
Why are engineers so narrow-minded? - vo2maxer
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-are-engineers-so-narrow-minded-new-research-has-an-idea/
======
drenvuk
I'm an engineer. I'm creative as hell even outside of the domain of my work.
I'm also able to analyze situations and problems with consistently unerring,
narrowly focused detail. Four years of training in certain types of cognitive
processes does not preclude someone from learning how to use another less
rigorous (by definition) method of thought.

This article was shit from the get go, here's a list:

The title was shit:

>Why are engineers so narrow-minded? New research has an idea.

The research is not new, the research he and the hbr.org article are citing is
from 2007. It's also important to mention the findings are about the
perception educational environment itself not and not in the workforce. If
there was new research I couldn't find it links to the papers.

The very first sentence of the body was shit:

>I could make a viable argument that engineers are swiftly destroying the
world.

Yet he neglects to do so, and also fails to mention that it's the people using
the technology that are destroying the world, not us.

The second sentence is even worse:

>Naturally, I won't, as they can be very sensitive souls who stream
uncontrollable invective like many people stream Netflix.

So in order to make himself immune to any reasonable argument that he knows
would refute his weak-ass claims he just says that all engineers would be
critical of it anyway - shut up and accept him and the psychologist findings
as gospel.

The worst part is that the older research isn't bad, though I'm unable to find
the newest research that should be easily viewable inside of the hbr.org
article (seriously, where is it???), the older stuff seems reasonable, it's
the zdnet.com writer's snide asshole commentary inserted everywhere while
pulling bits and pieces from the research to come to incorrect conclusions.

This drivel seems to be ending up on the front page more often. Please stop
upvoting it.

------
smartmic
Two things are somehow irritating to me. First, Mark Zuckerberg is not an
graduated engineer by education but the first eyecatcher on the article's
page. Second, I would prefer some distinction between classic engineering
disciplines (mechanical, electrical, civil…) and software engineering. The
article targets the latter but curricula of engineering disciplines vary
widely and good schools offer elective courses on ethics and social sciences.
It is more a matter of students personality and interest where he or she stops
expanding his or her horizons.

~~~
aduitsis
Excellent comment, I thought the article was talking about software
developers.

------
nnq
Society gets what society pays for: people don't like creative engineers
because they don't always solve the problem you want them to solve (they might
discover a more important/interesting one and jump to that instead; or maybe
discover they have a cool interesting solution... and maybe decide to create a
new problem for that solution etc.) and they tend to get bored easily (and may
appear lazy) and they are not controllable ("if I can imagine it AND make, why
do I need the boss for?") and they also tend to get just a tad bit power
hungry (think Zuck, Page etc.)...

So we're optimizing for "engineers that are not too creative" and "artists
that are not too technical" because these are the kinds of cogs that fit well
in our current organizational machines. And then we have the first read "how
to be more creative" books/articles, and the latter "how to be more
structured" books/articles.

And most good engineers learn to hide their creativity and focus on showing
off effectiveness. Sometimes we even post-hoc invent elaborate ultra-logical
explanation for why out intuitions and preferences must be correct in order to
sell them. Also, creativity in engineering lowers efficiency and safety, so
nobody would be willing to pay more to get less of these two. And if god
forbid you are one of those creative-engineers that openly declares he/she
"doesn't really give a f about either efficiency or safety, only engineering
new and novel stuff that never existed before" you'd have to tapper it off
with an "I'm joking" or nobody will want to work with you again :)

I'd love to see a rise of the techno-creatives, but in general organizations
hate or fear us, so we keep disguising ourselves as either "engineers" or
"artists" or "entrepreneurs", sometimes switching hats depending on the
crowd/situation. Oh, and purely business oriented people tend to equate a
volatility loving creative-engineer with a psycho with a chainsaw in one hand
and a flask of gasoline in another, so it helps to never be too honest with
these guys either.

 _Many engineers and other technical people are so narrow-minded because that
's what our society rewards in these fields! Change the reward system if you
want different results!_

~~~
nedrocks
I couldn't agree more. I think our entire tech interview system exists to find
people who fit the role you defined above. I wrote a post on this describing
my thoughts [1].

What's strange is so many companies brag about how they have "The Best"
technical minds working for them. They pride themselves on their engineers'
pedigrees. However, once they hire "The Best" they put a ton of process for
those engineers to go through. Effectively this is a mechanism to be
predictable and to let managers know more precisely when things will be done.

I don't see this changing in industry too quickly, simply because once a
company gets past the founding stage, those companies hire engineers who can
close tickets and work "effectively" rather than creatively.

[1] - [https://www.nedrockson.com/posts/management/interview-
correc...](https://www.nedrockson.com/posts/management/interview-correctly/)

------
loopz
Tempting troll article, but _" Why are X so narrow-minded"_ is just a
rhetorical question aiming to undermine any other interpretation than the
assumption behind the question itself!

