Why so much BS in professional engineering? (Rant!) 5

[ParabolicTet]

How come in competitive sports and arts, there is very little BS at the top levels? Almost all the pros have incredible technique that evolved from generations of pros prior to them. If any professional had a weakness, other pros would exploit that to their advantage.

But this is not the case with professional engineering. I've seen far too many incompetent and unqualified people performing complex engineering analysis. My biggest pet peeve is those with no knowledge of matrix structural analysis doing FEA. Whatever happened to garbage in equals garbage out?

I've often had arguments with engineers who do not understand that in linear analysis the stresses will double if you double the loads. Or I have seen even those with PhD's reporting results to ridiculous number of significant digits. A good example is fatigue life predictions, which are notoriously known to only be correct within an order of magnitude. But time and time again I see engineers report predicted lives of 10,954.36 hours.

Or take another example where again someone with a PhD was showing how 0.5 MPA from one software was 50% off compared to 1.0 MPA from another software. He didn't understand the bigger picture that both these numbers are basically ZERO and cannot be compared with any degree of reliability.

So why does the professional engineering world tolerate so much nonsense and incompetence from so-called "professionals"? But in sports, arts, and music people will smell your BS a mile away. When is the last time you saw a hacker win the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

Or if you play any musical instrument, you'll know the pros know their stuff inside out from tens of thousands of hours of practice. And it's not just any random practice, it is precise techniques and theories that all musicians agree upon. It seems us group of engineers have no common understanding of how the physics and math all works together. We just use the software like black boxes.

 

[YoungTurk]

I disagree with the fundamental concept of the OP. Art is - well - art, and best I can tell the BS is strong in the arts. Listen to a pop record producer or concept artist du jour if you doubt it. Sports is true survival of the fittest competition which isn't comparable to professional trades.

To paraphrase a prof of mine, there is a different expectation of engineers than of, say, politicians and bankers - two other highly trained professions. Those professions bask in wealth and fame but nobody is really all that fazed or surprised when they utterly fail and ruin peoples' lives. The expectation of an engineer is the opposite - we're expected to get it right, the first time, everytime. When an old structure or machine fails (often due to neglected maintenance), people want the heads of the engineers involved.

That being said, if a node jockey is truly a hazard to an organization or end user, then its up to the organization to run him out on a poll or reap the rewards of its own incompetence.

 

[KENAT]

'politicians'- 'highly trained professions'

Sure of that, think Bush II or maybe Palin before you answer.

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[FeX32]

'highly trained professions' => LMAO!


Fe

 

[SomptingGuy]

Bush II was highly trained ... and totally obedient.

- Steve

 

[YoungTurk]

Glad to provide some comic relief - and, I'd say, point made. W was a Harvard MBA and military pilot, and yet discussing the man's competence is laughable. As for Palin, well, I checked and she's attended 4 colleges, which is more than any engineer I know!

Don't forget the bozos on Wall St; how many MBAs and Econ PhDs does it take to make the mess we're in? What's the engineering equivalent of that? And don't say Deepwater Horizon, I think the management professionals are going to get their fair share of the credit for that one as well.

 

[321GO]

'politicians'- 'highly trained professions'

'politicians'- 'highly instructed professions'

 

[SAITAETGrad]

With regards to FEA, I've seen something much different than what some others have described.

It seems to be engineering graduates that have taken an FEA course were trained as though they were to go on and program FEA code. These courses concentrate on the finer points of FEA code and take a spartan approach by overwhelming students with equations (some of which, granted, they should have but have not learned in classical analysis courses). Then, in a parallel course on engineering design, they try to teach themselves to use the software or have some introductory software style training.

What's missing is the intermediary step- the skill set specific to the users of FEA. What is the appropriate element for the job? What are the potential pitfalls with modeling errors? How do you setup joints for analysis? What about boundary conditions?

These missing practical skills are often found in the manuals of large OEMs but not in university programs.

And that has been a problem with undergraduate engineering education since the 1960s. The focus is on creating grades and the cop-out used by professors (many with no industry experience) is to rely on "gotcha" style academics where analysis is regurgitated to answer an easy to mark question on an exam for the purpose of creating a well defined grade.

With little or no link between the "potato" analysis and the real world, engineering graduates are unable to a) recall the analysis they regurgitated for the exam and b)apply said knowledge to practical problems.

Separately, you also see an older group of analysts out there who have coasted for 10 years or more that take up FEA as an easy path to justify their existence with make believe capability based on a one week training course. These people are of course the most dangerous of all because they may be minor players in management or at least seen as peers of middle managers who grew up along side these individuals. They are often able to convince individuals of very rudimentary skill (their peers) to sign off on their analysis as gospel. Of course, to an engineering manager, the analysis doesn't have to be correct, it just has to be signed and released in the quoted number of hours.

 

[GregLocock]

...until the correlation is performed and the weaknesses in the FEA are revealed.

Of course the amateur level of FEA analyst that don't correlate their models don't really concern us here since we are professionals.

Aren't we?


Cheers

Greg Locock


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[SomptingGuy]

These missing practical skills are often found in the manuals of large OEMs but not in university programs.

They are also found in the industrial placements that are part of "sandwich" degrees.

- Steve

 

[kontiki99]

I don't know anything about FEA, but you're holding up the entertainment industries as a standard for engineering professionalisim!

I just saw a few episodes of America's Got talent on Hulu.com.

Really talented musician singers were rejected for unique "air" guitarists and music acts that were funny/tragic and the big overcame handicapp stories.

They had a quota for every group. If you didn't make the cutoff, nobody hears from you again.

Meritocracy can work, nothing works 100% of the time.

 

[csd72]

You are not comparing apples to apples:

Thise that you are aware of in the entertainment and sports industries are the most succesful 1 or 2 % of their industry, you dont hear of the incompetent ones (well not until idol e.t.c.)

The equivalent in the engineering profession are those that win the construction and engineering society awards, if none of your coworkers have won these awards then they should not be compared.