By Talin
As engineers, our managers are always telling us to "think positively". "With positive thinking" they tell us "you can accomplish anything." If we discover an obstacle or an unexpected stumbling block, they occasionally chide us for thinking so negatively. "I want solutions, not problems!" is an oft-heard rebuke.
But we continue to disobey our managers and think in a negative fashion. Not all of the time, for as good engineers we need to play many roles. But we continue to think that way a significant amount of the time.
We know what happens to engineers that only think positively.
Modern technological systems are extremely complex, with tens of thousands of variables which have to be considered and accounted for. No designer can create such a complex system without making dozens of mistakes, because humans just aren't that competent. And in some environments, any mistake can be lethal.
In order to insure the integrity of their work, engineers must ruthlessly and relentlessly hunt down and eliminate their own errors. They must have a total commitment to the task of cleansing their design of even the smallest flaw. And they must resist the human temptation to take the short view, to say "good enough" too soon. Instead, they maintain an unreasonable persistence and patience, utilizing negative thinking, pessimism and perhaps paranoia to assume that there are still flaws remaining in the design, even when there aren't. Perhaps words such as "paranoia" aren't correct, but they are words that actual working engineers have used to describe themselves and their feelings towards their craft. "What if the unthinkable really does happen?" they say. "What if all the backup systems fail?"
Obviously, there is a great tension going on between the archetypal manager and engineer. Managers often accuse engineers of perfectionism, of tinkering with the product instead of finishing it. And in some cases, it's true. We've all heard the adage: "There comes a time when you have to ship the product and shoot the engineers". (Although I sometimes wonder if perhaps the correct solution in some cases is so shoot the product and ship the engineers.) But for an engineer who doesn't want to become famous by killing someone, it's never "good enough".
Let us imagine for example a design engineer who is working on a software module to control an elevator in a high-rise apartment building. So far, the tests have gone well, and two weeks have gone by without discovering any new problems.
Does this make the lead engineer feel good? Not on your life. This is a very good engineer. He has a deep-seated anxiety, a kind of faith that something will go wrong. He believes that there are hidden flaws that he has not been able to discover, traps lurking within, waiting to ensnare him, or worse, whoever happens to be unlucky enough to step inside the fiendish thing. Once the problem is discovered, he'll breathe a sigh of relief, because he knows that yet another way in which people might get killed has been eliminated. He knows that when the inevitable disaster did finally occur, it happened while he was on watch, and he had the strength to deal with it. He can breathe deeply, for a moment, contented in his role as protector. And then the waiting begins again.
Systems that work perfectly the first time can make master engineers tremble with fear.
How do engineers develop these attitudes? Certainly a lot of it comes from personal experience--getting "burned". But a big chunk of it comes from a surprising source, one that is far older than the engineering profession itself: Folklore and myth.
Joseph Campbell said that our society was changing too fast for us to develop appropriate myths. However, he was not entirely right--engineers have a whole mythology which they use to motivate themselves and give object lessons on what is the proper attitude to take.
One particularly strong mythic motif is exemplified by Murphy's Law, coined by a test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base: "If it can go wrong, it will go wrong." There is an entire panoply of corollary and associated laws, enough to fill a medium-sized book. The common thread that binds these laws together is the assumption that there is something far more perverse than just the laws of random chance at work. It is a superstition, one that is not only the source of much humor but also much utility.
The great philosopher Immanuel Kant said that in order to live a moral life we had to construct a world of Idea in which morality actually matters, and then act as if this world actually exists. In this way we could continue to feed our spiritual needs while living a cosmos in which our senses report only cold, dead matter, devoid of any intrinsic moral value.
Similarly, in order to design safe systems, engineers can create a myth of a world of pessimistic metacausality, in which Murphy's law actually holds true, and then act as if that world actually existed. One hopes for the sake of their own personal happiness that they can leave that world behind them when they go home at night, to enjoy the wonder and beauty of the universe in which we actually exist.
As humans, we are motivated in large part by our participation in the cultural narrative that goes on around us. But what is the narrative that surrounds engineers? What stories do they tell? The engineering profession has literally thousands of urban legends to draw from, a rich source of myth.
In corporate lunchrooms all over the industrialized world, the elder gurus of the engineering profession sit around the table, surrounded by wide-eyed apprentices as they expound upon one tale or another. Tales about the hackers that went to jail, and the ones that started a security consulting service; about the funniest bug they ever saw; about the great phone-system crash; about the Challenger O-rings; about the Hubble main mirror, and why it was made wrong because of a simple error in measurement; and about how the first eight NASA lunar probes utterly failed until they learned how to build them right. A smorgasbord of the world's stupidity and cleverness is spread out before their puerile curiosity.
Of course, not all of the stories are so negative. There are also the stories about multi-million dollar companies that started as two kids in a garage, stories of how the gods once walked at Xerox PARC, stories about projects completed under time and under budget. "And that" says the guru, "was how I survived the massively stupid blunder of 1991."
To outsiders, it seems like "geek talk", and to a certain extent it is--discussions of technology for the sake of the cool, the new. But a lot of it is "war stories", based on past experience and mistakes. Engineers learn much by listening to each other swap tales, many of them rich in both technological detail and human relevance. Some innovators have even proposed that we build advanced collaborative communications systems that enhance this storytelling process, as part of an efficient corporate groupware facility.
There are also internal narratives. Some engineers may even see themselves as participants in an heroic saga. Certainly one of the adjuncts of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy was her attempt to promulgate the image of the "heroic engineer". In real life, we see many examples of selfless sacrifice--from the project leader who quits in disgust over unsafe policies, to the whistleblower who loses a job after reporting toxic dumping.
Not every engineer feels this way, of course. Some are so tightly wrapped up in their craft that they lose all awareness of the world outside. Some are seduced by the lure of bright technology. Some bow to the inevitable, complaining "What do you expect me to do about it?" But on the whole, engineers are conscientious, expressing a desire to help their fellow man, although it is sometimes difficult for them to find a way to connect that desire with the details of their work.
Ultimately, from a mythological perspective, we are all Vulcan, the cosmic blackmith of the Roman pantheon. We descend into the depths of the earth to forge a new mystery and bring it home to our tribe. We know there is peril in our gifts, but we must balance that against the needs and desires of those we serve. For only we can truly understand that peril; Only we know the secrets of the hammer and the fire. Vulcan was a grumpy fellow, and if we are perceived similarly, then perhaps that is the price we must pay to keep our folk from being burned.
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Postscript, September 1999:
This article of negative thinking got a lot of positive feedback from readers of CACM. One professor even asked permission to use the essay in a lecture to a group of engineering students.
A friend of mine, Willy Langeveld, who is a scientist a SLAC told me "There is more proof for the existence of Murphy than there is for the existence of God."
I missed a couple of important "grand failures" in my list, in particular the classic Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. And of course, there's the Titanic, but that's almost a cliche by now.
Those whom have read Atlas Shrugged may appreciate the delicious
irony of my using Ayn Rand's name in a context in which she would entirely
dissaprove of...in partiicular, the use of the words "Objectivist" and
"Self-ssacrifice" in the same breath.