Guest Blog: Why Engineers Screw Things Up

Since I contribute to my own blog so seldom, I'll occasionally post other people's work if they have something noteworthy to say. Here's something from a friend who doesn't blog at all, but has granted me permission to post his thoughts.

Why Engineers Screw Things Up

Lloyd Eater

1) MY DISCLAIMER. What I’m about to say likely doesn’t apply to computer engineers. But it does apply to aeronautical, biological, civil, chemical, electrical, mechanical and naval engineers.

2) THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN ENGINEERS AND SCIENTISTS. A simplified distinction between engineers and scientists is: engineers are doers, and scientists are thinkers. Said more elegantly: The objectives of scientists are to understand nature. Engineers’ objectives are to build useful things using science – within budgetary, schedule, regulatory and operational constraints.

3) THE BACKGROUND OF THIS ESSAY.
My first job as a chemical engineer was as a process engineer in oil refineries, next was a product manager with a manufacturer of HVAC equipment, next was as general manager of a firm manufacturing power plant equipment, next was heading up a research and development group – and finally was as a specialist resolving serious corrosion problems occurring in nuclear power plants. In this last job, after a 20 years hiatus, I worked with many young plant engineers (male & female) – who were typically a generation younger than myself. Working with these folks I was dumbfounded to discover that they were disinterested in engaging to resolve serious problems their plants were experiencing. I noticed that they avoided meetings to discuss their problems and possible solutions. Their attitude was “I got to go to attend another meeting. After all, we hired you to cure this problem. So please get working on it.”

I thought this issue might be unique for engineers with electric utilities. So I began researching for reasons to explain this fundamental change in the motivation in today’s young engineers, and their lack of interest. I found that many qualified authorities had studied, analyzed and diagnosed this issue. For example Jonathan Rowe, Editor of The Washington Monthly, concluded “The American engineer has become a thinker, not a doer, more concerned with belonging to an intellectual and professional elite than with producing good steel mills, washing machines and automobiles.”

Recently, I had a conversation with the dean of San Jose State’s Chemical Engineering Department. He readily agreed that his graduates had zero hands-on capabilities. They weren’t self-reliant. He found his students relied on computer software programs to solve engineering problems. He observed that when his students input inappropriate data into a program the results were nonsensical. But his students were unable to recognize that the outcome was nonsense because they lacked hands-on sense.

4) HOW ARE ENGINEERS CAUSING THE DECLINE OF US TECHNICAL PRODUCTIVITY?
A Menlo Park design firm believes the gap between engineers and manufacturers is much to blame for the failure rate of high-tech companies’ products.

The chief troubleshooter at the Weirton Steel Co. says, “Too many people try to work out the problem who have never worked the job. Go out and get your hands dirty and your fingers burnt. It’ll teach you something that books will not.”

Through the 80’s we had, compared to Japan, twice as many engineering researchers, and four times the level of technical activity. We spend more on GNP for research and development than do Japan or Germany. Our engineering school enrollments doubled over the last decade. Then why

• can't we build cars to match Toyota and Honda, or TVs to match Sony?
• have we lost our market for machine tools?
• is most sewing equipment used in American textile mills foreign-made?
• are Japanese microchips twice as reliable as US chips?

Studying its own engineering problem, Great Britain found “Graduate engineers lack the qualities of practical application and understanding of industry. Employers reported reluctance among engineering graduates to work in production.”

US studies show that our Nobel prizes do not indicate strengths in practical engineering. A professor at UC Berkeley says “We are pursuing Nobel Prize. The Japanese and others are pursuing engineering. We get the trophies. They make the sales.”

Europe had its scientists (Pasteur, Einstein, Planck). We had practical craftsmen and workshop wizards (Edison, Westinghouse, Wright brothers, Goodyear, Bell, Ford). It’s true that our untutored genius could not carry us forever. But the ideal of applied science (learning connected to the needs of the people) should have prevailed – and it did until shortly after World War II. Then the direction of our engineering endeavors began to change – so gradually that most Americans weren’t aware of it.

The change was dramatic to foreign visitors who saw us post WW2 and returned in the 90’s. Mr. Shinto (now president of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) said, “Americans were extremely competitive in turbines and generators – and they were of such high quality! Your young engineers were working in the workshops, along with the workers. Your engineers knew the production program, and they knew how to use machine tools. Because they knew the production process in detail, they were able to get greater productivity and high quality.” Japan, for one, installed this approach into their workplaces. Every graduating engineer was put to work in the factory before he did anything else. Shinto came back to America in 1990 and found American engineers were “into computerization, not into the workshop. I didn’t find the same kind of intelligence in the workshop.”

The president of Tufts University said “Steel companies hire Japanese engineers to install the process controls because American engineers can’t. Domestic companies seem incapable of engineering such relatively simple products as subways and high-mileage vehicles.

5) WHAT HAPPENED TO CAUSE THIS DECLINE IN AMERICAN PRACTICAL KNOW-HOW?

