Re: Off-Topic: Engineers (small rant)

>Sorry, but someone that puts their name on something that I cannot walk
>on, touch, drive, or risk losing fingers with does not deserve the
>appellation of engineer.

Presumably you mean to include those engineers, including many on this list, whose job it it to prepare drawings or CAD models, writes specifications or reports or supervise other engineers who do and who never see the finished product. And also (presumably) you mean to exclude people who perform touch labor but take no responsibility for the finished product. I claim a person who assumes personal responsibility for writing software is just as much a professional as a person who assumes personal responsibility for preparing a CAD model or writing a weld procedure. The software guy might even have an edge, by virtue of the extent to which they need to debug their own code, trap errors and find problems with mis-use.

The assumption of final responsibility creates an important distinction. Most engineers work for corporations run by people who probably don't know the difference between a pipe rack and a hat rack.And I daresay more than a few people on this list who aren't self-employed would be satisfied with 'Not my fault--I was just following orders' after a failure of a system they'd worked on.

We might consider comparing our own work with physicians. Doctors and nurses take personal responsibility for a patient, no matter what shape the patient's in. Someone comes in to a doctor's with a hellacious cough gets the same care when he's on his last legs from a lifetime of smoking as he did when he just had bronchitis. No sending out resumes when it looks like you have a hopeless case on your hands and no blaming the customer for technical illiteracy.

Christopher Wright P.E.    |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
chrisw@skypoint.com        | this distance"   (last words of Gen.
___________________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)