> It is politics costumed as engineering, ritual costumed as analysis, scapegoating costumed as problem-solving. Engineering is the commitment to understanding what actually causes what, to targeted remediation grounded in evidence, to the disciplined separation of correlation from causation, especially when the narrative is seductive.
Maybe this should have been at the start of the blog post, and not the end. Anyway, I don't really agree with it.
Everything that works is its own form of engineering even when people don't recognize it. If your workplace is hitting optimal success despite being hostile to "real engineering", it originates in the types of problems being solved.
So then, the "real real engineering" is in reducing friction between various groups, and that often takes the form of a communication "silo". Your discomfort and confusion may actually be a significant part of the business success.
Ultimately, you choose to work there. Your happiness is not an indicator of whether the business is optimal. Your stubborn insistence on certain idealistic principles may be what Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as "a foolish consistency". As anyone who has engineered a thing can confirm, some problems just suck and the optimal solution is full of tension.
> It is politics costumed as engineering, ritual costumed as analysis, scapegoating costumed as problem-solving. Engineering is the commitment to understanding what actually causes what, to targeted remediation grounded in evidence, to the disciplined separation of correlation from causation, especially when the narrative is seductive.
Maybe this should have been at the start of the blog post, and not the end. Anyway, I don't really agree with it.
Everything that works is its own form of engineering even when people don't recognize it. If your workplace is hitting optimal success despite being hostile to "real engineering", it originates in the types of problems being solved.
So then, the "real real engineering" is in reducing friction between various groups, and that often takes the form of a communication "silo". Your discomfort and confusion may actually be a significant part of the business success.
Ultimately, you choose to work there. Your happiness is not an indicator of whether the business is optimal. Your stubborn insistence on certain idealistic principles may be what Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as "a foolish consistency". As anyone who has engineered a thing can confirm, some problems just suck and the optimal solution is full of tension.