The End of the Engineer

http://blogs.forbes.com/tomgillis/2011/07/14/the-end-of-the-engineer/?partner=yahootix

by aarghh • 15 years ago

16 21 15 years ago

blogs.forbes.com

bartonfink• 15 years ago

"That’s why I’m encouraging my kids to pursue a liberal arts education. I can’t think of another course of study that would prepare them better for the future."

This has nothing whatsoever to do with what he wrote about the diminishing returns of pure engineering skill over the past ten years, and I'm not sure why he chose to conclude with this.

I fail to see the connection between a liberal arts education and "a competency of customer understanding... [that] includes a vision of solving problems the customer has yet to anticipate." Engineering is still going to be a fine career choice for a long time, and unless that liberal arts education comes with a specific mandate to study the current whims of the marketplace and how to create products to serve them, his kids are going to be in a rough spot when they graduate.

friendstock• 15 years ago

Agreed!

Yes, engineering is a commodity and companies must do customer development... but people will need strong technical backgrounds in order to make the right decisions.

gte910h• 15 years ago

You think requirements analysis and industrial design are parts of a liberal arts education?

kartikrustagi• 15 years ago

And I always thought iPhone was a technical marvel :-/

imack• 15 years ago

"As China and India continue to evolve, their supply of engineering talent is likely to outpace demand"...Spoken like someone who has never tried to outsource a development project.

I've been hearing this since I started my CS program in 2001, back then I was worried that by the time I graduated the whole north american industry would be hollowed out and I'd have to go to law school. If the engineering sky was falling, it would have collapsed by now.

He is, however, correct about the importance of customer understanding, but that is not at the expense of engineering in any way.

jones1618• 15 years ago

Paradigm shift? No, more like visibility shift.

While it is true that shaving megahertz and kilobytes doesn't give you command of a market anymore, engineering still defines market leaders. Look at Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Their "customer understanding" is key to their success (and is most visible) but they couldn't serve their customer experience without mountains of engineered infrastructure.

What about Apple? They're just a pure design firm now? No, they may fly the design banner but below decks the Good Ship Lollipop is manned by notoriously cut-throat band of engineering scalawags bent on shaving components and squeezing price/performance blood out of their suppliers.

Yes, component engineering and manufacturing have moved overseas but system and product engineering still dictate what the user experience designers (who also need a fair amount of engineering know-how) can deliver.

At minimum, every "Liberal Arts" kid should learn math, science, programming and basic web technology. Think about it: We live in a world where artists use tech skills and librarians are computer scientists to some extent.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

Somehow, I'm not too worried.

While I don't doubt for a minute that engineering talent in other parts of the world will continue to improve, the need for engineers will remain until that time when a machine algorithm can take a set of requirements and a 'look' and put together a plan for creating the required product. That too will come about at some point but efforts to date have yet to seriously threaten day to day engineering.

Perhaps the author is just burned out, or perhaps he has lost his sense of wonder which is so vital to engineering things. But I am not convinced by his reasoning that we've hit 'peak engineer' :-)

turbojerry2• 15 years ago

Well the Holy Grail of automating software development has been supposedly coming for a long time and still isn't here, check out The Last One from 1981-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_%28software%29

jeffdavis2• 15 years ago

The author seems to have concluded that engineering will cease to be a competitive advantage. I think that can only be true if engineering can no longer produce things that are truly new or qualitatively different than what could be produced before. And that sounds a little like saying "everything has already been invented".

Sure, the consumer doesn't care about the difference between 2.8 and 3.2 GHz. But the difference between 1 MHz and 1GHz is so huge that it's a qualitative difference -- you can apply it in ways that just wouldn't be practical otherwise.

I find it strange that he cites Apple, because they are a prime example of the success of engineering and design excellence. They take existing technology, imagine what can be done if they push it to the limits, and design products that deliver a lot of value (I don't happen to like Apple products much, but a lot of people do -- and not just because they look nice).

But pushing the technology to the limits is a crucial aspect. Why do you think they care so much about their sources of technology? Sure, it's outsourced, but Apple always makes sure they get better products than their competitors can. If the iPhone were just a little bigger when it was launched, it would have failed -- because that's the difference between all your customers always carrying it around, and being happy about it; and them leaving it in their car or at their desk when they go to lunch.

makeramen• 15 years ago

I would argue Apple doesn't exactly "push engineering to the limits." That is the role of companies like Intel, nVidia, AMD, ARM, to name a few. Apple is precisely in the business the author describes, of tailoring the technology of those other companies to best fit the mass market of consumers.

This is not to say Apple doesn't design and engineer either. Just not in the traditional sense. Apple engineered and designed OSX to take advantage of the cutting edge hardware they source from other more traditional "engineering" companies. Apple designs and engineers the retail experience, online and in-store, to better sell those products. Apple designs new and innovative ways to combine existing technology into innovative new products like the iPod, iPhone, iPad.

