Franchu’s lair

Some days ago I was on a plane en-route to Washington D.C. and while reading a magazine I saw a paragraph in the article “Standards, Agility and Engineering” by François Coallier that struck me for its way to put things in perspective. I wrote it down to blog about it, but somehow I managed to forget about it until now. The text went as follows…

While the objective of science is to understand nature, engineering’s objective is to build useful things using science.

Scientists do reverse engineering while engineers do forward engineering. Engineers must not only build things, they must do so within budgetary, schedule, resource, regulatory and operational constraints.

This fragment clearly shows the different mindset of a scientist and an engineer. While a scientist’s main goal is to discover the building blocks and rules that govern a certain observed principle, an engineer’s main goal is to solve a problem based on the things a scientist has discovered.

Even if this difference seems trivial and innocent it has very deep implications in the way people work. According to the vision depicted by Mr. Coallier, and which I share, research is to be carried by scientists while development is to be carried by engineers. The problems arise when companies decide to do R&D as a whole and tie it to a specific project with its lifetime, deadlines, and associated limitations. In such cases you are imposing on scientists the same constraints that engineers have and no real research can be achieved as it is quite difficult to predict when a new breakthrough may be achieved in science because it is a trial and error process coupled to the brightness of the involved scientists.

The situation only gets worse when you introduce what the people from businesspundit.com called management by semantics. This concept refers to the fact that management tends to be carried by people that know lots of the jargon and buzz words in the sense that they know what they are called, and what their definitions are, but they really don’t understand them and much less are able to explain them or apply them.

In the fast paced technological world we live nowadays, it is very difficult to keep on the bleeding edge of technology and that is why even if engineers or scientists assume managements positions unless they do a real effort to keep in touch with the technology’s underlying principles they will eventually drift into management by semantics. This is a very dangerous situation for a company because then R&D will be tied to impossible constraints such as insufficiently funded projects, impossibly tight deadlines and unachievable expectations. Then R&D companies will not be long term money making machines interested in growing while advancing science but short-term money making machines.

For now I love being an engineer, but the day that management by semantics becomes the rule and poisons the corporate world, I will happily change my job and try to work as a scientist, giving a chance to the advancement of new technologies for a better world.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed