The engineer’s job is to make things that work. This can be quite complicated, and it requires both education and practice in certain modes of thinking. It requires a design, a model, testing and measurement of that model, then usually some constraints related to costs. Patience, humility, and a certain level of creativity are all prerequisites for the job. Yet, the specifications for the thing the engineer makes are usually invented by somebody else. Here lies the dialectical tension between the engineer and the “boss.” What the boss specifies is what the engineer must build. In my family, as a child growing up in the world of General Motors in the 1950s and ‘60s, the “boss” was not my engineer father, but my Preacher’s Kid (PK) mother. As my own education progressed, I understood her role as that of a “priestess.” She set the rules, rules based on ultimate virtue. That was her remit.
I became indoctrinated into a philosophy where virtue was the standard for all creative and technical activities. And, while one could easily measure aptitude and skill for various engineering projects, the goal of all those projects needed to be virtuous.
Exploration of the notion of virtue (Virtus in Latin) goes back at least to Aristotle. He defined a “virtue” as anything that leads to eudaimonia (happiness) – but, as we now accept, this is much deeper than apparent at first glance. Virtue has been a theme in both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions over many centuries. It depends on both reason and emotion. It is governed by self-control and fostered through meditation. My PK mom saw virtue as mostly an exercise in following the rules – a matter of discipline. While punishment for infractions was never her jam, beyond a disapproving eyeroll or “tsk-tsk,” she made it clear that virtue required certain standards of behavior. My dad, the engineer, was more interested in testing limits – he was compelled by his job, I suspect, as well as his extended family dynamics (he was the eldest son of eight siblings) – to experiment with boundary cases. But, in the end, he knew that the specifications, the rules, were set by others, like Mom.
What about those engineering values, though? The curiosity, the inquiry, the attention to detail, the patience to test your results, and a deep understanding of systems – all these qualities are necessary to make a successful engineer. If building a system, or improving it, is the object of the game, virtue must be the reward for success. You win the game, and achieve eudaimonia, as a result. This implies that virtue may be measured by financial benefit, but it also implies that financial payoff is not the only source of virtue. My son derived great happiness from wiring his own smart home, including a network server where everything connects, and nobody paid him for that enterprise – it’s his “hobby.” While clear to me, his klutzy uncoordinated dad, that he exercised considerable engineering skill in this project, the virtue in completion is also apparent. His kids seem to appreciate it, too. My writing is something of an engineering project, as well. I start the project by either reading something, or from some other tangible real-world experience, then do a modest amount of research, design an outline, consult (test) the outline periodically for a couple weeks (the specification), before finally sitting down (including some amount of meditation) and putting words into a document. Then I test the document with further research, rereading it a few times, more meditation, before publishing. I believe the virtue of my writing comes from a sense of completion, and knowledge of the care I put into it. Audience response is optional – not why I write – I’m not selling it to anybody. But I do see myself as an engineer of sorts when I write; the object of the exercise is to make something … something good.
Unlike me, however, most professional engineers seem to be tools of their “bosses.” Their goal is to design and develop a system that can somehow enhance the bottom line of the organization that employs them. That was certainly the condition of my father’s 30-year career with General Motors – his Process Engineering Department was staffed by engineers whose sole function was to optimize manufacturing systems at the plant level (perhaps also GM division level, in my dad’s case) — to maximize output quality while minimizing cost (overhead). Perhaps Dad considered this enterprise virtuous, but I’ve always thought it may have shortened his life. Mom, both before and after he passed, openly expressed to me her own doubts about the virtuousness of his endeavor. In any case, I chose a hopefully more perspicacious life path as a public servant – no profit-centric career for me. And, since retiring, I now think about things like virtue and engineering values. They are real concerns for me; Mom would approve.
But what did Mark Zuckerberg mean by the expression, “Move fast and break things”? It was his motto at Facebook for many years (until being retired from public consumption in 2014). Did he really believe that success in the consumer marketplace relied on destruction? It seems many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have followed his dictum. I suspect the true meaning of the slogan was that the market will always resist new entrants. Your presumed competitors, if you are an entrepreneur, constitute a wall that needs to be breached. Even so, scaling that wall, burrowing under it, or otherwise penetrating it, seem like reasonable alternatives to tearing it down! The engineer utilizes cleverness, carefulness, attention to detail, and rigorous testing, not brute force, to accomplish objectives. But Zuck was young when he said those words. And greater self-awareness among we who consider ourselves more “mature” may be nothing more than desire to protect our privilege, the status quo.
The engineer must deal with a permanent dialectical tension between goals of the boss and true virtue. As with all dialectics, a synthesis is required. Eudaimonia, human flourishing, depends upon some compatibility among various competing objectives. There is always a larger social entity than any single corporate boss. And the largest of all social entities, humankind, is the ultimate arbiter of virtue. That was my PK mom’s final judgment. I still try to follow it.
–William Sundwick
Warp and Woof 