The same can be said of any role, position or profession. Just yet another
master supression technique.

This is not to say engineers _can never_ be narrow-minded, the statement is
both true and false, for diverse situations of each X..

------
valand
Contradictively, in the software engineering environment I'm working at,
engineers who thrive are those who are open minded and capable of thinking out
of the box: the jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-something, the artist-
artisan, the orator-motivator, the metaphor-generator, the occult, the
physicist, the photographer, the producer-psycholog, the gunpla-mad-scientist,
etc.

The rest follows.

Some engineers are close minded because of upbringing, culture, and previous
education. They simply didn't experience enough or experienced more than what
they could receive at a time, inducing trauma.

Encouragement can unlock it, sometimes with shock therapy. Current environment
boost one's change as long as it can hold against negative traits and
influence of someone's close mindedness.

It's a game of influence and infection in a closed scope.

~~~
na85
>Contradictively, in the software engineering environment I'm working at,
engineers who thrive are those who are open minded and capable of thinking out
of the box: the jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-something, the artist-
artisan, the orator-motivator, the metaphor-generator, the cult-follower, the
physicist, the photographer, the producer-psycholog, the gunpla-mad-scientist,
etc.

I think this is nearly always the case. Meritocratic promotion systems don't
really exist in reality. Being more social and open-minded than one's
colleagues is always going to get one ahead.

~~~
valand
Yes, but it's not only because of being more social and open-minded. Sometimes
it's the ultra-introvert-ultimate-problem-solver, or someone who is
involuntarily being depended on by everyone by being caring all the time.
Ultimately it's someone deemed useful for other people.

On the contrary, someone with "I'm frontend so I don't care what backend is
really doing" or "If it is in production then it's SRE's responsibility"
attitude don't go anywhere.

------
majos
Possibly narrow-minded reaction: this is a bad article about iffy studies.

The article throws up a link to a review of two studies [1] and spends the
rest of its time freely asserting that "engineers" are arrogant people who
lack "openness, kindness, and curiosity". Here's the closest it gets to some
evidence:

>I know several people at Google just like that.

But OK, maybe the study actually offers good evidence that the author article
missed?

From the HBR summary, the first study had ~100 engineering students fill out a
questionnaire, do either a 15-minute guided meditation or stress relief video,
and then either "list as many alternative uses for a brick as possible" or
"list all the factors they would consider in designing a retaining wall for a
river flood scenario". They found that self-reported mindfulness in the
questionnaire was positively correlated with "the number and the originality
of ideas that participants wrote down in the idea generation task and with the
number of factors considered in the engineering design task".

In the second study, they looked at survey data from ~1400 and found that
self-reported mindfulness is positively correlated with self-reported
"confidence in one's ability to be innovative".

But neither of these things demonstrate that engineers are narrow-minded. They
don't even demonstrate that mindfulness meaningfully affects creativity. They
just suggest that _self-reported mindfulness_ is positively correlated with
producing ideas for a small toy task and confidence that one is creative.

It's a big jump from those conclusions to "mindfulness should help engineers
be more creative". And then it's an _enormous_ jump from that to "engineers
are narrow-minded".

[1] [https://hbr.org/2019/01/how-mindfulness-can-help-
engineers-s...](https://hbr.org/2019/01/how-mindfulness-can-help-engineers-
solve-problems?utm_campaign=hbr&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter)

------
tmpz22
I ran into this pretty heavily recently when trying to talk through problems
with users (who weren't also SWEs). My goal was always to approach the problem
bottom up by breaking down into significant detail where the problem
originated from and the steps to arrive at a satisfactory solution. Their
concern was top down and they could care less about any of the details other
then 'ok its "fixed" now' \- even when these details were necessary for them
to contribute to the problem at all.

Long story short I sighed deeply (in private), took a deep breath, and tried
to turn off any emotional connection to the problem while I did all the work
necessary to make it a non-problem.

~~~
vikramkr
Perhaps users of a product don't want to contribute to solving problems based
on the product since they expect that what they are paying for is the entirety
of the involvement expected from them, and you making sure it's "fixed" now is
part of what they are paying for? I imagine enthusiastic early adopters would
be more amenable to working through solving the problem with you, but I don't
see why your general later stage user would be willing to really dive in deep
with you to solve the problem?

~~~
tmpz22
You're absolutely right. To clarify this is an internal tool, not a paid-for
product (though I prefer to think if it as a product).

The problem in question was one of basic usage and training needs. Again in
short we have a very subpar UI relative to what I think the potential of great
UI is, and this conversation was about bridging the gap while the tool itself
is still in development.

