Over the years I’ve met and worked with a number of people who started off as engineers and went on to do other things. One friend started as an electrical engineer and went on to become a corporate lawyer, though in truth that was his original aim in the first place. Other friends started off the same way I did, as mechanical engineers, only to become a lawyer, a doctor (specifically an OB-GYN, he wanted to deliver babies), and a professional dance instructor. The judge who performed my father’s second marriage started off as a mechanical engineer as well. Engineering is a good mix of the practical and the theoretical and mechanical engineering seems, to me at least, to be the most general of the engineering disciplines. A well-rounded mechanical engineering education touches on every other engineering field from chemical to civil to electrical to controls to computers to aerospace to power to materials science to just about anything else. Indeed, Professional Engineer (P.E.) certifications are given in the following engineering specialties, and mechanical engineering seems to touch on all of them:
- Agricultural and Biological Engineering
- Architectural
- Chemical
- Civil: Construction (with new design standards for 2016 exams)
- Civil: Geotechnical (with design standards)
- Civil: Structural (with design standards)
- Civil: Transportation (with design standards)
- Civil: Water Resources and Environmental
- Control Systems
- Electrical and Computer: Computer Engineering
- Electrical and Computer: Electrical and Electronics
- Electrical and Computer: Power
- Environmental
- Fire Protection
- Industrial
- Mechanical: HVAC and Refrigeration
- Mechanical: Mechanical Systems and Materials
- Mechanical: Thermal and Fluids Systems
- Metallurgical and Materials
- Mining and Mineral Processing (new specifications for the 2016 exam)
- Naval Architecture and Marine (new specifications for the 2016 exam)
- Nuclear
- Petroleum
- Software
- Structural (with design standards)
I’ve touched on as many as eleven of those fields during my own career, but what really unifies the thinking in all of them is a grounding in reality and a systems approach. Engineering is in many ways a form of economics; the engineer explores trade-offs among different constraints. The classic triple constraint in project management is based on cost, scope, and time. Another classic triplet is time, cost and quality. People often say, “You can have it fast, cheap, or good: pick two!” I might add that if you want it really fast, really cheap, or really good: pick one. This has also been expressed by the pithy observation that “Engineering is the art of doing with one dollar what any damn fool can do with two.” (I’ve seen a number of different versions of that and have failed to nail down its provenance.)
I’ve spent much of the last thirteen years doing operations research, which is about optimizing across many different resources or factors, or at least understanding the trade-offs between them. I’ve always been fascinated by this and seek improvements in every phase of every process.
Charles Stross, in his otherwise excellent novel Accelerando, posits what he calls “Economics 2.0”, which works in a fundamentally different manner than does “Economics 1.0.” In this he is incorrect. Economics is about choices made under conditions of scarcity. Period. If changing technology makes different things scarce, which he writes about ably enough in the book, that only means different things are scarce. It does not mean that economics works in a fundamentally different way. I mention this because economists and engineers are often likely to have similar types of personalities. An engineering mindset is in many ways an economic one.
In the end every job is about economics, is it not? You are trying to meet someone’s need in the most efficient way.