Said The Engineer, “Let Me Tell You a Story…”
Image from “ONCE UPON A TIME,” SAID THE ENGINEER… by Kourosh Kayvani

Said The Engineer, “Let Me Tell You a Story…”

Have you ever found yourself reading a book, sitting cozy on the couch, only to look up after who-knows-how-long and notice that it’s getting really really late—way later than you were planning on staying up. Now it’s really time to get to bed…

Just one more chapter

I've been thinking about the power of stories.

I wrote in my last couple of posts about how we don’t explain engineering well enough. One of the most powerful ways to convey what it means to be an engineer is through stories.

“ONCE UPON A TIME,” SAID THE ENGINEER…

“…in spite of how essential engineering is to human society, as a profession it remains largely an untold tale, as most engineers don’t recognize there is a story that needs telling—one in which their profession is the hero.” Kourosh Kayvani

Samuel C. Florman called the time period of 1850-1950 the “Golden Age of Engineering.” Part of what made it so were the developments that transformed society. In the United States, that century included milestones such as the first oil well (1859), transcontinental railway (1869), transcontinental telegraph (1871), telephone (1876), phonograph (1877), electric light bulb (1879), airplane (1903), mass-produced automobiles (1913), first US radio station (1920), movies with sound (1927), radar (1935), American broadcasting television(1941), and the ENIAC computer (1946).

To be an engineer… at any time between 1850 and 1950, was to be a participant in a great adventure, a leader in a great crusade. Technology, as everyone could see, was making miraculous advances, and, as a natural consequence, the prospects for mankind were becoming increasing bright. —Samuel C. Florman

It was a century that started with horses and buggies and lamps burning sperm whale oil that ended with automobiles, jet planes, telephones, and computers. The people who made that possible were celebrated. Technological progress was celebrated. Novels were written with engineer protagonists. Some expounded a vision of a perfect future run by applying engineering principles to all aspects of life, including politics, economics and social conflicts.

Then things changed. The public’s view of engineers and technology changed. People realized that the world is not perfectible. The word tradeoff entered the lexicon.

The image of the engineer has changed from that of a ruddy-faced chap rushing about in high-laced boots, to a man in a white coat seated motionless at a computer terminal. —Samuel C. Florman

Meanwhile, engineers became more reticent. Florman cites the psychological research of his day (writing in 1976) that found the typical engineer to be intelligent, unassuming, and practical. They considered their work to be interesting, fulfilling and noble, but when asked to talk about their profession, they tended to emphasize the analytical and antiemotional aspects.

While engineers were no longer prone to make grandiose Golden Age pronouncements, in the process they also lost the ability to tell any compelling stories. They made for uninspiring spokespeople. This left many people concluding that engineering was basically a field for analytical, emotionless, boring people.

This impression lingers to today, which is why so many people assume that they already know just enough about engineering to know that it’s not for them.

What could we do to change that? Do you have to go all the way through engineering school to get a hint that engineering might be for you? I think not. Engineering stories can help you figure out if you might really enjoy becoming an engineer.

Choose Your Own Adventure

That book that you can’t put down that keeps you up all night wanting to find out what happens next. If you are the one who is captivated by that story, what does that say about you?

Your interests can say a lot about you. Being “interested” in something… Is that something that you choose?

Photo of pages from a Choose Your Own Adventure paperback.

When I was a kid, I used to enjoy reading books from the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series. At the end of each page in a CYOA book, there is a choice with instructions for which page to turn to, depending on what you want the main characters to do next. Sort of like paperback hypertext.

To make an imperfect analogy, life too presents you with a series of options, opportunities, and choices to make.

As if the bottom of your page that talks about going to college says:

If you decide to major in engineering, turn to page 19.

If you decide to major in Greek archaeology, turn to page 38.

etc.

Say I told you to just pick the one that interests you more. Could you flip a coin and decide, “If it comes up heads, I’ll chose to be interested in engineering. Tails, I’ll choose to be interested in Greek archaeology.”

My hunch is that you can’t fully choose your interests.

Some of you are probably objecting right now because you think I’m denying your agency. There’s probably one of you who is saying, “Hey! Who says they’re mutually exclusive? I'm an engineer, and I majored in Greek archeology! Ever heard of Archimedes?”

So, before you dismiss what I’m saying, recognize that I’m not telling you that you can’t choose whichever you like, I’m saying that you may not be able to choose which you like.

Think about some of your established preferences in life. Was it a pure choice whether or not you like vanilla ice cream? When you fall in love, is that something you decide to do? Sure, you may have exercised choice in what you did about it, but are you fully in control of what attracts or interests you?