But the real differentiator is the vision behind their actions. While Intel, nVidia, ARM battle to make the faster, stronger, cheaper, more power-efficient processors; Apple is asking "how do we make listening to music more enjoyable?" (iPod), "how do we make our 'smart'phones less annoying?" (iPhone), and "how do we make computers that actually get out of our way, so we can get our work done faster, and go home to our friends and families?" (Macs).

The difference is in the driving questions behind their actions. The answers might still be provided by people we call engineers and designers, but they are definitely not the same kind of engineers as the ones at Intel creating the next generation processor architecture.

jeffdavis2• 15 years ago

But what you are saying is essentially that they build on top of other engineering work. And that's all engineering is, anyway.

Maybe in X years Intel will just be a manufacturing company and not an engineering company. But that's just the way of things -- when an industry is immature, engineers are needed to make stuff work; and when it's mature, they don't need so many engineers.

But there are new industries, new applications, and new expectations that will need engineers.

Or, maybe everything really has been invented this time, and we're just done.

hjkl• 15 years ago

I'm a guy who went to school for a BA in Film/Digital Media and a BS in Mechanical Engineering. I now work as a software engineer. It is my opinion that my BA in film to did not develop any more "soft skills" than my engineering degree.

The implication in this article is that you either think like an engineer or you think like... I don't know, someone who studied liberal arts? I think this is a false dichotomy. Engineers can understand customers just as well as someone who studied film/anthropology/politics/whatever.

WalterSear3• 15 years ago

Better, if understanding that customer's requirements involves engineering something. This "maybe you can engineer, but I got 'wide ranging experiences'" shit has got to stop. You can't get a liberal education in a classroom - you have to go out into the world and teach yourself.

(Social science undergrad/MS, FWIW, with plenty enough shakespeare and philosophy classes)

WalterSear3• 15 years ago

This article presents so many strawmen, it should be called the rise of the engineer.

wladimir• 15 years ago

He's conflating two things; yes, there are a lot of good and cheap engineers in India. And yes, doing what the customer needs is important. Conclusion: the end of the engineer!

It's more like "the engineer is dead, long live the new engineer". The end of the engineer would mean the end of our decades-long high-tech fun ride.

People take so much for granted. Engineering is implicit in everything these days. We've replaced the guts of our (human) world with software, hardware, and it's not showing signs of stopping. Who is going to support that?

People with liberal arts degrees, of course! Yes, I bet in a decade, it's going to be so much easier to get a job with a liberal arts degree than with an engineering one...

WalterSear3• 15 years ago

The biggest problem I have had with recent liberal arts degree acquirers is that they are so damn sure of themselves, and completely clueless. They don't know what they don't know.

It's like they haven't been introduce to the actual world, or anything even remotely complicated. Isn't that what a generalist education is supposed to prepare you for?

cwp• 15 years ago

I guess if you tell a room full of engineers that engineering is no longer where it's at, you won't get a lot of applause.

The author never said that there won't be a need for engineering talent. Of course there will. It's just that engineering isn't the edge anymore. The difference between Apple ten years ago and Apple today isn't better engineering. The difference between Apple and Nokia or Twitter and Buzz isn't engineering.

Actually, I think this is what Google+ is about. Google has always had great engineering, but they haven't paid much attention to user experience. Google+ comes out of the recognition that the internet is actually a means for people to connect with other people. So if you're going to focus on that instead of "organizing the world's information," user experience comes to the fore. Sure, the engineering is there, but it's not enough. And sure enough, Google has put a lot of effort into UX in Google+ - everything from interface design to feature selection to rollout strategy. Contrast that with Wave, which was a marvel of engineering, but didn't have a clear purpose.

zwieback• 15 years ago

Someone who writes this kind of ridiculous drivel cannot be a good engineer so I don't take his analysis very seriously.

JamesVI• 15 years ago

Correct, Tom Gillis is not an engineer.

He is a salesman who happens to lead a business unit at a technology company.

alexgaribay• 15 years ago

Why was this article written? How is it the end of the engineer? How is the 'era of the engineer over'? I don't see one thing in the article to support his idea. The only thing I conclude from the article is that the focus of business has shifter to satisfying the customer with easy-to-use elegant technological products.

turbojerry2• 15 years ago

While it is true that understanding your customers and making things easier to use is important it does not mean that engineering is dead. He makes many mistakes in the article, for example Apple is less about the customer than it is about creating pretty objects that have a cult like status, how else do you explain people buying mobile phones that only work if you hold them a certain way? He obviously has no knowledge of the strides made in engineering that I see every single day. Also I took a look at IronPort that he seems to be so proud of, they are security products that don't seem that secure-

http://securitytracker.com/id/1023399

http://sebug.net/exploit/19117/

All that said, it's in Forbes, so hopefully the article will distract many CEOs of large companies from investing in engineering allowing other companies to eat their lunch, I look forward to shorting those CEOs companies and going long those that crush them.

The End of the Engineer

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