This might come across as a very strange question but is it uncommon to find engineers who did not enjoy school or think highly of the schools that they attended? I have encountered numerous computing and IT types over the years who did not enjoy school or had bad experiences at school but very few electrical or mechanical engineers.
Had a further thought when I woke up this morning. Science itself (not its application) exists without a social construct. The properties of Magnesium, the existence and properties of black holes, the mechanisms by which extremophiles exists in their environments, do not exist for human purposes, nor were they developed like that to meet human needs. By contrast, engineering is 100% about taking science and applying it to human needs. The need and application of engineering is all about social interactions.
To take my favourite example at the moment: Autonomous vehicles. One issue here is that they are being created to make people's lives easier in particular ways, if the designers misjudge how people appreciate their lives being made "easier" then they won't sell. The other issue is that they will kill people. (That's not scaremongering, it's a fact - trains and planes are very, very safe but people still die on or by them. It's a question of limiting the risk to a socially acceptable level.) Those deaths will broadly happen for one (or both) of two reasons: either the designers have misunderstood, not fully understood, or have decided to ignore, the environment the car is working in, or the designers have made an error - which will be most likely because of miscommunication within the design function. These are all social functions ranging across the boundaries of the customer, the supplier, and (within the supplier) the engineering team. Some, or ideally many, of the engineering team need to thoroughly understand and operate effectively in that social context to keep those deaths to a minimum - and to make sure that autonomous vehicles do actually deliver what the end user wants.
But within that engineering team there is certainly space for those who function at different social interactivity levels. (Interpret that sentence how you wish - I just made it up. Any experienced engineering manager - or, indeed, university lecturer, will know exactly what I mean!)
Had a further thought when I woke up this morning. Science itself (not its application) exists without a social construct. The properties of Magnesium, the existence and properties of black holes, the mechanisms by which extremophiles exists in their environments, do not exist for human purposes, nor were they developed like that to meet human needs. By contrast, engineering is 100% about taking science and applying it to human needs. The need and application of engineering is all about social interactions.
To take my favourite example at the moment: Autonomous vehicles. One issue here is that they are being created to make people's lives easier in particular ways, if the designers misjudge how people appreciate their lives being made "easier" then they won't sell. The other issue is that they will kill people. (That's not scaremongering, it's a fact - trains and planes are very, very safe but people still die on or by them. It's a question of limiting the risk to a socially acceptable level.) Those deaths will broadly happen for one (or both) of two reasons: either the designers have misunderstood, not fully understood, or have decided to ignore, the environment the car is working in, or the designers have made an error - which will be most likely because of miscommunication within the design function. These are all social functions ranging across the boundaries of the customer, the supplier, and (within the supplier) the engineering team. Some, or ideally many, of the engineering team need to thoroughly understand and operate effectively in that social context to keep those deaths to a minimum - and to make sure that autonomous vehicles do actually deliver what the end user wants.
But within that engineering team there is certainly space for those who function at different social interactivity levels. (Interpret that sentence how you wish - I just made it up. Any experienced engineering manager - or, indeed, university lecturer, will know exactly what I mean!)
