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How to deal with technical incompetence? 2

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bugbus

bugbus

Structural
Aug 14, 2018
506
I will start by saying that no one, including myself, is immune from making blunders or being totally clueless on certain technical topics. It’s only human and it’s totally forgivable. After all, this is the benefit of working in a team with a wide range of experience.

Unfortunately, as with probably most professions, there are always a handful of individuals that somehow make their way into technical roles who clearly don’t understand the important technical concepts and principles beyond a surface level. In the worst cases I’ve seen this border on sheer incompetence combined with big egos and an unwillingness to challenge their own understanding.

Obviously different people have different ways of looking at things, and in some cases there is latitude for interpretation. But when it comes to conflicting ideas on what are often black-and-white facts, it becomes quite frustrating. It’s even more frustrating when these individuals are at a similar or higher role/salary to you.

I’ve never known a delicate way to treat this situation. Obviously it’s important to be polite and try to understand where someone is coming from, but I also can’t pretend that all ideas and opinions on technical issues are equal. It has led to situations where I now feel the need to treat everything that certain individuals say with some degree of skepticism, and needing to scrutinise their work to a greater degree.

At its core, I think the issue comes down to poor hiring practices and managers themselves not being all that technically involved, hence why these issues are often overlooked. Is there enough emphasis during the hiring process these days on technical ability? It probably depends who you work for, but I’ve seen this as a widespread problem.

Anyway, curious to hear others’ opinions.
 
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Depends on relative positions and ages.
Is the person a manager high than you? Are they a peer in position and age? At a lesser position? Younger or older?
 
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About 30 years back I use to mentor one of the younger engineers at a company I worked for. I generally tend to be pretty thorough when describing a situation. I could spend an hour explaining something to this guy and I'd ask him if he understood. Occasionally, he would confirm his understanding and then ask a question that indicated he hadn't a clue about what I'd described. Fortunately, I had a lot of patience, back then.

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik
 
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It's worsened if it's a woman who's not timid about playing the gender bias card.

Worked with a senior engineer who had 20 years on me, but couldn't figure out what one was supposed to see in the middle of a shift register, gack... Luckily, we didn't cross paths very often.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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I made a mistake about 10 years back. A Chinese engineer, Yan, was excellent and I mentored her and when she left the firm I helped her in her new places of employment. She was a Mechanical engineer in China, but didn't register as an engineer in Manitoba. I was largely responsible for her becoming registered. She and Ling Wei both became registered...

Yan passed away from cancer a couple of years back, and I still have an active shrine for her...

One day, I made the mistake of commenting to her about how 'unassuming' (don't know the right word) she was... she nearly took my head off... big mistake on my part.

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik
 
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I had a geotech with a PHD try to tell me you had to apply all AASHTO LRFD load factors twice (i.e. 1.5x1.5xload). He was the geotech of record for a large design build and we were designing specialty structures that they had to sign off on. We even sent him the publication by FHWA with several examples of how to design these structures, and he was so convinced he was right that he wouldn't even look at them. Even the contractor realized he was wrong and basically had him demoted on the project once the contractor saw how much money this was costing him.
 
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To a certain extent there's no way around the problem. Some people are good at interviewing and say the right things, have qualifications, but are otherwise bad at their jobs/not technical enough/whatever.

If it's someone outside your department telling you how to do your job incorrectly, I'd maybe mention it to my boss but otherwise ignore it and have whatever justification ready if needed (Code actually says this, whatever).

If it's someone inside your department effecting what you're working on that gets trickier. If they're essentially making you over design something because they're too conservative or just wrong...that's not the worst thing ever but it's annoying and more costly. If they're trying to cut corners due to incompetence and not listening to facts/standards/codes/etc then that's a much bigger issue.
 
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I have found that not everything is as "black and white" as we'd like to think.

For example, something as mundane as a beam's end fixity seems pretty straight forward, but is always a topic of debate when the numbers don't work out.

Hell, there's been countless threads on here that debate the end fixity (or lack thereof) on every type of member, using every type of material.

Now, if its one of those rarities that is "black and white", like satisfying statics...thats a different story.

My point is that alot of things in engineering that seem crystal clear to us, may be viewed differently by another engineer (perhaps the other engineer's view is more or less conservative than our own).

That said, if it is true incompetence, throw the book at 'em!

 
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IME the only cure for incompetence is to build a culture that 1. doesnt tolerate failure and 2. doesnt shortcut process. The best companies I've worked for/with were very direct, you needed to succeed or find another job. You also needed to prove every bit of your work bc they didnt blindly accept assertions that you had completed an analysis, you went into formal design reviews with a presentation showing FEA/CFD/BJA/etc results and allowed the team+management to poke holes. Fakes/frauds/incompetents couldn't hide shoddy work so never lasted more than a few months.
 
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I'm trying to cultivate a more tolerant attitude that people aren't "simply" incompetent, but rather not fully competent at the job they currently have. I have colleagues who are not really a good fit for the actual jobs they have, but they have them. Consider how hard it is to hire the right people, so you take the match that is close enough.
 
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Ultimately, it's management's job to hire the right people for each job, and to train/mentor them into their ideal positions. Now, if management is incompetent, that's different ball of wax.

Having a chronically incompetent in any position breeds discontent, resentment, and poor morale potentially in all parties concerned.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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I didn't say it's easy to cultivate a tolerant attitude!
 
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Agreed, and the unfortunate reality of management is that many companies provide zero training for new/prospective managers.
 
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I didn't say it's easy to cultivate a tolerant attitude!
Click to expand...

I'm tolerant when I have to explain something once. If I have to keep explaining it then I quickly lose patience.
 
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My manager has two open postings for jobs, and many candidates for each.
Are most of the applications nonsense? Yes.
Are any of the candidates perfect? No. Are some close? Yes.
I don't envy his job to figure out what kind of "close enough" is good enough for what we actually need.
 
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Promote it! [pipe]

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik
 
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bugbus,
I may have been diverting the thread away from your original question.
Your problem is one that I've struggled with, even when I'm in a position of some authority on a few matters. When pointing out mistakes to colleagues it just does not help when your reaction scales up with the severity of the error. I've let that happen and gotten nowhere. In all cases, whether a spelling mitsake or a case where people could die, you are "providing comments" in all cases.

For me, putting my comments in writing is better than giving them verbally. I find that the time spent writing is time spent getting my own thoughts in proper order, and cleaning out inflections, overreactions. This usually improves the reception at the other end. The benefit of writing out my comments increases with the severity of the error. I just don't speak as well as I write.

When I find a pattern of errors, I stop marking every instance of the error I find. I still look at all of the instances, and then aggregate my feedback into one big picture that covers them all. Then I advise the recipient that all of the problems need to be corrected in "X" way.

All of this is meant to fit into the model that "everyone is a learner". Expectation of the recipient is that they will be open to the feedback and able to fairly hear it. If they disagree, they need to give a reason why. There have been cases where their reason why was good enough to be kept. I'm a learner, too.

None of this is how I was trained. I learned from the school of hard knocks, bosses showing their frustration when I "didn't get it", chunks of metal flying over my shoulder. Years later, I don't have many role models to draw upon when I'm trying to do the better way.
 
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Sparweb - all good points. But sometimes the person just never learns and keeps asking the same questions or making the same mistakes. Then it gets time to be blunt with them.
 
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I generally try to modify the description so the person can understand... often works...

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik
 
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Ive seen this several times cant do anything about it - most tend to get away with it without any harm (both to them and the users of their projects), probably because of redundancies built within modern engineering design.

Part of why it is difficult for a layperson to differentiate a good engineer from a bad one.
 
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