pietro pozzi

© photo by pietro pozzi

You’re such an engineer”.

This is what somebody like me is most likely to hear about himself when exposes his point of view to a multidisciplinary group. But where does this definition of engineer come from and why it applies at most of the exponent of this category? Firstly, a specification is needed: when somebody speaks about engineers, he is surely referring to a product engineer. So let me explain my view of what a product engineer does (or should do). A customer’s company gives the supplier’s company a bunch of specifications and a pile of papers full of requirements. Most of the times these are made of boundary conditions plus numbers, sometimes these are drawings or just sketches, only once in a while it happens that the specs are “relaxed” and the supplier is left free to decide by its own.
Now here comes the engineer: in few words he is responsible for the transformation of those requirements into the products that his company will supply to the customer’s one. He produces a first draft taking inspiration from what the others do and that reflects the peculiar requests that the customer has carefully resumed into documents as explained before. He decides which are the tests to be done in order to assess that the requirements are met and that the functionality is guaranteed until the end of his life; lately he adjust his “creation” according to the numbers that the tests and measurements return. Then eventually he gives the whole job to the people who are responsible for the production and that’s it.
In other words, a product engineer is someone who gives a material essence to a combination of numbers and data. Differently, there are many other engineers whose job is again centered on the final customer’s requirements, but this time the customer - or, more properly, consumer - does not even know to be a customer yet.
Take for instance the music streaming app you use everyday: that was originally designed taking into consideration parameters like ease of use, stability, low costs of maintenance, adaptability to all operative systems etc.; in addition to this, the engineer must consider the everyday person’s tastes and habits (to skip a song for instance or to see the album’s cover on the screen when playing) and also his attitude to the interconnection with social networks - allowing to post what is listening to - and his creativity - giving him the opportunity to create his own playlists.
However, being this product purposely design to satisfy an increasing number of people that are by definition evolving themselves during the time, the engineer cannot be satisfied with a picture of the consumer’s needs frozen into a limited period of time but needs instead to update his database of information including feelings, feedbacks thru the app itself. And this is the peculiarity of the consumer-oriented engineer, who is always connected with his potential customer thru a number of channels: history (of music), social, cultural etc. for instance. To make a comparison, the difference between the first and the second kind of engineer is more or less the same as between the information and the communication.
Although apparently this draws a line between who in the engineering field is dedicated to a consumer product and who instead designs a component product, the moment of human interaction is luckily there also for an engineer who works on component. During everyday life the engineer is asked to respond to many different functions of the company (Purchasing, Sales, Finance, IT etc.) and to work with members of his team (Prototypes, Quality, Production etc.) on which he has to depend on. The ability to work in a team in the respect for each other as well as the mutual learning is baseline for working into a company. However, is easy to forget that other people have grown in different context, attended different studies and lived in different countries, in other words, come from other universes than us.

Without considering this multicultural background, it’s difficult to achieve the objects and even to survive. This is the reason why a constant confront with others and the tendency to appreciate and discus other’s point of view is at the basis of every engineer’s activity. So the line between the two engineers disappears, even if both remain just such “an engineer”.