Explaining Engineers to Other Professions

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes 56 seconds. Read Later

This is an excerpt from a talk I gave to non-engineers in my local Rotary organization about what engineers do and how we think. The audience consisted of accountants, attorneys and sales people. I tried to relate specifically to their professions in order to help them understand. Here is the tongue-in-cheek explanation I gave to them.

Some people say engineers are just like accountants... except engineers have a personality.
We both work with numbers; although engineers have to take six semesters of calculus and differential equations where accountants think higher math is long division. We both have our specialized calculators, but ours have more buttons than theirs.

Accountants work on balance sheets, keeping track of their debits and credits, and most of the time they restrict their number keeping to currency (dollars). Engineers also make sure we keep things in balance, but we use a variety of units including BTUs, horse power, kiloWatts, moles, amps, kips, and the like depending on what field of engineering we practice.

Now here is where it gets difficult. When an accountant provides their customer with an answer, there is always a dollar sign next to the numbers. The customer can easily determine the value from the accountant’s work based on the size of the number next to the dollar sign.

When an engineer provides their customer with an answer, there is a number but the units that we use are in something only an engineer in the same engineering discipline would understand. It’s almost like we are speaking a different language. As a result, it’s hard for our customer’s to see the value in our work. When we present our answers, we get a confused look and a few polite questions and then we are ushered out of the room. Then the sales engineer (that’s an engineer that didn't do that well in math classes) takes over. They make up something that they think the customer will understand, tells them how much they can save using our solution, come up with a price, and closes the deal.

A young Michael Faraday was a scientist,
chemist, physicist and philosopher. He does
look like he could be a lawyer though.

I can tell you that an engineer would never compare themselves to anyone in the legal profession.
Both professions have knowledge of their laws, but our laws are named after people and are stated with the clarity of mathematical expressions. The great engineering law givers are the likes of Sir Isaac Newton, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Alessandro Volta to name a few. We don't have many laws but they have names such as Newton's first law, Newton’s second law and Newton’s third laws (not much imagination there). Our laws are not open to interpretation, no need for judges because our laws dictate how the universe operates.

To us, a slippery slope is an inclined plane that has a low coefficient of friction. Also our laws are self-enforcing so not a lot of need for law enforcement. If an engineer doesn’t understand Newton’s law’s their bridge falls down and there’s no talking your way out of that one.

Engineers should not be compared to sales people.
A sales person describes how their customer can use their product, state the value proposition, ask for the order, and then get on to the next sale. They provide just enough information as is necessary.

An engineer on the other hand will want to explain to everyone present, as accurately, and in as much detail as possible, how their device works. Pointing out the simplicity and elegance of their design, and why they are so smart in coming up with the idea. So no, never compare an engineer to a sales person.

In fact, my friends that sell insurance will go out of their way not to talk with engineers! They comment that the engineer will want to know in fine detail how the policy works. They’ll insist on learning about the formula and math used to determine the risks and premiums before they are ready to purchase. I don't want to say engineers are high maintenance, but an engineer friend of mine had one insurance salesman come back three times to answer numerous questions until he felt he had sufficient information to make a purchasing decision.

I hope this talk provided you with a little insight about us engineers. The next time you see one of us, just say “hi.” Whatever you do - don't try to make small talk unless you want to learn all about the science of Nano technology. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Leave me a comment below and share your thoughts!

ESI Announces Solution

I rarely post product release information or press releases on my blog but this announcement is just too exciting not to share:

ESI Announces Solution to End the Energy Crisis

LACEY, Washington - April 1, 2011 - Engineered Software, Inc. makers of the PIPE-FLO® and PUMP-FLO™ software, today announced the release CEPO™, a revolutionary new software program capable of converting unused computing power into clean electrical power that can be supplied back to the power grid.
 
When CEPO is installed on a computer, it runs as a transparent background application. When the computer power is not needed for viewing PowerPoint® presentations, reading e-mail, updating Facebook®, or playing solitaire, the patented software converts the unused computing power to electrical power that is returned to the nation’s power grid.

