Mike Singer wrote:

> Different mindset makes an engineer different to politician, lawyer,
> bandit or whatever this kind.

I kind of wonder whether you, me, both of us or neither of us are engineers
:)

> Engineer's professional world is of strict rules, specs etc. 

After adding the smiley to Wouter's reply to this, I get to the serious
part of it... :)

I thought I've been doing quite a bit of professional engineering work so
far. Part of it (and it's a part that's often not taken seriously enough)
is to "pick the clients' brain" and discover what specs are the right ones
to achieve what they want. This is often not an easy process, it is at the
very core of engineering work, and it is less governed by strict rules than
translating Hamlet into modern Chinese.

> There is no much sense to cheat those rules or specs; in fact, following
> those rules and specs makes a good engineer. 

If that were all, engineering would be easy (and still more underpaid :).
The real art of engineering is IMO to balance conflicting goals, know how
much is just enough -- it is my experience that in real-life professional
projects, the most important specs are often the ones that are left out of
the official specs. 

In the end, the only real spec you usually have is "it must work" or "it
must become a successful product". Much of the rest is an educated guess,
more art than science. (Which, BTW, for me is one way of saying what
engineering is: where science meets art. I'm sure many have felt the same
awe when watching a really good engineer performing some feat of awesome
engineering or when examining an awesome product of engineering as people
typically feel when watching artists or art.)

It may be that making a successful product (engineering) is not that
different from getting elected (politicking). Both have a pretty simple
starting point as "spec", but the devil is in the details :)


> There real life world rules a set by some ideology, say, Christianity,
> Marx theory or whatever. Those two engineer's worlds are different "by
> design". That's two absolutely different experiences.

I'm not sure I understand that fully, but I think I disagree. I'm not a
Christian, but for what I know about Christians, I think the Christian
engineers would hold that they try to use Christian principles in their
work whenever possible -- and that they regret when they feel compelled not
to, and try to get better with that and have less reason to regret.
(Similar thing can be said for Marxists, IMO. Not sure about "whatever" :)

Gerhard

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