Engineering has become too much of a simulacrum. We act like we do it in ways we don’t really do it. We feel ashamed of showing how we are actually doing it, so we stuff it with filler in order to be accepted and liked. We only relax to be ourselves when no one is watching. All the rest we do is an increasingly contrived facade we put in place due to different social pressures. Here’s how we break it, little by little, day after day:
We fake requirements, and we let them rot
We are not bothered to tell the difference between Project Management and Systems Engineering. We do not know how to navigate their overlaps.
We believe that a problem which is proportional to the amount of people involved will be solved by adding more people
We adopt frameworks we do not believe in or we don't understand
We are forced to accept corporate manufactured mantras someone 50 years ago said are important (they’re not)
We don’t laugh enough about how ridiculous things are all around us
We ride the hype while we consume biased content
We over audit what we do
We embrace myopia; we only scratch the surface
We waste energy fighting with fellow deparments
We acquiesce to be led by people who belong to a bygone era
We accept subpar numbers and figures. We embrace slippery metrics.
We change what doesn’t need to be changed. We destroy what we painstakingly built
We stop giving a damn
We refuse to kill already dead projects
We confuse prototypes with products
We overcomplicate goals and objectives
We step out of our depth
We only pay attention to the winners
We get too used to wearing a mask
We give and accept bombastic titles that mean nothing
We focus on the solutions before knowing the problems
We deal with too much random shit
We believe in fairy tales like plug & play
We forget the delicate reasons why things work
We lose sight of the things that tie everything together
We stretch old designs beyond reasonable limits
We overcomplicate leadership
We try to get things “right the first time” instead of going step by step
You may say I am cynic, but I’m not. Can engineering be fixed, though? I think yes. How? Well, we shall start doing it more as if nobody’s watching.