The Curse of Engineers
We fall into the same trap over and over again 🛑: developing beautiful things that serve no purpose. Throwing ourselves headlong into a side project because it challenges our intellect. Doing things because we can, not because we should. Wasting precious hours.
Let’s call it the engineer’s curse.
The Art of Making Things That Serve No Purpose
I often feel that intellectual excitement at the thought of embarking on a new project, of doing things right, perfectly, state-of-the-art. Polishing my little diamond—dare I say, creating my masterpiece? Software quality is at the heart of my expertise, after all.
That’s not a problem in and of itself: if the product makes sense, if it lets me earn a living, or adds a little to social utility (let’s dare to dream), that’s fine. Quality and efficiency aren’t mutually exclusive, as we know. In fact, not only does quality not slow us down in the short term (e.g., Test-Driven Development), but it also greatly increases our development capacity in the medium and long term.
No, the problem is actually doing things that serve no purpose. An art that engineers brilliantly take to its peak: the most beautiful creations of “nothing” are our doing. Entire hard drives stuffed with half-cut diamonds. Entire weeks spent reinventing the wheel or the butter knife. Millions of lines of code that have never seen a user. How many half-baked ideas, how many cases of putting the cart before the horse, how many solutions to problems that never existed: an astonishing creativity.
So… why?
Will I be up to the task?
On closer inspection, I see deep within us (within me) an irrepressible urge to create and build, mixed with the anxiety of not knowing how. When presented with a problem, I immediately ask myself, “Will I be able to do it?” Meaning: “Will I be up to the task?” It’s a very academic line of thinking, actually—perhaps akin to the “good student” syndrome.
Whereas our friends from business schools—who have the advantage of having no experience with technical matters—immediately ask themselves the only question that matters: “Is this the right thing to do?” Then they wonder what idiot of an engineer they’ll be able to find to do it, but that’s another story.
Thus, the “how” clutters our minds at the expense of the “what” and, above all, the “why”: what should I do, and why should I do it? What can I contribute? What matters to me?
The question of meaning
This question is by far the most anxiety-inducing, so to combat that anxiety, we plunge headlong into it and cut a new diamond… until we can no longer avoid the original question and end up leaving everything unfinished—once again.
You might say there’s a time for everything: it’s only natural for a young engineer to be concerned with mastering his craft. As the years go by, having seen all kinds of projects—some beautiful, some not so beautiful, some big, some small—and having watched many fade into obscurity while realizing that certain ones inspired a noble sense of pride, our engineers come to the conclusion that they’d just as soon not work for peanuts 💡
Yes, it’s called a midlife crisis, but I’m fine—I’m only 39 years and 9 months old.