5.1) THE MANHATTAN PROJECT OF 1942-45.
The changing of engineers from doers to thinkers began with millions invested in the A-bomb program. General Groves, in overall charge, found that key European scientists like Bethe, Fermi, Szilard and Teller refused to include the engineers on their team in the “loop”. This was because Europeans were class-conscious and regarded engineers as mere mechanics – beneath them. To get them accepted by Europeans as equals, General Groves created the impressive “scientist” titles for his engineers. After WW2 the government started giving millions to universities – for the space program, nuclear development, and high-tech defense. This helped turn our best engineering minds away from factories and bridges toward what is called “engineering science”. NASA and Department of Defense dollars have prompted our engineering schools to hire more research-oriented faculty who have brought in more grad-student researchers. Lewis Smullin of MIT says “MIT used this scheme to quadruple its faculty by 1970, increase its graduate-student population by almost six times, and increase its sponsored research funding to over 9,000 times its 1938 levels.”

5.2) ENGINEERING SCHOOLS
Engineers have always suffered from an acute status problem in American academia. Originally Harvard rejected them for dealing in practical matters ill-suited to the education of a gentleman. So engineers struck out on their own by founding MIT. By 1900 engineers were admitted to academia, but were treated as second-class citizens, even by the physical scientists with whom they were once allied. In reaction to such indignities schools began stressing “engineering science” more and more, leaving practical training to employers.

Jim Adams (teaches engineering at Stanford) says “Before WW2 the curriculum was empirical. Lots of drafting and attention to machinery. With space and defense research money, courses that emphasized design, manufacturing and drafting were pretty much dropped.” In many schools mechanical engineers no longer have to learn how to weld, or civil engineers to survey. These changes were most pronounced in MIT and Caltech – but other schools followed.

Even when such courses are available, the best students often don’t want them. Such endeavors do not rate high in their pecking order. The MIT catalog devotes a couple of prosaic paragraphs to manufacturing and materials processing, while the Department of Nuclear Engineering gets a page-plus paean.

A professor at Baruch College NYC has studied reasons for America’s economic misfortunes; he says “When America relegated manufacturing engineering to the community colleges and the technical schools, it was the beginning of the demise of its manufacturing.”

Engineering schools have become over-specialized, with individual faculty members knowing more and more about less and less. Defense contracts with their secrecy requirements have made it especially severe – telling the individual no more than that researcher needs to know for his little component. People have no relation to the end product of their work. This overspecialization explains why our designs don’t work well. Example: the original Metroliner cars were loaded with sophisticated control gear, but were unable to run in a snowstorm because the fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Example: the original BART was designed by aerospace engineers with zero streetcar or subway experience. The system was severely unreliable for the first three years.

5.3) INDUSTRY
An expert observer says “The manufacturing guy is the most forgotten in the company pecking order. The marketing guys have charisma and are close to the president. The engineering people hold the secrets of high tech and are close to the president too. But the manufacturing guy doesn’t dress as well because he doesn’t meet with the public. He has these big hands, probably dirt under his nails. And he sweats.” By contrast in West Germany, even elite engineering graduates must work in industry before they are eligible for a degree.

Indifference to engineering begins with the kind of people who run our major industrial enterprises. Only 26% of CEOs and directors in the US are engineers, versus 67% in Japan and 60% in Germany. David Roderick, chief of US Steel, is an accountant. His idea of meeting foreign competition was to buy an oil company. The steel industry’s R&D effort is only 50% of its Japanese counterparts. Engineering schools report a sharp decline in steel-industry recruiting. The director of career planning at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh (the heart of steel country) says that such recruiting has dropped to “near zero”.

The auto industry is another laggard. There’s a saying around Detroit that when the federal government first enacted air-pollution regulations, Honda hired 200 engineers while the American companies hired 200 lawyers. Rick Waggoner has counted beans at GM for 18 years. He’s currently CEO. For 4 years he’s been sitting on the completed & tested design of a SUV size vehicle giving 80 mpg. And it’s five times more crashworthy than present nodels. And its tooling costs are one fifth those of present models. In these 18 years what has been Rick’s key policy decision for GM? He decided to trash the lovely and wildly successful all-electric EV-1, after his engineers had developed it. Incidentally, GM’s electric car posed such a competitive threat to Toyota that they developed their Prius hybrid.

It’s not just that the engineers and designers take a back seat to the lawyers and accountants. The hierarchy in these older industries is such that bright young engineers are stifled even within their own ranks. Carver Meade (teaches at Caltech) says “I still have students who are turned on by cars, but if they go to work for an auto company they’ll be designing bolts. They won’t have any real impact on the product until they’ve been there 20 years. Even people who have been there 20 years don’t have much impact.” It’s not surprising that the best grads seek greener pastures.

6.0 PREDICTION. People with proficiency are getting old. There is no one to replace them. The National Science Foundation is predicting a shortage of industrial engineers in the coming years. Look for more American Nobel prizes, but also look for more imports from Japan, China, India, Denmark, et al, for machine tools, vehicles, wind turbines and solar collectors.