Hacker News Reader

Comment by skyberrys | Hacker News Reader

You reminded me of a comic hanging up in the engineering college. It was a picture of a student getting their finger zapped with the thought bubble of "ouch, that hurt. Wonder if it will happen if I do that again?" And the caption was along the lines of "How to tell if you are ment for engineering."

View on HN

Sounds like this ancient XKCD: https://xkcd.com/242/ (Normal person doesn't pull the lever again; scientist wonders if that happens every time. I assume the engineer does, too...)

The scientist’s job is to get zapped until they figure out why. The engineer’s job is to get zapped a couple times while they wire that thing up into the power grid.

That's it

I’m genuinely not sure who is meant for Engineering. The one who would try it again or the one who wouldn’t

if curiosity > pain avoidance: engineer

I see. Sounds more like a scientist to me :)

yeah that's definitely scientist. The two are easy to conflate since they both deal with manipulating reality to make it do things we want, but science focuses on understanding the reality itself and engineering focuses on getting it to do what we want.

Still seems like the same driving force of curiosity behind both, but one wants to know and one wants to do. It's like yin and yang, like two sides of the same coin.

I'm into engineering because I want to create what's never existed.

Science is more about discovering what already exists.

For sure, yin and yang. As a kid, I didn't understand the difference between Dewey Decimal 500s and 600s.

https://xkcd.com/242/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com