What is in an engineer? The word is used to describe so much of work done in the economy. The people who design fighter planes are called engineers. The people who optimize the speed at which financial transactions take place or build that back end of an iPhone app are called software engineers. The people who keep the engines running on container ships are called engineers, a legal designation. The people who sign off on the plans to build bridges are engineers. At university engineering departments, professors, researchers, and students diligently work on publishing journal papers. The people who maintain the HVAC systems in large buildings are called engineers.
Are these uses of the term ‘engineer’ correct? Are they all useful? Is each one of these jobs considered engineering? If so, the word ‘engineer’ has taken on far too broad a meaning to be useful in any rigorous sense. It essentially means ‘someone who works with a machine of any kind’ which isn’t terribly useful. To steal a term from computer science, the word ‘engineering’ is overloaded. It is a single term that is assigned many meanings. What’s more, many of these meanings are used interchangeably despite referring to disparate endeavors.
Perhaps examining the etymology of the word engineer will provide some insight into a more precise definition. This is the etymology from Google which, in turn, gets it from Oxford English Dictionary:
“Middle English (denoting a designer and constructor of fortifications and weapons; formerly also as ingineer ): in early use from Old French engigneor, from medieval Latin ingeniator, from ingeniare‘contrive, devise’, from Latin ingenium (see engine); in later use from French ingénieur or Italian ingegnere, also based on Latin ingenium, with the ending influenced by -eer.”
The word 'engineer' comes from the Latin word ingenium, which is the same source as the modern English word ‘ingenuity.’ Perhaps ‘designer’ or ‘architect’ would be similar translations. The earliest engineers designed large machines used to destroy enemy fortifications called siege engines. In fact, all early engineering was for the military; the term ‘civil engineering’ originally distinguished the discipline from technical work done in support of the military.
Around the turn of the 19th century, machines like the steam engine began to accelerate the industrialization of England and Europe. The word ‘engineer’ was transliterated into the English language and began to refer to the people who designed -- and also operated -- the steam engines. There were now multiple meanings. To this day, the people who operate rail locomotives and the engines on ships are called ‘engineers’. Somewhat ironically, the people who do all the technical design and development for ships are called naval architects.
With the rise of digital computing the term ‘software engineer’ began to creep into the corporate lexicon. So now the people who operate locomotives are engineers, the people who designed medieval siege equipment are engineers, the people who design modern machinery and processes are engineers, and the people who write software are engineers.
The academic use of the word ‘engineering’ further compounds the confusion. Around the early to mid 1800s, military academies began to teach students (military) engineering. As the industrial revolution accelerated, the specialization of labor became necessary for an increasingly complex economy. More universities began to add new departments of engineering to complement technological advances being made in the industrial economy. However, Universities were — and still are — operating engineering departments in the tradition of the physical sciences. And engineering is not science.
Aside: Science is not engineering. Engineering is not science.
The ubiquitous, buzzword-y acronym STEM is often presented as a monolithic idea. It’s thrown around as though science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are all the same. This clever acronym obfuscates the difference between science and engineering at a fundamental level.
The scientific method is the process by which new knowledge is discovered empirically. When doing science, one first identifies a phenomenon that is not understood. Several hypotheses about the cause and effect of the phenomenon are developed. To be considered scientific, these hypotheses must be able to be definitively tested and proven false: a condition called falsifiability. One must then develop an experiment to repeatedly recreate the phenomenon and repeatedly falsify each hypothesis. A hypothesis that can be proven false but has survived every attempt to do so is considered true.
Engineering follows a different and, in many cases, an opposite process. In engineering, a problem is identified, and solutions are proposed. Solutions are prototyped and tested. Issues with the prototype are identified and fixed in successive prototypes and the process repeats itself until the problem is adequately solved. I consider the fundamental difference between science and engineering to be the notion of falsifiability. Science requires falsifiable hypotheses and experiments to test them. Engineering is an iterative process of verification and optimization. The engineering process more closely resembles the design process than it does the scientific method.
Science is a process of exhaustive falsification. Engineering is a process of iterative verification.
For completeness, I’ll discuss mathematics and technology too.
Mathematics is the application of formal logic to study numbers and space. The goal of mathematics is to use logical reasoning and statements that you know to be true (axioms, theorems, etc.) to prove more statements true. Mathematics has wide application in the physical sciences, in economics, in business and finance, and, of course, in engineering. However, doing mathematics is not the same as using mathematics for a scientific experiment or for engineering analysis. Mathematics as its own field of study is more about proving that the square root of two is irrational and investigating whether there are more real numbers than there are integers than it is about estimating the price of the S&P 500 or calculating the temperatures inside of a jet turbine during combustion. Scientists, engineers and lots of other professions use math, but few of them are doing mathematics. Conversely, mathematicians are rarely doing science or engineering.
Finally, technology is the outcome of using the previous three fields of study to make new things. Math is the language, science tells us the rules, engineering is the design and development process, and technology is (hopefully) the end result.
(End aside) University engineering departments continued the traditions of academia and the scientific method to explore problems in applied science. While this work can be important and good, it isn’t engineering even if that is the word that has been chosen to label it. I believe the term ‘applied ______ research’ is both more accurate and less confusing. There is precedent for this; My college degree is from a program called ‘Theoretical and Applied Mechanics’ though the degree itself is called “Engineering Mechanics”. University chemical engineering departments and programs would best be labeled Applied Chemical Research, likewise for mechanical, electrical, etc. '
Consider the following situation. In a previous job, I worked as a chassis development engineer. My job was to develop truck chassis so that the trucks rode and handled well while still meeting all the durability and cost requirements. My friend was a PhD student, and his job was to write papers about atomic force microscopy. In order to develop engine and transmission mounts, I developed some novel signal processing algorithms, but it wasn’t my job to publish or present them. Likewise, my friend developed some novel machines for testing atomic force microscopy, but his job wasn’t to make machines that work, his job was to publish papers. If I made all these novel signal processing algorithms and published them but did not make any improvements to the truck, I’d get fired. Likewise, if my friend made all these new machines but didn’t publish any papers, he’d get fired from PhD school. Yet the same word, ‘engineering’, is used to describe both endeavors. What’s more, one is supposed to be training for the other!
For the rest of this essay, I will use the following definition for engineers. Engineers use the principles of physics, economics, and mathematics to design, build, and test machinery or infrastructure. This definition is precise enough to be useful in arguments while being wide enough to cover the many disciplines of engineering. Using my definition, locomotive or ship operators are not engineers. Software developers are not engineers. Academic researchers that are doing theory are not engineers. People making fighter planes and bridges and oil refineries are.
While this whole exercise may seem like a pedantic argument over semantic minutia, consider that American universities spend over 15 billion (taxpayer) dollars a year on engineering research. Overloaded definitions of engineering can lead to the misallocation of this funding. For manufacturing businesses to thrive in the US, technical education in the United States needs to change. For the rest of this essay, I will outline how engineering education came to its current state, what its current deficiencies are, and what changes I would propose to better align it with the current demands of the US economy.