grep.ro

I'm an engineer¹, and I'm damn proud of it. Let me tell you a little about my occupation.

We create things. We design them, test them, tweak them, polish them until they're ready for people to use. There are many, many types of engineers - some desing bridges, some lay out computer chips, some specialize in testing a computer program, some sweat over the details of the movement mechanism of a solar panel on a spacecraft.

Engineers must, of course, have proper knowledge in their field, otherwise they're reduced to scriptable, easily-explained work; that's not engineering, that's unskilled labour. They must be able to create new things (by the way, the very name comes from "ingenuity", not from "engine", as is easily assumed) so, like artists, they² must know the materials they're working with. Also like artists, they must have vision, imagination. Unlike an artist, an engineer's work is very constrained. Never do engineers have the liberty to decide what their creations do, only how. There are many constraints: how big it can get, how expensive it can be to produce, how much time and resources can be spent during the design, etc.

The most obvious constraint is the financial cost. If somebody asks an engineer, "can this be done?", the answer is usually "yes, if you're willing to spend enough". A stronger bridge can be built using titanium instead of steel, but titanium is damn expensive. A faster processor can be designed if you're willing to piggyback a big cooling system on it, which is also expensive. Of course, we have the limits of physics, but they are rarely reached in practice - costs usually climb sharply when you get close to them.

Engineering is about tradeoffs. One example is the performance/cost tradeoff above. An engineer has to make decisions about many things, and they subtly influence each other. You can decide to place a fast mathematical adder on a chip, but it's going to use up a large surface area and more power. Every project is different, with its own tradeoffs and constraints. One has to find the sweet spot, where everything is good enough, all constraints are respected, and hopefully the cost is not too big. Given more design time, a better compromise can be reached, but ultimately the law of diminishing returns kicks in. This is anoter tradeoff, and it applies to all engineering projects: how much time are you willing to spend on the design, versus how good you want the design to be.

Engineering is also about finding solutions to problems. One has to be creative - you are, after all, making something new. If you try an idea that's never been tried before, you might find a nice, low-cost³ solution to a problem. A good engineer needs to be imaginative and not afraid to experiment (within budget, of course :)

Engineering is, not least, about understanding people. An engineer's work is, almost always, going to be used by people (as opposed to machines). Even a computer program is likely to be read by other people (many times, if it's a successful one) for debugging, adding features, or simply as an example. So pretty much any engineering creation is designed with a human user in mind. The engineer must, therefore, understand the user, understand his needs, knowledge, way of thinking. Good designs are intuitive and confortable to use - this is much harder to achieve than it sounds. It's easy to make a user interface, it's hard to make it a good one. Take for instance the iPod, compared to most other music players on the market.

Engineering is rewarding. If you spend a lot of energy on creating something, sweating out the details of its insides, designing clever mechanisms, optimizing for various constraints, well then, seeing it actually work, being used, hopefully being successful, brings great satisfaction. It's even better when you see other people pick it up and making something creative with it, on top of it.