George Rebane

Folks, if I didn’t know better, I would say it was another dirty communist plot.  We have already done our best to sink the primary and secondary school systems in the country, and now we’re in the process of cooking the last goose to lay our golden eggs.  The Associated Press reports that the national accreditation body for engineering schools is now requiring that these schools produce a more well-rounded student who also has such things as “people skills”.

Apparently the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology has been co-opted by some soft heads who now require our engineering schools to start teaching “soft skills” to our engineering and science undergraduates.  And according to the Associated Press, they are not alone.  Joining them are the air head administrators and academics in such prestigious places as MIT and UC Berkeley.  I guess by now you have the feeling that I’m more than a little peeved.

The young people studying technology will hereafter be required to learn about business skills, law, entrepreneurship, etc as “part of a national push to produce grads who are both technically savvy and people smart.”  But guess what, no engineering manager out there gives a big rat’s asset if the new hire, still fighting pimples, is people smart.  They want someone who can do the technical job, and if they can, they will be taught any “soft skills” they may need to advance.  The slogans about teamwork and communication that the administrators quote don’t matter a hill of beans if the kid can handle a breadth of technical subjects with sufficient dash and verve to be able to connect dots between places that no-one ever thought had dots to connect.  It is these abilities which make the breakthroughs for the project, for the company, and finally for the country.  Let me take a few deep breaths.

The problem that the politically correct, who have never/seldom worked as practicing engineers and entrepreneurs, don’t realize is that there is an immovable constraint on the learning process, no matter how smart you are.  Everyone has just 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.  And at the end of four years we want the little darlin’ to get out there and convince someone that they can be a wealth generator if properly managed.  In the meantime, the shoreline of human knowledge (where we want these kids to work) is already long and expanding at an ever increasing rate.

In the old days one could be an electronics engineer or a thermodynamicist and understand a good part of your discipline.  Now technical knowledge and its interconnections have become so voluminous and complex that specialties have specialties.  Today the field of systems sciences dominates and pulls together the specialty areas to deliver products in all fields ranging from the social services through aerospace and medicine to agriculture (and everything in between).

We don’t need people to sacrifice part of their valuable time in engineering school substituting classes with business and law students for core technical subjects.  Remember, the hours in a day are a zero sum game; it’s either this or that, not both.

Fads in creativity and the creative process come and go.  In technology, quality creative work has always been a solo flight.  Those of us who have been there and done that know that when it’s time to invent something new, the job quickly gets lonely and you writhe for days, weeks, sometimes months between the agony and the ecstasy of dead-ends and breakthroughs until ‘Aha!!’ or it’s modern equivalent ‘Holy sh__!!’  This is not a process done by groups in low-walled, tightly packed cubicles or pizza filled conference rooms full of boys and girls trying to make points in front of the boss.  The recent study by the Sandia National Laboratory confirms that ‘wicked problems’ are best solved solo.  In short, you can’t effectively gang-futz creativity in a deep technical area.

But to fly solo one needs to have a subtle combination of depth in several important subjects and breadth over a lot of areas.  And a young person can only get that by taking a lot of technical courses in well designed technical curricula.  These courses are all hard and many require some pretty desperate noodling.  If there’s any group work and communication involved, it is the kind that equally suffering engineering students do naturally when they meet to go over a difficult chapter, problem set, or page of code.  There they use a language and methods of interaction that would make the heads of their soft skills mentors spin.  But the job of learning the tough stuff gets done.

As a lifelong engineer, engineering manager/executive, and consultant, my fortunes have always depended on what kind of technical productivity I could muster.  When hiring technical talent, I and my peers in similar straits, have always opted for the brains no matter if these often come in a painfully shy package or speaking self-confidently in heavy foreign accents.  Skilled technicians know how to give each other ‘the handshake’ in the first few minutes of their meeting.  And we also know how to vet a candidate for a job without having to rely on their school transcript.  Some of these interviews are not pretty but they are efficient.

The real comical part of the new curriculum that is supposed to teach young engineers entrepreneurship is that such training was never needed by the good engineers and scientists.  Being smart, they pick up the non-technical essentials very quickly, and being even smarter, they pick up financial and business partners much as remoras and pilot fish attach themselves to a shark.  American business history is full of companies of all sizes and shapes that were started and run by creative engineers who brought on other talent as needed.  After all, as most B-schools in the country now admit by their abbreviated programs, there is less to an MBA than meets the eye. As the latest in a string of personal examples, two technical members of my most recent engineering group, with pockets full of money, are now again working new and exciting start-ups – one here and one in China – with neither having a soft skill between them, but man, are they smart. 

Finally, American universities have attested to the effectiveness of our technical curricula by attracting bright minds from around the world.  Our problem recently has been how to keep them here.  It’s a sure bet that such foreigners never have nor will they in the future come here to learn “soft skills” in our engineering schools.  So, if my assessment is correct, soon we will again be hearing more English spoken in the halls of our technical schools as room is made in the curriculum for more BS courses and fewer courses that teach the wealth generating technologies that our country needs to stay competitive in a global marketplace.

I apologize for the length of this rant, but once started it was hard to stop (probably due to my deficiencies in soft skills).