Imagine about how potentially useful it would be if you could be fully in charge of what you find interesting.

For example, I remember in high school that I took a course in English literature. I think I made it okay through Pride and Prejudice, but somewhere in the middle of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights I started to lose it. I would know that I had to read another 50 assigned pages before the next day, but I couldn't get through more than a couple of pages at a time without involuntarily falling into a coma. Thinking back on it today, all I remember about Wuthering Heights is that there’s a guy named Heathcliff in it. All I remember about Jane Eyre is... nothing! Did I even actually read Jane Eyre?

Point is... now that I’ve thoroughly horrified and disgusted you with how uncultured I am, can you at least appreciate how useful it would have been to have had the ability to just decide to find those books interesting? I really really tried.

So too, some people would like engineering, and some people wouldn’t, just as some people enjoy reading a Charlotte Bront? novel, and some people don’t. And just as there are some people who enjoy reading the occasional novel, but not enough to warrant going for a PhD in English literature, so too, some people may develop an appreciation for the field of engineering, without necessarily wanting to make it their full time career.

Engineering Literacy

If you are one of those people who enjoys learning a bit of the ways of engineers, but not necessarily enough to want to become one, that is great! Whatever else you do in life will only be enhanced by having some degree of engineering literacy. If you learn a little bit about how engineers think and how engineering works, that is a valuable filter on reality that you can use to help identify when a particular problem you are trying to solve happens to be well-suited to taking an engineering approach.

The Adventure That Chooses You

I think though, there are still a lot of people out there who aren’t engineers, but could be good ones if they wanted to be. Is there a way to tell if you might be one of them? I think there is.

I learned it from Debbie Sterling, founder of GoldieBlox. She was trying to make engineering toys for girls. She observed that girls didn’t particularly respond to typical boy engineering toys like the erector sets, but it wasn’t because building things is a “boy thing.” She found that what was missing was the story. Girls could get just as interested as boys in an engineering-oriented toy as long as it had some point.

This observation is significant because it isn’t just about girls. It is meaningful to everybody to see the point of what something is for. Just because there is some subset of people who will be content to pointlessly tinker doesn’t mean that the point doesn’t matter. You don’t want all engineers to be the kind of people who would still do this even if there was no point to it.

If you want a shortcut to figuring out what interests you. If you want to find out if engineering, or some other subject, would be something you would enjoy doing, you should seek out the equivalent of the adventure stories of that field. That way you’ll learn the point first, and it will make learning the means have a purpose that you will understand.

If you read the stories of engineering, and the stories really grab you, then that could be a sign that there is a part of you that could be great at engineering.

The idea that a story can grab you, that almost against your will, your attention is almost magnetically attracted to certain things, is the opposite of Choose Your Own Adventure. It’s almost the other way around―the adventure chooses you.

Get the Word Out

Not every person will want to be and engineer. But the continued existence of large numbers of people who initially count themselves out but then discover they were wrong, is a sure sign that we need to do more and better outreach. Tell those stories!

Esther Jung

Software Engineer

4 年

I enjoyed reading this, thanks for sharing your thoughts! On a related note, I recently watched a couple of episodes of "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist", a TV show starring a female software engineer. It's honestly not a very good show, but it's funny how we're getting more and more references to the engineering profession in pop culture. I expect this to be biggest factor in improving people's perception of engineering.

Ben Lai

Full-stack Software Engineer | Product Manager | Green Team Lead | Screenwriter

4 年

David, I like your out-of-the-box thinking -- how can we make engineering exciting to everyone? It reminds me of a project to make programming fun for girls, which I read about in "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch: --------------- (From https://www.enotes.com/topics/the-last-lecture/chapter-summaries/chapter-27-summary) Another of Pausch’s students, Caitlin Kelleher, saw how Alice makes programming easy, but she asked Pausch what makes it fun as well. He tells her he is a “compulsive male” and likes to make little tin soldiers move around at his command. For her PhD dissertation, Kelleher wondered how to engage girls as well as the boys, so she built a system called “Storytelling Alice.” She is now a computer professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and she has been able to demonstrate that girls are perfectly willing to learn how to write computer software if it is presented as a storytelling activity. -------------- See https://www.alice.org/get-alice/storytelling-alice/

Chip Cutter

Reporter at The Wall Street Journal

4 年

This is great, David! You're right --? stories about careers can be so interesting and powerful.?

Abby García

Senior Product Manager | Design Thinking | Builder | Enterprise SaaS

4 年

Wonderfully written David!

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