So a million pieces of context, but I think the frustration caused by the
event is the same thing this blog alludes to - as an engineer I looked at it
one way, as ${SOMETHING_ELSE} they saw it a different way, and the result was
a lot of negative emotion (frustration, anger, apathy, etc.).

As a PM I see it as my job to find a way past that, and it was a great
learning experience even if I would prefer to never go through it again!

------
crimsonalucard
As an engineer myself I do agree with this in a sense. Engineers lack
creativity and they also tend to lack analytical skills. There's a high focus
on "best practices" and design patterns without the critical thinking on
"why." So you tend to see the over-application of these kinds of things
everywhere in code. If I were to describe the style of thinking engineers tend
to have, the best word is "religious" with grand delusions of being
"analytical."

I work in a golang shop where engineers were stupefyingly trying to port Java
Design patterns over to the language. I literally told them straight up that
most of these design patterns are horrible and bad for code. I told them about
the huge pitfalls of dependency injection and Nobody even wanted to listen or
believe me.

One guy tried to have all init functions that create structs replaced with a
builder pattern. Literally can people not see how the builder pattern enables
the creation of structures with invalid state? Why? Why? Why? I think because
the builder pattern is prettier and more elegant looking. Overall though these
engineers are miss applying their analytical thinking.

It's only when I referenced quotations by Rob Pike (creator of golang) on how
Rob Pike designed Golang to get away from OOP did people start to actually
listen to me. Appeal to authority rather than logic, that's how "analytical"
engineers think.

Obviously these engineers love OOP as a language they also like Golang which
is the antithesis of OOP. The fact that these engineers can exist with
conflicting beliefs tells me that their isn't an analytical bone in their
body. They worship the buzzwords of OOP and Golang for religious reasons.

~~~
paganel
> I work in a golang shop where engineers were stupefyingly trying to port
> Java Design patterns over to the language (...) It's only when I referenced
> quotations by Rob Pike (creator of golang) on how Rob Pike designed Golang
> to get away from OOP did people start to actually listen to me

I mentioned this "Python is not Java" [1] blog-post in my first interview for
a job as a Python programmer 15 years ago (I got the job), interesting that
some things seem to never change.

[1] [https://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-
java.html](https://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html)

~~~
crimsonalucard
Ah that's just syntactical stuff. Structurally python OOP and Java OOP are
similar.

The thing with Golang is that you're not even suppose to think in terms of
"Objects." It's literally suppose to be a step backwards towards C like
languages.

------
asimpletune
Are engineers this way? Maybe some are, as with any profession, but many
aren’t. I actually think it has more to do with the set and setting, than the
individual. People are like gases that fill containers, and often the most
economically safe, salaried jobs are incidentally containers that would just
love to have a “narrow-minded” person do tasks. This is often counter-
productive in the long run, but by that point their boss or whomever has
gotten what they needed.

The truth is that engineers deal with unknowns, and to do that you have to be
extremely creative. Am I alone here in thinking this?

------
codpiece
I always make a point to sit with the engineers at the lunch table wherever I
work. The conversations are wide-ranging and deep. Hardly narrow-minded. If
anything, engineers tend to look for flaws, leading arts majors feeling hurt.

~~~
smallcharleston
I met one engineer with a similar attitude. He would often make fun of me for
not knowing things. However, he completely lost it when I pointed out he
didn’t understand some basic concept in the same way he would have done to me.
I’m hesitant to believe interpretations like yours based on my experiences
with these people. I kind of view a lot of what I’ve seen engineers engage in
(it might differ from your experiences) as a pointless intellectual pissing
contest (on subjects the participants often lack depth of understanding on)
with some level of group ego massaging.

~~~
crimsonalucard
I'm an engineer and this his hugely true. I love intellectual pissing
contests. If I lose a contest it's pretty hard to stay unbiased. I think I
manage but to be biased is to not know about your own bias, so who knows?

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I'm an engineer.

I'm not as creative as I would like, but, at one time, I was a very good
artist, and a pretty good musician.

However, I'm also an outstanding problem-solver, and I like that. I can also
design some fairly complex software systems.

I appreciate folks who are creative, and I appreciate folks who aren't. We
figure out how to work together.

------
manicdee
This is just a rehash of the same issue we have had for millenia: people
trained in certain ways of doing things will try doing everything that way.

Engineers, doctors and accountants are often pilloried for their lack of
people skills, yet we never complain about a counsellor’s inability to build a
bridge.

~~~
darawk
Also of note, people trained in the humanities, presumably like this
journalist, tend to treat everything as a literary analogy problem and proceed
to reason about concrete issues based on how they "appear" or what other
things they "sound like". At least the engineering approach is often useful
for things.

