engineering is an art, or it is a tool. those who love engineering are artists, but art doesn't make money. Companies need engineering, and want to make money. artist engineers take jobs because they love engineering, and need money to live. And then they are forced to do tool engineering, engineering that is optimized for simply its raw utility.
Engineering is two very different things for very different purposes. Similar to the two functions of food, one is the requirement our bodies have to survive, the other is the art of food. Companies are not limited by fancy engineering. Your body isn’t limited by not eating scallops. You can imagine a Michelin star chef wouldn’t particularly enjoy working in a prisons kitchen making chum. This is how I felt working in industry.
- Engineering is one of the tasks required to achieve completion of a product or project. In those cases, the engineering process, its beauty and elegance, exploration space, and its aspect as an art, its unimportant. Engineering is not the limiting factor at a company, despite what people will tell you. It was not a few engineers who invented the idea of ‘landing rockets’, it was the person who had the vision to say its possible, the funds to try it, the tenacity to gather people together to try it, and the vision to sell all of this cohesively.
- Engineering as an art. The beauty of the problem space, the intricacy of the solution you choose, its cleverness, and elegance. The process used to derive the final solution. The craft of cohesion of the design. This is the art of engineering. It is not appreciated in industry, in commercial applications. But engineering artists have nowhere to go, we either work a job or do a startup, neither particularly benefit from the *art* of engineering. We are trapped, working in prison kitchens, as Michelin star chefs.
One of the worst parts of this, is that engineers who are artists often maintain their artistic tendencies at companies, where the most optimal strategy should be creating chum, but they cant help but perfectly craft everything. They make slightly less shitty chum, but the prisoners just get chum, and it’s just out the door late. No one wins. Perhaps we can extend then this say, anything a human does that is not a *job*, is their art, and is by definition not optimal.