“With CEPO the United States is well on its way to energy independence,” said Ray Hardee, P.E. Chief Engineer at Engineered Software, Inc. “The goal is to employ CEPO to the cloud computing environment. Here owners of major server farms will be able to harvest much of their unused computing power to the grid saving countless megawatts of power each year.”

Currently the process is not self-sustaining and only 95% of the unused power can be returned to the power grid. However, with an expected influx of investment capital for Wall Street investors, the process is capable of becoming self-sustaining within 10 years. Additional assistance may be needed in the form of government tax incentives. Members of congress are already lining up to support the bill, and the company claims there will be plenty of government money available.
 
Once the process is self-sustaining, a simple laptop can produce enough clean energy to power all the LED lighting in a standard size house. By networking just five Windows® PC’s into a hybrid electric car’s electrical system, CEPO can provide sufficient energy to operate the car indefinitely. That is provided the driver of the car does not “Text” while driving, or any of the Windows does not need to be rebooted. If you have the new Apple® iHybrid car there is an "App for that” and you will need to download the Apple CEPO application at your nearest Apple Store location.

“CEPO will be used by power companies to generate electricity so cheaply that there will be no need to meter the power to their customer,” said Alec Tricity, Manager for Public Utilities Incorporated. “Imagine all the power we need, without having to pay to any foreign oil interests, and full employment at home. I can hardly wait the 10 years until we have everything worked out.”
 
For more information about this faux product please contact april@fools.net.

Or Get the Full Explanation HERE

I Can Explain

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes 57 seconds. Read Later

I always run my blog ideas past Natalie in our marketing department. She is the one that makes my blog writing sound intelligent and well written as opposed to the various random ideas I send her. This special April Fool’s post was no different. I suggested to her that I write a post announcing a new software discovery that would solve the energy crisis by providing an unlimited supply of free electrical power simply by using unused computing power.

She said I should write about something that sounds more realistic, and then throw the punch line in at the end. After all, the more believable and entertaining the story, the funnier it will be when you reach the punch line. She suggested I write about taking the summer off and pursuing the life of an Alaskan bush pilot. Those who know me personally know I love flying and try to get up in my plane whenever the sun is shining. One of my favorite shows is the “Flying Wild Alaska” on the Discovery Channel. She thought it might be funny to have me claim that I was on a sabbatical trying out for this reality show. Tempting as it sounded, I have been in the energy business in one way or another since 1971 so I decided to use some of my energy experiences to help develop the story.

It always seems the solution to the energy crisis is only 10 years into the future. I don’t know why 10 years is the magic number, but it seems that everyone uses it. If you’re a politician 10 years is well into the next election cycle and no one will remember your campaign promises.  If you’re a CEO, in 10 years you’ll either retire rich or move on to a bigger company to cause more damage.  If you are in the news business 10 years is over 120 news cycles, (remember the infamous “wardrobe malfunction, ” the “Balloon Boy”, Pluto’s demotion from Planet Status, Leno vs. Conan, Tiger Woods' marital problems, the financial meltdown, ... see I told you). And if you are the one actually involved in doing the work, within 10 years you’ll have kids and you won’t be able to remember back 10 weeks let alone 10 years.

The next thing is you need to make the technology reward sound almost too true to believe. For example in the 1960’s I can remember GE, Westinghouse, and Combustion Engineering say that in the future nuclear power will be so cheap to produce, the power company will not need to meter the power anymore. That sounded really great so I decided to go study nuclear power in school. 

In the 1970’s when I was actually starting up nuclear power plants, it turned out the costs to build a plant got out of control and nuclear power was really not that cheap. In addition, everyone was worried about the China Syndrome and suddenly no one wanted a nuclear power plant in their state let alone their back yard. 

