Every One's an Engineer

This isn’t a new conversation; for a long time people calling themselves engineers has been contentious.

In 1937 a natural gas leak caused an explosion that destroyed a school in New London, Texas, killing 425 students and teachers. A legislature passed a law that made it illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you were licensed by the state. The law was passed to protect the public from unqualified individuals who were calling themselves engineers and performing work that could potentially harm the public.

In places across the world, the title of engineer is protected by law. But most of the world its open to interpretation. It could be argued that anyone who applies technical skills and knowledge to achieve an outcome to call themselves an engineer. Knowledge doing a lot of heavy lifting.

And thats how we end up sanitation engineers, swimming pool engineers and even software engineers. It could be argued that for the swimming pool engineer, they have sustained a level of technical understanding to find complicated leaks, diagnose chemical imbalances and understand the physics of water flow.

Again this all requires a level of technical understanding and knowledge to achieve an outcome.

With the rise of AI, we are seeing a new breed of pseudo-engineers. People who have no technical understanding or knowledge, but can harness AI to achieve an outcome that with enough attempts create something that resembles a solution.

Does it matter if we don’t understand fully the path but we have clear view of the destination? I could argue before the rise of AI, many software engineers did’t understand the code they were writing or copying. Or the abstracted system they were a part of. How many software engineers know the inner workings of a database or the underlying operating system they are running on? Could you build an OS from scratch?

Developer UX has been pushed further and further away from the underlying system. To the point that developers no longer write code but fabricate it through planning and questioning AI. For the vast majority of computer users will they just be able to do the functions developers would do but not the underlying technical knowledge. Have we been gate-keeping these processes, do we really need specialized users to query data in a slightly different way to what is already available?

Currently developers are seeking there worth and trying validate it through being ahead of the curve, creating fragile methods and systems to stay up to date with the latest models. Engineers, and users are having a lot of crossovers in interests and are seeking the same destinations. But are traveling in very different ways. Developers are finding any excuse to coming up with overly engineered methods to get to their target where users are brute forcing their way through to their solutions.

So much of the work we do is not understanding the problem we are trying to solve, but engineering the tools to solve the problem.

We find ourselves in a world where people obsess over the latest models or methods, and not the actual subject matter they are experts in. I think this is one of the ways we end up with burn out as instead of becoming experts in maintaining pools, we are chasing the latest AI model to automate the work of a pool engineer.

Because if we don’t understand the problem and you are just presented a solution then how will you being able to maintain it, improve it or even understand the implications of the solution you have been given.

AI creates a false sense of competency in subjects we have no depth or experience in.