Website Wednesday-Working with your hands

This website: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/ has a fabulous article about the beauty and satisfaction of working with your hands as a craftsman. My favorite quote:

"The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away."

Nello Sevastopoulos* once told me that he considered engineering to be a blue-collar job. We work with our hands. We get no real credit from society,– look at the all the doctor shows on TV.  There are no shows about the engineer that made the equipment that allowed the doctor to save the patient’s life. I once heard the definition of professional as someone who can still be considered good even if the results of their efforts fail. A good doctor can have a patient die. A good lawyer can lose the case. Try being considered a good engineer if your stuff doesn’t work. Yet I consider engineers real professionals, real problem solvers, not just some dorks with an eidetic memory like doctors and lawyers.

There has always been a hands-on aspect to engineering. I consider American engineers tendency to “lift the hood” and get their hands dirty one of the characteristics that differentiates us from the more effete academic European and Asian engineers. I feel that electrical engineers tend to be more competent because we have not yet created a stigma about being in the lab holding a soldering iron. The mechanical engineers sit in front of their computers and no longer sashay out to the shop to spin the cranks on a milling machine. Getting your hands dirty is not considereda professional thing to do. How much worse all the products of this world are because of this attitude. Its dinnertime and I need to go hang out with my buddies and swap stores over a beer. Read the article and let me know what you think. It is really great.

* As a VP of Linear Technology, Nello would interview engineers. He told me he would ask them if they had ever changed the oil in their car. If the applicant said no, Nello pretty much showed them the door. He needed hands-on problem solvers that were not afraid to get their hands dirty either figuratively or literally.