In this article I will talk about what Engineering means to me.

I’d like to ask any reader that, before reading this article, use a couple of minutes to answer the question: “What does ’to be an Engineer’ mean?”. After this small exercise, I suggest to write a short answer down in a piece of paper.

After doing that, you can read the article. If it likes you or not, compare my answer with yours. Finally, try to define it again and, if you want, share your definition as a comment.

I hope you like this post. I hope it to make you to think.

History

It was upon a time… a happy student who was finishing Computer Science Engineering. That was me, obviously. And due to I was finishing, I started to browse about some jobs.

It scaries at first. So I started to learn about job interviews, reading about what questions could I found and which ones were the best answers. This is commonly known as “cheating” :D

One of those questions was “What an Engineer is?”. That was a good one, as you already know if, truely, you have tried to answer it. With that question there was an answer too: An Engineer is a person who solves problems.

In that moment it seemed genial. What a simple and accurate answer!

A new answer

but I think I’ve found another answer to the same question. What is more: I think that saying “An Engineer is the person who solves problems” defines more an Idiot than an Engineer. I’ve been that idiot for too long (and maybe someone thinks I still do XD).

I’m going to prove it: A person who solves problems can see, at the end of the day, a heap of solved problems and other heap of problems to be solved. Two options can happen here: the heap of problems to be solved can grow or decrease.

The first option shows a incompetent person, because he won’t able to finish all those problems. The second option is that man’s bosses see him solving problems and giving him more problems, until the poor man is grouped with incompetent people.

So that answer is not enough for me. Maybe I choose a bad career or there is another way.

Because of that, I think that An Engineer is the person who solves problems before them to appear. That hint is very important.

This way, the Engineer will found a lot of things done at the end of the day. There will appear more problems, that is unvoidable, but a good Engineer will have tried to avoid their impact. I mean, the really difference between an Engineer and an Idiot is to think in advance.

Consecuences

This new definition has a lot of consecuences for me. To start with, it is important to think in advance to problems. But… How can this be done?

There are two ways: either you continue on being an idiot and trust your luck and/or fortune-tellers, or you take measurements. Literally.

You cannot know if anythink goes wrongly if you do not know when it goes smoothly. So the first thing to be done is just measure. You have to draw a line between what is normal and what is not, so you can be warned when something leaves its normal status.

If the line is wrong, probably you will waste your work. This is a little price you have to pay while you are adjusting it. But when the line is adjusted, you will have more time to react when things leave their normal status until they become a true problem.

To this advantage you have to add another no less important: to know when something is out of its normal status will allow us to identify the cause more efficiently.

Some times, the cause will be admissible: a change in the product behave can generate a result change. These cases allow us to update the “normality” definition an to modify our alerts.

Our measurements system can broke too. This is not avoidable.

How many measurements should I take? As many as possible. Whe a problem appears, the more data you have, the faster you can evaluate why did it started and the less time you will waste to find the solution.

Examples

We can see some examples everyday:

• When you go to the doctor, they measure the blood preasure to check if is normal.
• Trafic cameras control trafic jams, so people can drive normally.
• Whenever a ragged boy enters a shop, he is watched, because he is not normal.
• If your car sounds unusual, you carry it to the shop before it to get broken.

How do you know in these cases when it is “normal”? Is it something just known and that’s all?

No. None of these cases are because of randomly. Neither a future-teller is saying it.

What happens here is that, conscious or not, some limits have been set and, when the threshold is passed, there is a warning and someone takes care.

Planning

Another definition I’ve readed is that “An Engineer is someone who plans”. This is quite beautiful, but… What does to plan mean?

I’ve “planned” a lot of times. I’ve enumerated any requierd step to finish a job; then I’ve estimated how long will each task take; I’ve started solving it task by task and… I’ve never been right.

Some hidden problems have always appeared. Tasks were larger I expected. And this happens because of something: to estimate is synonym of intuit. An estimation can only be exact whenver the job is finished.

So, in my opinion, an Engineer who estimates it is just a future-teller. To make it really useful, something more is required.

And that “something more” are measurements again. They are some limits again. Those limtes which tell us when a task is finished. And a task is finished when it is finished. I mean: if it is almost finished, then it is not at all.

The only way to know when a task is finished is when some limits have been set beforehand.

So “planning” is not to put a task after another and predict how long are going to take any of them. It is, in addition, to define when each of them are finished. And this is required to know when the whole job is finished.

This planification should take in mind new problems, because they will appear. And the measurements to avoid them too!! This is the risk planification.

If all these are part of “planification”, then I agree the definition: An Engineer is the person who plans, where planning takes in mind not only task length, but the project and each task scope, and the risk evaluation, and the solution to these risks.

Damn, uh?

The end

Before reading this part, please, do the first exercise again: write down your Engineer definition in a piece of paper.

I do not want to modify your result with my answer.

Probably your answer will be as valid (or more) than mine.

After all this, if we had to define in a short sentence what an Engineer means, I think I’d say that An Engineer is the person who learns about the past, evaluates the present and uses those data to foresee the future.

Any comment will be welcome; even more if they contain your answers.

Greetings for everyone.

And thank you ;)