Why are engineers so narrow-minded?

I'm an engineer. I'm creative as hell even outside of the domain of my work. I'm also able to analyze situations and problems with consistently unerring, narrowly focused detail. Four years of training in certain types of cognitive processes does not preclude someone from learning how to use another less rigorous (by definition) method of thought.

This article was shit from the get go, here's a list:

The title was shit:

>Why are engineers so narrow-minded? New research has an idea.

The research is not new, the research he and the hbr.org article are citing is from 2007. It's also important to mention the findings are about the perception educational environment itself not and not in the workforce. If there was new research I couldn't find it links to the papers.

The very first sentence of the body was shit:

>I could make a viable argument that engineers are swiftly destroying the world.

Yet he neglects to do so, and also fails to mention that it's the people using the technology that are destroying the world, not us.

The second sentence is even worse:

>Naturally, I won't, as they can be very sensitive souls who stream uncontrollable invective like many people stream Netflix.

So in order to make himself immune to any reasonable argument that he knows would refute his weak-ass claims he just says that all engineers would be critical of it anyway - shut up and accept him and the psychologist findings as gospel.

The worst part is that the older research isn't bad, though I'm unable to find the newest research that should be easily viewable inside of the hbr.org article (seriously, where is it???), the older stuff seems reasonable, it's the zdnet.com writer's snide asshole commentary inserted everywhere while pulling bits and pieces from the research to come to incorrect conclusions.

This drivel seems to be ending up on the front page more often. Please stop upvoting it.

Two things are somehow irritating to me. First, Mark Zuckerberg is not an graduated engineer by education but the first eyecatcher on the article's page. Second, I would prefer some distinction between classic engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical, civil…) and software engineering. The article targets the latter but curricula of engineering disciplines vary widely and good schools offer elective courses on ethics and social sciences. It is more a matter of students personality and interest where he or she stops expanding his or her horizons.

Society gets what society pays for: people don't like creative engineers because they don't always solve the problem you want them to solve (they might discover a more important/interesting one and jump to that instead; or maybe discover they have a cool interesting solution... and maybe decide to create a new problem for that solution etc.) and they tend to get bored easily (and may appear lazy) and they are not controllable ("if I can imagine it AND make, why do I need the boss for?") and they also tend to get just a tad bit power hungry (think Zuck, Page etc.)...

So we're optimizing for "engineers that are not too creative" and "artists that are not too technical" because these are the kinds of cogs that fit well in our current organizational machines. And then we have the first read "how to be more creative" books/articles, and the latter "how to be more structured" books/articles.

And most good engineers learn to hide their creativity and focus on showing off effectiveness. Sometimes we even post-hoc invent elaborate ultra-logical explanation for why out intuitions and preferences must be correct in order to sell them. Also, creativity in engineering lowers efficiency and safety, so nobody would be willing to pay more to get less of these two. And if god forbid you are one of those creative-engineers that openly declares he/she "doesn't really give a f about either efficiency or safety, only engineering new and novel stuff that never existed before" you'd have to tapper it off with an "I'm joking" or nobody will want to work with you again :)

I'd love to see a rise of the techno-creatives, but in general organizations hate or fear us, so we keep disguising ourselves as either "engineers" or "artists" or "entrepreneurs", sometimes switching hats depending on the crowd/situation. Oh, and purely business oriented people tend to equate a volatility loving creative-engineer with a psycho with a chainsaw in one hand and a flask of gasoline in another, so it helps to never be too honest with these guys either.

Many engineers and other technical people are so narrow-minded because that's what our society rewards in these fields! Change the reward system if you want different results!

Tempting troll article, but "Why are X so narrow-minded" is just a rhetorical question aiming to undermine any other interpretation than the assumption behind the question itself!

The same can be said of any role, position or profession. Just yet another master supression technique.

This is not to say engineers can never be narrow-minded, the statement is both true and false, for diverse situations of each X..

Contradictively, in the software engineering environment I'm working at, engineers who thrive are those who are open minded and capable of thinking out of the box: the jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-something, the artist-artisan, the orator-motivator, the metaphor-generator, the occult, the physicist, the photographer, the producer-psycholog, the gunpla-mad-scientist, etc.

