Is becoming an engineer still worth it?

Written by Devika Chawla and Nishant Bhajaria

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We start this conversation over a cup of coffee in the Netflix kitchen:

Devika: “I have all these openings and its taking forever to identify qualified candidates. Where are the engineers?”

Nishant: “The talent pipeline will only get worse. None of my nieces and nephews want to become engineers”

Devika: “Why do you think that is?”

Nishant: “I wonder if they think computer science is not as cool as it used to be? We once used computers to send humans to the moon and other larger-than-life projects, while modern computing is about making things smaller - phones, chips…”

Devika: “So, to a culture obsessed with scale and size, computers have gone from being the creator of change to a mere catalyst? Or to paraphrase President Bartlett in the West Wing, engineers went from being the guy to being the guy the guy counts on….”

Nishant: “The social stereotypes hurt too -- on TV the lawyers are always good looking, well dressed, confident, successful while engineers are portrayed as geeks”.

Nishant has a point about the social stereotypes (see FIGURE 1 and FIGURE 2 below).

FIGURE 1: LAWYERS IN POPULAR CULTURE (SOURCE)

FIGURE 2: ENGINEERS IN POPULAR CULTURE (SOURCE)

This conversation inspired us to write about what engineering means to us and what it makes possible. Honestly, there is no better time to be a computer engineer than today. The profession is broader and cuts across all disciplines, more challenging, rewarding and impactful than it has ever been. It requires an open mind, some new mental models, and some new techniques:

Be Imaginative and entrepreneurial

The days when engineers worked on major life-changing projects from scratch in isolation have passed. Today, engineering is about intelligent reuse, creative aggregation and innovation in digestible and trackable pieces.

Leverage Open Source, Cloud Storage and other reusable technologies to solve other, unsolved, hard problems and explore new possibilities. 

• Facebook == Email + AOL IM + Picasa + human need for contact
• As Steve Jobs put it, the iPhone == iPod + phone + web browser

Today’s complainer is tomorrow’s customer. Find such problems and solve them.

Conversely, don’t be afraid of disrupting and reshaping expectations. Not that we’re bragging, but if engineering lacked ingenuity, you’d be paying $4.99 per DVD rather than streaming quality EMMY-nominated content on demand at a much lower price.

You have the power to challenge habit and history.

If you build it, they will come.

Be a decision maker, take charge

Don’t wait for someone to tell you what the perfect set of features looks like. 

People’s expectations change quickly; take too long and you may end up with:

• a product that is no longer viable or
• in a market saturated by competitors.

Build a minimum viable product; get real-time feedback, improvise, revisit and recreate. Iterative improvement in existing products is as much engineering as ground up inventions.

Don’t make perfection the enemy of progress. As Gordon Bell said, “The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren’t there.”

Be a beancounter

Given the cost of creating products - people, offices, marketing don’t come cheap - optimizing effort for outcomes is not just the job of accountants and CEOs. Look at efficiency as not just a feature of your product, but a guiding principle in its creation and delivery.

Engineering is like redecorating your house: Progress should be measured as much by the new infrastructure you create as by the outdated infrastructure you retire.

As Benji Weber writes, creating something new adds maintenance and training costs in the long run. Before creating something, weigh your desire to solve a problem against pragmatic questions like:

• Does the complexity it will introduce really justify its existence?
• Can you adjust process or practices instead to make it unnecessary?
• Rather than automating something, can you eliminate its need, therefore creating capacity for a more urgent challenge?

Be a salesperson

Engineers often sneer at the sales staff. “Those who can, build it, and those who can’t, sell it,” said a former colleague to one of the authors.

In reality, engineering is about selling your idea before, after and during its creation.

People are more likely to buy what they understand. They won’t care about the cool algorithms or processes you deployed. Learn to articulate what you and your product do for he/she who pays the bills.

Remember that as you build automations, don’t talk like an automaton. As we said before, if you build it, they will come, but only if they know what “it” is and what “it” does.

...and finally, give back

Some say, somewhat justifiably, that engineering has become all about making money quickly.

Engineering brings about a great deal of creative carnage. Our products make things faster, cheaper and better, but often at a cost. Automation makes human labor redundant and not everyone has the skills to land on their feet.

Meanwhile, the creators of this technology are often not representative of their customer base. Women are almost as poorly represented in the engineering workforce as they are in engineering college programs. Senior management layers at most tech companies are fairly monochromatic. The tech community often feels like a hall of mirrors, in which like-minded people reflect and reproduce each other’s opinions.

In spite of these limitations, engineering also makes possible a renewed capitalism married to community. This is where you come in.

The skills that help you create equity and quality at work can be summoned in service of Engineers without Borders to build solutions that address some of the most critical issues facing global communities, including drinking water and sanitation infrastructure, solar photovoltaic systems, irrigation systems, paved roads, bridges, and schools.

You can volunteer to teach kids how to code using LEGOs, an approach that has shown results in getting kids interested in the sciences.

You can be inspired by Bit Source, a Kentucky-based web design startup that is teaching miners how to code using their experience with technology and robotics. In doing so, the company profitably helps miners transition from an atrophying industry to a growing one.

Stanford even offers a course in doing good with engineering.

All of these contributions may not seem as glamorous as sending a man or woman to the moon, but on this planet, they make for a good living and a better life.

And with due deference to everyone’s favorite fictional president, engineers may not be the lead actor in the movie of life, but they can be the director and take the script to an unforeseen and thrilling climax of their choosing.