Not Knowing is OK 25

[jasoncwells]

It is OK to not know something.

This message goes out to all my novice engineers. It might seem like the above statement is anathema to engineers. After all, we are paid to know things. What we do is enormously difficult. No one expects anyone, not even senior engineers, to know everything. What your peers do expect is that you identify gaps in your understanding and then get help or do your homework.

As a novice, if you come to me and say, I don't understand something. I am going to respond with either a short answer (do this), a long answer (this is why you do this), or some references to authoritative resources (you can learn about this in these books). I might also say that, "I do not know. Let's go talk to this other engineer."

Your senior engineers want to teach you. They want the product of your labors to be good quality engineering. At a minimum they want the business to succeed. At a higher level, they believe that the practice of engineering serves people.

If you pretend to understand something, a senior engineer will sniff you out in two seconds flat. Depending on their character, they might be amused or they might be annoyed. It is better to simply state that you don't understand. I can work with that.

Here is the thing that you may not understand about this topic if you are novice. The issue is trust. If a novice engineer engages in a pattern of making assertive statements without a strong rationale, then you are going to start losing trust. The senior engineer will form the opinion that you make claims that you can't substantiate.

The job is hard enough. Help your peers to help you advance in the profession. When you do not know something, that's OK.

 

[geotechguy1]

Thomas Telford started life as as stone mason; the guy who designed the crystal palace was a gardener, Larry Page and Sergey Brin started google in a garage; Bill Gates and Paul Allen for Microsoft; Jeff Bezos started Amazon in a garage; Elon Musks way of thinking / engineering is basiaclly the antithesis to most 'top of the industry' engineering; the Wright Brother's, high school drop outs, certainly weren't using 'top of the industry' process.

Wonder where the modern world would be if all of these guys had been crushed by MBA-driven big corporate processes?

 

[CWB1]

Good engineering process is driven locally by engineers not management, finance, or otherwise.

It doesn't take a big company to have a revolutionary idea, but big companies are generally in a much better position to capitalize on them. Stereotypically, they have an expert specialized in every component, they test every detail to the nth degree, and they have comparably massive supply chains that will react quickly for low-cost. The net result is the ol' better, cheaper, & faster to market. Had HP listened to Steve Wozniak for example and gone into PCs early then his side-gig Apple would've been doomed bc they couldn't compete with the mega-corps capabilities. Ferrari famously found out similar when Ford developed the GT40 during the 1960s - process driving assets and capability win. The usual mistake big companies make in this regard is (like HP on PCs) that they often make overly conservative choices to stay out of small niches until those markets have proven themselves significantly profitable and matured to a fairly common direction. That's not to say they dont prepare for market possibilities, that's where research depts come in - evaluating the cost and capabilities of future technologies against their limitations, and drafting a rough plan for product development to leverage those technologies in 5-15 years. Unfortunately bc research is kept secret at big companies the public often develops these strange notions that established companies are on the way out vs upstart rivals. They also often develop an even stranger hero-worship for entrepreneurs selling a (usually severely overvalued) brand.