The rest follows.

Some engineers are close minded because of upbringing, culture, and previous education. They simply didn't experience enough or experienced more than what they could receive at a time, inducing trauma.

Encouragement can unlock it, sometimes with shock therapy. Current environment boost one's change as long as it can hold against negative traits and influence of someone's close mindedness.

It's a game of influence and infection in a closed scope.

Possibly narrow-minded reaction: this is a bad article about iffy studies.

The article throws up a link to a review of two studies [1] and spends the rest of its time freely asserting that "engineers" are arrogant people who lack "openness, kindness, and curiosity". Here's the closest it gets to some evidence:

>I know several people at Google just like that.

But OK, maybe the study actually offers good evidence that the author article missed?

From the HBR summary, the first study had ~100 engineering students fill out a questionnaire, do either a 15-minute guided meditation or stress relief video, and then either "list as many alternative uses for a brick as possible" or "list all the factors they would consider in designing a retaining wall for a river flood scenario". They found that self-reported mindfulness in the questionnaire was positively correlated with "the number and the originality of ideas that participants wrote down in the idea generation task and with the number of factors considered in the engineering design task".

In the second study, they looked at survey data from ~1400 and found that self-reported mindfulness is positively correlated with self-reported "confidence in one's ability to be innovative".

But neither of these things demonstrate that engineers are narrow-minded. They don't even demonstrate that mindfulness meaningfully affects creativity. They just suggest that self-reported mindfulness is positively correlated with producing ideas for a small toy task and confidence that one is creative.

It's a big jump from those conclusions to "mindfulness should help engineers be more creative". And then it's an enormous jump from that to "engineers are narrow-minded".

[1] https://hbr.org/2019/01/how-mindfulness-can-help-engineers-s...

I ran into this pretty heavily recently when trying to talk through problems with users (who weren't also SWEs). My goal was always to approach the problem bottom up by breaking down into significant detail where the problem originated from and the steps to arrive at a satisfactory solution. Their concern was top down and they could care less about any of the details other then 'ok its "fixed" now' - even when these details were necessary for them to contribute to the problem at all.

Long story short I sighed deeply (in private), took a deep breath, and tried to turn off any emotional connection to the problem while I did all the work necessary to make it a non-problem.

As an engineer myself I do agree with this in a sense. Engineers lack creativity and they also tend to lack analytical skills. There's a high focus on "best practices" and design patterns without the critical thinking on "why." So you tend to see the over-application of these kinds of things everywhere in code. If I were to describe the style of thinking engineers tend to have, the best word is "religious" with grand delusions of being "analytical."

I work in a golang shop where engineers were stupefyingly trying to port Java Design patterns over to the language. I literally told them straight up that most of these design patterns are horrible and bad for code. I told them about the huge pitfalls of dependency injection and Nobody even wanted to listen or believe me.

One guy tried to have all init functions that create structs replaced with a builder pattern. Literally can people not see how the builder pattern enables the creation of structures with invalid state? Why? Why? Why? I think because the builder pattern is prettier and more elegant looking. Overall though these engineers are miss applying their analytical thinking.

It's only when I referenced quotations by Rob Pike (creator of golang) on how Rob Pike designed Golang to get away from OOP did people start to actually listen to me. Appeal to authority rather than logic, that's how "analytical" engineers think.

Obviously these engineers love OOP as a language they also like Golang which is the antithesis of OOP. The fact that these engineers can exist with conflicting beliefs tells me that their isn't an analytical bone in their body. They worship the buzzwords of OOP and Golang for religious reasons.

Are engineers this way? Maybe some are, as with any profession, but many aren’t. I actually think it has more to do with the set and setting, than the individual. People are like gases that fill containers, and often the most economically safe, salaried jobs are incidentally containers that would just love to have a “narrow-minded” person do tasks. This is often counter-productive in the long run, but by that point their boss or whomever has gotten what they needed.

The truth is that engineers deal with unknowns, and to do that you have to be extremely creative. Am I alone here in thinking this?

