James Nicoll On Engineer's Syndrome

It's generally agreed that the mind of an engineer is a delicate thing, particularly the minds of Electrical Engineers.

Engineers Syndrome may be caused by the habit of some schools to use Lies for Engineers, models that are wrong but good enough for their purposes. There is also a tradition amongst some engineers to see their profession as the best one in the world, certainly much harder than mere open heart surgery, managing a nation-state's monetary system or being a Hindu god.

When they notice the fact that Lies for Engineers are flawed the reaction is often _not_ "Oh, they simplified that [foo model] for engineering undergrads" but rather "Those guys over in [foo] don't know their stuff. I'd better invent my own version of [foo] and since I know regular old [foo] is wrong, because my Lies for Engineers course shows me this, I won't bother to check Foo For Fooists to see if the flaws I have noticed LFE are addressed in FFF."

When Foo-ologists notice Shiny New Foo by an Engineer [SNFbaE] they may well point out that their standard model produces better results or that SNFbaE requires that the Earth be composed entirely of pudding. many engineers do not take this as proof that SNFbaE is wrong but that Foo-ologists are even more incorrect than the engineer thought. A few cycles of this (particularly the bit where the Foo-ologists fail to
fall to their knees in worship but instead act as though their discipline was a real job like engineering) and you may get to see Secondary Engineer's Syndrome where not only do they see Foo-ologists as wrong but as an active conspiracy to suppress SNFbaE.

Tertiary Engineer's Syndrome is to that stage as Tertiary syphilus is earlier forms. Every other profession is seen as un-engeerish and therefore flawed and wrong. It's just a matter of looking for the mistakes you know are there.



Engineer's Syndrome interacts oddly with the idea what humans want must be possible. I don't seem to have come up with/remembered a snappy term for that way of thinking but it definitely exists. It's handy when it leads to locomotives but not so much when it leads to the quest of the Hole at the North Pole.