In the late 70’s the next big thing was the breeder reactor. Breeder reactors were supposed to make their own fuel (Plutonium) from Uranium 238 that could not be used as fuel in a regular nuclear reactor. The process actually worked, because that is how the US Government created all the plutonium for the nuclear weapons program. With the breeder reactors we can turn swords into plowshares (another great slogan of the time). It turns out that some people were concerned that with all the power plants making all that plutonium someone could sneak into a nuclear reactor, steal some plutonium and make their own nuclear weapons. As a result the breeder reactor lived a short life.

Well not to be outdone someone came up with the fusion program in the late 70’s and early 80’s. With a fusion reactor we would be able to harness the unlimited energy of the sun, with an abundant source of fuel coming from sea water. Once again, they promised power so cheap the electric utilities wouldn’t need to meter it. Trust me, the physics work; there is no need to go into details when we’re solving the energy crisis. Many of the world’s industrial countries started major fusion programs with the goal of developing working fusion reactors in 10 years. (Seems like all the smaller countries were developing their own breeder reactors to make their own nuclear weapons because of the cancelled breeder program in the US.)  Initially the fusion programs had some success by getting the temperature of the hydrogen plasma up to million or so degrees needed for fusion to occur, but the process never could be sustained. In other words, it took more energy to get started that it could ever produce. Work is still proceeding on fusion power but it is still a research project. 

In the late 70’s the shine had worn off anything nuclear and the US Department of Energy had to look at other ways to gain our energy independence from Middle Eastern oil. (Now that’s a concept we can all agree with, and it got started after the 1967 Oil Embargo). So we decided clean up our coal industry. I was in Indiana, PA working at a dirty coal preparation facility. Down the road, they had a clean coal gasification facility that would turn dirty coal into clean natural gas. The gas companies weren’t going to get rid of the gas meter but since the US has more than a 200-year supply of coal, we were well on our way to becoming energy independent within 10 years. 

As it turns out, these plants had a tendency to blow up, so much so that they built special blast walls. These walls were designed to blow off to prevent a buildup in pressure that would bring the entire building down. It also turned out the byproducts of coal gasification were really bad for the environment, and even Pennsylvania didn’t want that stuff in their backyard.

Another group in the government was working on liquefying coal, or turning coal into crude oil that could be refined to end our dependence on foreign oil. This time they decided to do everything underground that way they didn’t have to worry about bringing the coal to the surface, blowing up the process plant, and getting rid of the waste products. I’m not too sure on the details, but I think it involved injecting steam into coal seams, high temperatures, along with problems controlling the reactions underground. Coal liquefaction inevitably turned out to be a dead end on the road to energy independence.

In the late 80’s and the 90’s were the government was serious about ending the cold war so they didn’t have many energy initiatives in the works. The power utility business was more involved in developing power plants that were smaller and cheaper to build. It seems large power generation units, (nuclear of fossil) were very expensive to license because of all the resistance by the environmentalists. So the power utilities started building many smaller gas turbines to run a generator to make electricity (simple cycle). By keeping the projects small, they avoided much of the opposition. They then added a steam boiler to the back end of the process to take advantage of the high exhaust gas temperatures of the gas turbines (combined cycle). Everyone was building combined cycle units and it looked like the energy crisis might be ending.

In the 90’s something strange happened, one day we woke up and we found out the west won the Cold War. With the end of the cold war, we had a much larger problem; the Russians and Chinese quit the cold war to become capitalists. With over 1 billion people in China and all of them wanting a Chevy Tahoe or Ford Explorer, the oil prices went through the roof, and we were no closer to energy independence.

In the early 2000’s after the dot com bust, people decided that it was high time to invest in something new, so why not invest in becoming energy independent. Not only independent but environmentally responsible with our energy consumption, if we used less then we wouldn’t have to produce so much. With the financial power of Wall Street and the promise of tax incentives for “Clean Energy” we were well on our way. 

