of engineering. It's not just that higher salaries are luring qualified "quantitative people" away from engineering, it's also that the corporate environment in United States (and apparently in Great Britain, if BP is any indication) explicitly eschews good engineering in favor of cutting corners to achieve short-term financial results.

As I think about my personal experiences in engineering, both in the companies I have worked for and in partner companies that I came to know and companies that friends have worked for, there have been two kinds of companies that actually emphasized making a well-engineered product that would meet market demand (and hence make money in the medium to long-term). The first were privately-held companies, both large and small, in the United States whose executives did not have to worry about what happened to a stock price each quarter. The second were foreign companies, based in either continental Europe or Asia.

Venture-funded and publicly-traded companies in the United States often do wonderful research on advanced technologies, but once feasibility is demonstrated, the product development process is short-changed. Everything is about shipping a product, regardless of how well it works, and meeting quarterly forecasts for raw revenue. In an odd market distortion, customer satisfaction with the product is an afterthought, something that can be addressed down the road. The barrier to entry for competitors is often so high that only huge companies can realistically enter the market and compete, and companies figure that in the meantime, they can drive up their stock prices by shipping inferior product. (This probably also explains the exceptions to the generality I've made here--companies that buck this trend like Apple are in competitive consumer markets where the barrier to entry is not so high and ignoring customer satisfaction is fatal.) It's not that their engineers can't make a better product for their customers; they are not allowed to do so.

The same pressures apply to safety, as seen most dramatically in the Deep Water Horizon disaster. Engineers knew how to deal with a situation such as what has happened--but it required spending money on a remote-control shut-off valve that would have been effectively mandatory in Brazil and Norway. Call it a regulatory issue or a corporate issue, but don't call it an engineering issue--the problem was foreseeable and a solution was available that would have had only a very small impact on the overall cost of the operation.

There's also a self-perpetuating effect within these companies. As engineers observe that quality and ethical practices are regarded by their employers as unimportant or even downright undesirable, they respond by no longer even trying to follow such practices. The culture of the companies becomes one of emphasizing short-term financial returns over any other consideration.

The net effect is that the public sees a shoddy product or safety disaster, and they begin to regard engineers in society as incompetent and incapable of doing things correctly. The United States has gotten to this point, as the panel tonight on the NewsHour expressed. Until the corporate environment in the country somehow changes, I don't see the impression ever changing back.

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.

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.

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.

Economics: So They Are Disappearing

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Longtime readers of this blog may remember an entry I did earlier this year in which I noted that I saw few of my peers educated in science and engineering actually working in the field, and questioned why anyone would. Well, researchers at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University have collected the data that back up my anecdotal experience.

In a report released last late month, Professor Harold Salzman of Rutgers and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown were intending to research whether United States educational institutions were actually producing the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates at an adequate rate, which many have been questioning. They did not find a drop in the number of people studying STEM, but to their credit they did find and note another phenomenon--the top quintile of students was substantially abandoning STEM careers for finance and other, more lucrative careers--exactly the phenomenon I described in my undergraduate class, except in that case, it extended through the top three quartiles of a small class.

Yet, the researchers didn't seem to emphasize what strikes me as most significant finding in their report. Burying this in their section on the top quintile, they state, "All quintiles shared in an across-the-board decline from the 1993/96 to the 1997/00 cohorts" in taking a first job that was in the STEM area after graduating with a STEM degree. In other words, students in the late 1990's quit going to work in STEM roles--and the data indicate the decrease was nearly a factor of two in the case of the top quintile, statistically significant but lower in magnitude across the board.

In its conclusion, the report states, "Highly qualified students may be choosing a non-STEM job because these other occupations are higher paying, offer better career prospects such as advancement, employment stability, and/or prestige, as well as less susceptible to offshoring." This is exactly what I have personally been observing; I couldn't have summarized it better.

At one point in graduate school, I remember having a conversation with a chemical engineering colleague who had just talked to a graduate that had been working in investment banking for about a year, and had just gotten a raise in salary to something in six figures before bonuses (I don't remember the exact amount). He was clearly excited. "That's a lot of money," he said. Sure enough, that's the career path he chose--leaving chemical engineering along with the majority of our peers.

Frankly, I don't see STEM careers becoming any more attractive or lucrative, so my guess is that STEM retention will stay low for the foreseeable future.

Economics: Why Would One Go Into Science?

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Recently in various media, Roche's head of global pharma research, Lee E. Babiss, has been quoted as to why the Swiss-based pharmaceutical company has opened an R&D center in China. In the United States and Europe, Babiss has stated, "many kids are not choosing to go into sciences. That is the primary reason we went to China. So many of the young people we were hiring were from China, so we thought 'Why should they have to come to us? Let's go to them instead.'"

Roche happens to be one of the world's large corporations that I actually have reasonable respect for after seeing how they treated their technical employees at their headquarters site in Basel, Switzerland and in Nutley, New Jersey, and how they handled the swallowing of Syntex in California. They're not perfect, but I think they have their priorities better placed than most international corporations with more than 10,000 employees. So, when Roche implies that they are not finding talent in the United States and Europe, I take that statement at face value.

There really should be no surprise about the statement. Most of the most intelligent people I know did not go into science or engineering, or got out of those fields as quickly as possible. In the group of twelve people that graduated in my class of chemical engineers at the undergraduate level, only three of us planned to stay in the field. (If someone else ultimately did, I've lost touch with them and don't know about it.) Of those three, one went into academia and remains in research, one went straight into industry and rapidly transitioned into product management, and I did a graduate degree and went into industry, into a career track like one that Babiss claimed was not often being chosen. Notably, two of the three of us in the group choosing to pursue the field were in the bottom quartile of the class. So, less than one-fifth of the class even tried to make a career out of the field, mostly from the group of weaker students, and only one remains employed--I'm looking for new career.

What did everybody else do? A smattering pursued eclectic dreams like sailing and made a career out of those, but just about everyone in the top two quartiles intended to go to business school or directly into financial fields, and near as I can tell have been very successful in doing so. At the graduate level, the pattern of my colleagues was similar. There was a greater percentage intending to stay in academia that have done so, but again many of the top students simply used their chemical engineering degrees as a way into the financial industry, with a good portion also heading into consulting or other business-related fields successfully. The exact pattern that Roche was seeing, that the best and brightest don't go into technical jobs in industry, was clearly there.

It's not hard to see why. While science and engineering salaries may certainly be higher than the national average, they are way below the compensation packages available to investment bankers, business school graduates or in management. There is little room for advancement in technical positions other than going into management. What's worse, people running the companies view their technical employees strictly as expenses--not as resources, since those in research and development (R&D) technically aren't making anything. When demands come for greater return on investment--whether for corporate survival during a recession or just from investors in boom times--it is easy to justify cutting the expensive R&D employees, and the jobs disappear entirely, or at least get moved to China or India where they can be done less expensively.

Some of the people I know that went into the financial industry or to business school are also out of work in this economy, but they have financial reserves that are five to ten times what mine were when my last job ended and they can live off the interest from their wealth even at current interest rates. Those that went into academia are all employed, if blocked from advancement in the current conditions. They will be okay. Clearly, the people that made the decisions to go into finance, business, or academia made smart decisions.

Meanwhile, those of us that tried to become the R&D workers that Roche claims it can't find in the United States and Europe have been laid off and some of us may never work in the industry again. Is there any wonder that "many kids are not choosing to go into sciences?" Taking a rational view of the job world, why would they?