~~~
jyounker
Thesis proven? :)

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Whose bridge would be better to drive over?

~~~
tmpz22
Swimming is the safer option.

------
TheOperator
In my experience, self-perceiving myself as being less orthodox and more
creative than my peers, is that making a bunch of changes is aggrevating to
your peers. It often disrupts their workflow, it causes them to have to learn
things again, and worst of all it can lead to unintended consequences because
you didn't understand why things were being done the way they were and the
pitfalls of your clever solution. Alternatively it can be the case the
creative DOES have a better solution but for some reason such as communication
people cannot understand WHY the solution is superior and reject it
perticularly when the creative is fairly new or in a fairly junior position.

The creative finds themselves in the position of either underperforming their
peers through overconfident cleverness, or overperforming their peers and in
the process threatening their peers because they have depreciated the
knowledge of their peers while positioning themselves as the only ones who
know the new system at least in the short term. So regardless of how well they
perform there is reason to try and beat them down. The creative employee has
incentives to try to downplay their creative instincts or at least to limit
their creativeness to their personal workflow where it causes less disruption.

Additionally if you take two engineers of equal ability, one by the book and
relentlessly uncreative but never breaks anything, and one which breaks as
many things as they improve coming out about even, the former is almost always
preferred simply because the latter causes a lot more stress and distraction
and more need for training. There is a cost to creativity that often goes
unaccounted for and a creative solution has to be meaningfully superior to be
worth implementing.

Probably the only consistent reasons I've seen creatives being favored is 1:
Outright superiority perticularly when conservatism has gone unchecked for too
long 2: Collective boredom and a desire for staff to learn different ways to
doing things to round out their skills 3: Management wanting to put pressure
on complacent mediocre employees who "go through the motions". In many cases
an employee exceptional at following directions and process can be genuinely
more useful.

------
davesque
It's usually a red flag when a question comes with a built-in assumption that
reads like an insult.

~~~
nnq
It's 2020... that's like the minimum you need to even hope people will read
past the article title. Attentions gets scarcer, so quasi-offensiveness and
assumptiveness have become kind of required to catch even a drop of it.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
Especially in an upvote-based system, like Hackers News or Reddit. I'm not
saying that these systems aren't useful, but simply it has flaws. Fortunately,
there is a "flag" button to counteract that, although it doesn't always work.

------
woodpanel
Although this article seems to focus on software engineers, the "narrow-
mindedness" aspect, reminds me of the book "Engineers of Jihad". The book
gathers data about how there seems to be a disproportinate amount of natural
science degerees in extremists groups and states as one reason a hierarchy-
seeking mindset amongst engineers.

Of course, it is questionable, whether they understand complex systems better
than anyone lese or are just more confident they do.

In my experience with software I've witnessed all forms of extremism. My non-
software days are gone too long to remember if the extremism cohort was
smaller there. But one thing I can say for sure: If a (software) engineer is
radicalized, he is much more conversed and harder to argue with. In other
words: better shielded from reason.

------
chrisco255
I would posture that much of what the author is trying to describe is
differences in thinking patterns. We've got loads of psychological research
that shows that across the population spectrum, various patterns of thought
dominate (MBTI, for example). I think this is a case where people who think
logically are attracted to professions where this skill is valued highly.
Perhaps creative thinking is another skillset that's also influenced by
personality. These folks are going to be more attracted to fields where they
can exercise their creativity.

~~~
bitwize
MBTI is pure quackery. The only personality model shown to have any
statistical legs whatsoever is the Big Five model and even that I have
reservations about because it relies so heavily on subjective descriptors
rather than measured quantities.

~~~
callesgg
It is not pure quackery, you can make measurements on anything and use it for
anything. The fact that it is not biologically "real" is a different thing.

I can make up a model for the human mind called there carboat model. It splits
everyone up on a spectrum on how much they like boats and cars. Now I can use
that model to make statistical assumptions about the people I measured. It bet
the assumptions will have high accuracy on boat and car related matters.

------
callesgg
"Why are engineers so narrow-minded?"

or should it be

Why do narrow-minded people become engineers....

Also it is not really a fact, there might be a trend but not a universal fact.

------
keanzu
> Some might say, however, that X get so enmeshed in Y that they leave no
> space for true creativity.

No true Scotsman would get enmeshed in Y.

------
hprotagonist
1\. SWE is not all there is to engineering

2\. Have you even read an ABET curriculum? "divergent thinking" is abundantly
represented.

------
mike50
Software engineers are not Engineers.

------
anotherevan
Let the kafkatrapping begin.

------
paulie_a
Because an engineer sees one solution and somehow it's always theirs

------
boyadjian
The problem is that many engineers are not paid to have ideas. They are driven
by their hierarchy, doing what they are asked to be done. They just obey
orders.