World's Most Fuel Efficient Car

The next focus for energy reduction spurred by our need for independence from foreign oil involved automotive transportation, developing cars with the promises of 60-100 miles per gallon. California wanted it, the people wanted it (but we also want our SUVs) and with a healthy dose of tax incentives to help speed the process along we had a clear objective. The first step was the ethanol tax incentive where every farm co-op in the Midwest decided to convert subsidized corn into subsidized ethanol. The investment bankers all wanted to get some of this action so there were hundreds of ethanol plants popping up everywhere to feed our nations thirst for domestic oil. Unfortunately, this hasn’t quite panned out because the energy needed to produce and ship the final product was still supplied by burning oil and coal.

We also needed to replace dirty power plants that burned coal and generated green house gasses with clean energy, wind turbines, photoelectric energy, and tidal power. What was really amazing was the recent “Nuclear Renaissance” where nuclear power all of sudden became the green solution (that is until the nuclear meltdowns in Japan). It seems with “clean energy” all we need to do is cover large sections of the earth’s surface with wind farms or solar collectors then develop a “smart” power grid to get the power from where the land is cheap to where the people live.

The next energy solution is going to involve many different technologies. With the wisdom of Wall Street, a heavy doses of “clean energy” tax incentives, and lots of hard work I’m sure we can be energy independent of foreign oil within 10 years. So in a way, my April Fools is an example of how we need to continue to look outside the box for solutions and new technology to solve our energy crisis. There probably isn’t going to be only one fix-all answer. The US is going to need to be creative and figure out how to produce our own energy using new technology instead of relying on oil and coal to get us there.

Tell me your thoughts on the future of energy consumption, or how you think we might learn from the past. Please leave me a comment or send me an email to blogger @ eng-software.com

Also, we are currently welcoming guest bloggers. If you are interested, just send me a message about becoming a guest blogger, and what you would like to write about. Thanks!

Are You Ready for the M2K12 Bug

This is a special issue of my blog so I can get the word out about a pending digital disaster.

I was talking to some of my friends who work for the Redmond Giant (for those of you that are non-techies, or from Washington state, Redmond is the home of Microsoft). It seems they are hard at work on the next release of Windows, with a goal to get the product out prior to December 21, 2012.

In talking to my inside sources, it appears many of the date functions in computer programs written after 2000 but prior to the year 2007 use the Mayan calendar in their functions to determining the date and number of days between dates. The problem is that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012. It seems that the Mayan’s figured the world would end on that date and it was just a waste of time and rock to chisel their calendar any farther than December 21, 2012.

In talking to others at IBM, Apple, Oracle, SAP, Google and other software powerhouses, this M2K12 bug (the official acronym of the Mayan 2012 Calendar bug) would not normally cause a problem if you don’t base your code on the Mayan calendar. It seems the big concern in the software industry is the wide spread use of open source functions. The problem lies in the inability to determine if their software uses any open source based on the Mayan calendar instead of the traditional Julian calendar. As a result, my contact says that the upcoming M2K12 bug will make the Y2K bug look like a non-event.

It seems that all the major software companies are coming out with releases to beat the December 21, 2012. For course, they can’t provide any assurance that your company will not be technologically crippled by the M2K12 bug unless your purchase their newest upgrade versions.

I have also heard rumblings in the software consulting world that many of them are also gearing up for the M2K12 crisis. They are getting together legions of programmers from Russia to India to review all their legacy code to safeguard against the M2K12 bug from rendering custom mission critical applications useless at the stroke of midnight December 21, 2012.

As a result of this crisis caused by the end of the Mayan Calendar, we at Engineered Software are not going to be caught off guard. Effective today, April 1, 2010, we will be committing all of our resources to ensure that none of our software products use any functions infected with the M2K12 bug. We are setting our release date for November 1, 2012 to provide our customers with sufficient time to provide a smooth transition of their Engineered Software programs with their established computer network systems and the end of the world.

Now it’s time to hear from you. Please feel free to share your experiences, or opinions on this blog entry or any other subject that is of interest. I can be reached at blogger@eng-software.com.

Also have a Happy April Fool’s Day.