Are engineers really bad at things they can't measure?
Posted by Tom Moertel Sun, 23 Jan 2011 22:11:00 GMT
Writing for The New Yorker, Ken Auletta offered his insights about Larry Page taking over for Eric Schmidt as Google’s C.E.O. Auletta’s article is full of the unexpected, but what surprised me most was this claim about one of the obstacles Larry Page must overcome to lead Google:
He will have to rid himself of a proclivity most engineers have: they are really bad at things they can’t measure.
It’s hard to dispute that engineers are really good at things they can measure. But are they especially bad at things they can’t?
And isn’t everybody “really bad” at things they can’t measure? (Try running through a forest with your eyes closed. Let me know how it goes.)
So what makes Auletta single out engineers for this failing? Is there a grain of truth in there somewhere?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am an Electrical Engineering undergrad.
I would categorize the stereotype in question as being similar in its roots to the Straw Vulcan idea, in that it is used as a way of protecting one’s self-image from comparison, essentially saying “Well since they’re good at something I’m bad at, they must be bad at something less measurable that I can believe I’m good at”.
I would personally go so far as to say that engineers are better than average at weighing unmeasurables, because so much of real-world engineering consists of exactly that: weighing and measuring tradeoffs when the long-term effects are unknown or unquantifiable, and engineers must necessarily get good at it to succeed.
I was an engineer at Intel in the 70s and 80s. I saw a lot of “focus on what can be measured” management styles.
What this often results in is a focus on some less important items, e.g., lines of code written per day per programmer, this then normalized to grade level or salary. (“Fred Jones….hmmm, 62 LOC/kilobuck…is this good enough?”).
We had many fine managers at Intel; the best of them saw the vision and didn’t lost in the forest of “metrics.”
I have no idea if this is an issue for Larry Page, never having met him, but I surmise this is what the author is getting at.
—Tim May, California
Funny little thing aside, you should watch Intacto. (I promise there’s a small relation to your post, a tiny small one but one nonetheless :p)
Good engineering is identifying what’s important, and then considering how to measure it.
Bad engineering is identifying what’s measurable, and then considering it important.