Sam wrote:
> Engineers didn't decide this. If engineers had their way your computer
> you'd be able to stick your dirty dishes inside your computer and have it
> wash them while you surf the web. Engineers aren't mindful of cost (and
> therefore price). However, marketers are.
Dominique Cormann wrote:
> That is a terrible and false generalization. Engineers can go in any
> direction cost wise.
and in a later message:
> Basically I just wanted to give an apple example that not all engineers,
> all of the time, want to built the biggest, and most expensive things.
> That is a bad generalization.
Allison J Parent wrote:
> It indeed is a bad generalization. As an engiener myself I found it
> annoying but let it pass.
Same here.
Sam replied:
> Well, my point was this: if you had free reign and an unlimited budget,
> you'd probably do all sorts of wild things with a product you were
> designing. All sorts of wacky features would creep in. That's a good
> thing. It's called "creativity".
If you have free reign and unlimited budget, what you're doing is *NOT*
engineering.
Good engineers want to ship a product that customers will actually use;
the greatest satisfaction an engineer ever has is seeing or hearing
customers use the product. While it is an ego boost to hear customers
praise the product, most of the best engineering goes completely unnoticed.
When was the last time you drove across a bridge and thought "Wow, the
engineers did an awesome job on this bridge."? (At most, people might think
"Wow, this is a pretty bridge.")
While it is tempting to keep improving the design forever, a good engineer
realizes that at some point the design has to be "done". There may or
may not be an opportunity to revise the design later.
To refute Sam's original point, at one of my previous jobs, the engineers had
to fight marketing tooth-and-nail to KEEP FEATURES OUT of the product, because
otherwise the product would have cost far too much. As it turned out, we
(engineers) weren't sufficiently successful at reigning in the marketing
bozos, and our competition came out with a product with 1/10 the features at
1/3 the cost. Guess which product was more successful?
A good engineer DOES NOT try to design the kitchen sink into everything.
Customers don't want a computer that doubles as a dishwasher, and engineers
know it.
Henry Ford said "The most beautiful things in the world are those from
which all excess weight has been removed." While at first glance this
might seem to apply only to automobiles, airplanes, and the like, in
reality it applies to all fields of engineering, including computer
hardware and software.
Any bozo with a EE degree could have built a computer roughly comparable
in capabilities to the Apple II using many hundreds of chips and costing
thousands of dollars. A good engineer could have done it with few enough
chips to make it affordable. An excellent engineer did it with almost
no chips, and made it not just affordable but also elegant. Ford would
have been proud to see it.
For more information on what engineering is really about (which is NOT
"feature creep"), I'd recommend the book _The_Existential_Pleasures_of_
_Engineering_ by Samuel Florman (although I disgraee with Florman's claims
about the necessity of government regulation).
There's also a good Engineering-related bibliography at
http://g250.grainger.uiuc.edu/eng199/biblio.html
Eric
Received on Sat Sep 19 1998 - 15:23:58 BST