I always make a point to sit with the engineers at the lunch table wherever I work. The conversations are wide-ranging and deep. Hardly narrow-minded. If anything, engineers tend to look for flaws, leading arts majors feeling hurt.

I'm an engineer.

I'm not as creative as I would like, but, at one time, I was a very good artist, and a pretty good musician.

However, I'm also an outstanding problem-solver, and I like that. I can also design some fairly complex software systems.

I appreciate folks who are creative, and I appreciate folks who aren't. We figure out how to work together.

This is just a rehash of the same issue we have had for millenia: people trained in certain ways of doing things will try doing everything that way.

Engineers, doctors and accountants are often pilloried for their lack of people skills, yet we never complain about a counsellor’s inability to build a bridge.

In my experience, self-perceiving myself as being less orthodox and more creative than my peers, is that making a bunch of changes is aggrevating to your peers. It often disrupts their workflow, it causes them to have to learn things again, and worst of all it can lead to unintended consequences because you didn't understand why things were being done the way they were and the pitfalls of your clever solution. Alternatively it can be the case the creative DOES have a better solution but for some reason such as communication people cannot understand WHY the solution is superior and reject it perticularly when the creative is fairly new or in a fairly junior position.

The creative finds themselves in the position of either underperforming their peers through overconfident cleverness, or overperforming their peers and in the process threatening their peers because they have depreciated the knowledge of their peers while positioning themselves as the only ones who know the new system at least in the short term. So regardless of how well they perform there is reason to try and beat them down. The creative employee has incentives to try to downplay their creative instincts or at least to limit their creativeness to their personal workflow where it causes less disruption.

Additionally if you take two engineers of equal ability, one by the book and relentlessly uncreative but never breaks anything, and one which breaks as many things as they improve coming out about even, the former is almost always preferred simply because the latter causes a lot more stress and distraction and more need for training. There is a cost to creativity that often goes unaccounted for and a creative solution has to be meaningfully superior to be worth implementing.

Probably the only consistent reasons I've seen creatives being favored is 1: Outright superiority perticularly when conservatism has gone unchecked for too long 2: Collective boredom and a desire for staff to learn different ways to doing things to round out their skills 3: Management wanting to put pressure on complacent mediocre employees who "go through the motions". In many cases an employee exceptional at following directions and process can be genuinely more useful.

It's usually a red flag when a question comes with a built-in assumption that reads like an insult.

Although this article seems to focus on software engineers, the "narrow-mindedness" aspect, reminds me of the book "Engineers of Jihad". The book gathers data about how there seems to be a disproportinate amount of natural science degerees in extremists groups and states as one reason a hierarchy-seeking mindset amongst engineers.

Of course, it is questionable, whether they understand complex systems better than anyone lese or are just more confident they do.

In my experience with software I've witnessed all forms of extremism. My non-software days are gone too long to remember if the extremism cohort was smaller there. But one thing I can say for sure: If a (software) engineer is radicalized, he is much more conversed and harder to argue with. In other words: better shielded from reason.

I would posture that much of what the author is trying to describe is differences in thinking patterns. We've got loads of psychological research that shows that across the population spectrum, various patterns of thought dominate (MBTI, for example). I think this is a case where people who think logically are attracted to professions where this skill is valued highly. Perhaps creative thinking is another skillset that's also influenced by personality. These folks are going to be more attracted to fields where they can exercise their creativity.

"Why are engineers so narrow-minded?"

or should it be

Why do narrow-minded people become engineers....

Also it is not really a fact, there might be a trend but not a universal fact.

> Some might say, however, that X get so enmeshed in Y that they leave no space for true creativity.

No true Scotsman would get enmeshed in Y.

1. SWE is not all there is to engineering

2. Have you even read an ABET curriculum? "divergent thinking" is abundantly represented.

Software engineers are not Engineers.

Let the kafkatrapping begin.

Because an engineer sees one solution and somehow it's always theirs

The problem is that many engineers are not paid to have ideas. They are driven by their hierarchy, doing what they are asked to be done. They just obey orders.