What makes a good engineer

Recently I have been watching/reading Professor Jordan Peterson My mind was transfixated by his way of expressing controversal ideas/thoughts which is both logical and blunt. Like all good lectures do, they tend to trigger your own thinking process. I’d like to use this quarantine time during the pandamic to talk about and break down what makes a good engineer.

• The traits of a good engineer
• Generalized ability of a good eengineer
• The congnitive ability required to achieve the goals

The traits of a good engineer

Based on my own experince and my witness of those who widely acceptpted as good engineer in my carrer. I think (without any hard data to back it up), a good engineer tend to have those 4 main traits:

• Ability to learn new skills
• Ability to come up with a good solution to a given problem
• Tend to influnce others both proactively by knowledge sharing/pairing or passively by peer pressure
• Deep or wide knowledge of the problem domain

Generalized ability of a good eengineer

So logically, those traits could be summarized as a process of get raw infomation/data and transform them into results. Specifically, in the above traits, they are associated with:

• Ability to absorb information to yourself
• Ability to apply learning to the project
• Ability to project your view on others
• Ability to accumulate the information

You can see also:

• The processes on process data and best on result to find new data are curicial to good results
• This is a loop, meaning there’s another elment of assement ability envolved otherweise it is not going to stop

The congnitive ability required to achieve the goals

Let’s break down those process see what kind of conginitive abilities are required

A typical problem solving process

1. Understanding of the problem domain
2. Search for existing solutions
3. When no existing solution exists, some hypophyses would be formed (logical reasonning)
4. Then amoung those newly formed hypophyses, you need to pick one or some most likely to sucess (least effort law, which requires ability to caculate the likelyhood roughly in your mind)
5. After that, we need to find associated data to fill in the gap, this requires the ability of abstract thinking and logical reasonning
6. After a prototype is created, we need to verify the deviation with the solution and the expected result, this could drive the requirement of more data to do furth assement
7. Should more data is needed, we need start searching for data fits the requirment (Pattern matching)

Summary

As you can see, the most imporant abilities are:

• Logical reasonning
• Abstract thinking
• Pattern matching

It looks like those summary is too obvious to have all the troubles doing above lines of reasoning. BUT, the intresting thing comes down to what Professor Jordan Peterson mentioned in one of his talk, that the IQ (which is a super set of what the above is) has ~0.7 correlation with the measurable societal sucess(e.g finacial/social status).

Which drives out another question, does a good engineer trained or born? I can further play some thinking game on next Staturday