We can hope, although it's unfortunate that the judge didn't rule on whether the University owed a duty of care - which would have been a very useful bit of case law. However, realistically we would be talking about a huge cultural shift here, unfortunately engineering does not have the greatest reputation for being a caring profession towards its customers or, indeed, other engineers. As an example, somewhat related to the threads you link to here, I am forever having to push projects to appreciate that it is not sufficient for engineers to design signage, manuals, etc designed for non-engineers - they need to involve human factors staff who are really good at this stuff and understand how people in different situations will actually react to these.

And somewhat related to the BBC story, we can't expect everybody in the profession to be comfortable giving presentations, writing reports (ref your first link), etc etc, the question is whether they can do it well enough to fulfil their engineering function - which may be providing notes to another engineer who can give the presentation or write the report.

Give me an engineer to work with who is brilliant at the technical side and I'm quite happy to tidy their reports and give their presentations for them if needs be. And I'm afraid I have little time for those who put down anyone who lacks those skills (or any other skills) as being a "bad engineer", mostly I find it is simply bullying. Genuinely helping those who would benefit from developing these skills of course is a completely different matter. It's always dangerous to comment on cases without knowing the facts, but in the BBC case chances are the University could have done more to support the student to develop their skills to give an adequate level of presentation with confidence, rather than maybe just assuming that a successful student ought to "just be able" to do it.  

I will say that, in a corporate environment at least, it is interesting how often you find that those engineers who spend their lives pointing out the incompetences of other engineers, or of customers, (while, of course, being totally unaware of their own) end up shunted away in a room with no-one else talking to them, and have no idea why...

So interesting point, thanks for raising it. I hadn't read either of those threads you linked to (just as well as one of them in particular, being someone with dyspraxic tendencies, would have got me very cross - and my resolution for 2024 is not to get cross with people who post their opinions on social media). I agree there is a relevance here, we do need to consider who we owe a duty of care to, and whether we are fulfilling it.

Talking of (slightly) "off piste", I'm in the middle of watching the (brilliant) first series of "Slow Horses", and noticed a scene where the lead character, a very hard bitten ex-cold war spy, "motivates" his team by telling them how useless they are. Which is a technique I've often seen in real life throughout my career, particularly by ex-military people. I've never actually seen it achieve anything positive though, apart from developing a great capability in the team in hiding their mistakes - or even worse, blaming them on to others. It did make me wonder whether that approach is still heavily used in the military world, and whether it is ever effective. Certainly doesn't work with me.

Thanks,

Andy

We can hope, although it's unfortunate that the judge didn't rule on whether the University owed a duty of care - which would have been a very useful bit of case law. However, realistically we would be talking about a huge cultural shift here, unfortunately engineering does not have the greatest reputation for being a caring profession towards its customers or, indeed, other engineers. As an example, somewhat related to the threads you link to here, I am forever having to push projects to appreciate that it is not sufficient for engineers to design signage, manuals, etc designed for non-engineers - they need to involve human factors staff who are really good at this stuff and understand how people in different situations will actually react to these.

And somewhat related to the BBC story, we can't expect everybody in the profession to be comfortable giving presentations, writing reports (ref your first link), etc etc, the question is whether they can do it well enough to fulfil their engineering function - which may be providing notes to another engineer who can give the presentation or write the report.

Give me an engineer to work with who is brilliant at the technical side and I'm quite happy to tidy their reports and give their presentations for them if needs be. And I'm afraid I have little time for those who put down anyone who lacks those skills (or any other skills) as being a "bad engineer", mostly I find it is simply bullying. Genuinely helping those who would benefit from developing these skills of course is a completely different matter. It's always dangerous to comment on cases without knowing the facts, but in the BBC case chances are the University could have done more to support the student to develop their skills to give an adequate level of presentation with confidence, rather than maybe just assuming that a successful student ought to "just be able" to do it.  

I will say that, in a corporate environment at least, it is interesting how often you find that those engineers who spend their lives pointing out the incompetences of other engineers, or of customers, (while, of course, being totally unaware of their own) end up shunted away in a room with no-one else talking to them, and have no idea why...

So interesting point, thanks for raising it. I hadn't read either of those threads you linked to (just as well as one of them in particular, being someone with dyspraxic tendencies, would have got me very cross - and my resolution for 2024 is not to get cross with people who post their opinions on social media). I agree there is a relevance here, we do need to consider who we owe a duty of care to, and whether we are fulfilling it.

Talking of (slightly) "off piste", I'm in the middle of watching the (brilliant) first series of "Slow Horses", and noticed a scene where the lead character, a very hard bitten ex-cold war spy, "motivates" his team by telling them how useless they are. Which is a technique I've often seen in real life throughout my career, particularly by ex-military people. I've never actually seen it achieve anything positive though, apart from developing a great capability in the team in hiding their mistakes - or even worse, blaming them on to others. It did make me wonder whether that approach is still heavily used in the military world, and whether it is ever effective. Certainly doesn't work with me.

Thanks,

Andy