"Engineering" Is Failing Because Of Understaffed Departments And Unmanaged Projects

In my experience, understaffed departments and under managed projects were the norm.

I found a thread on that here. The writer of that post is just saying all the things I went through in the last decade.

As I read over the original thread post, I realized that there are several underlying assumptions and expectations that are being painfully violated (is that too strong a word?) daily.

"Violated" wouldn't be too strong a word for what I went through. And "Disappointment" wouldn't be a strong enough word for industry I worked for.

Here are the Assumptions and Expectations that I have as a professional engineer:

(1) Sufficient Staffing: My expectation is that (for simplicity) when there is a client that pays 2X for a project that requires the efforts of 2 people, where X is the salary of one person, the company would put 2 individuals on that project. This happens 5% of the time. I have only experienced it in projects that were small enough for one person to do the job single-handedly i.e. ME.
What typically happens is, whoever (1 person) is momentarily light on work, gets the project. The job may require 2 people or 3. It doesn't matter.

This was an extremely simple illustration. What happened with me in the past year was we got a mega job that needed 8 people on it. We had 2.5. The 0.5 was a technologist so junior, he didn't know the 'DIST' command on AutoCAD. I counted him as 0.5 because he was breathing. The company was getting paid 5X for the project.

Needless to say, it was a miracle we got the deliverables done. And we were only able to do it because we produced painfully sub-par deliverables. Hence I left. 

(2) Sufficient Project Management: The project managers are usually so over burdened, that they cannot do their job. Everything is done in a rush, and there was never a single thought wasted between all the high-paid flibbertigibbets in upper management to hire one more project manager. If not for the humanity of helping out the guy who was literally dying trying to keep up - then for the fear of delivering sub-par projects and facing the consequences. Not a single management-level neuron was engaged in that thought for a millisecond.

(3) Taking Our Obligation Seriously: You would think that words like "Ritual Calling Of An Engineer" or "Obligation of an Engineer" would help a person think twice before delivering a shitty project that may harm people. But I have met few engineers that take their obligation seriously. I think accountability is low as engineers are a self-governed. And angry clients file law suits. End of management thought stream.

This happens, I think, because Accountants run the company. Accountants that don't take that oath, and subsequently don't give a damn about the quality of work. They freely make decisions that force engineers to break their own oaths. And the cycle of doom continues. In a court-case, the engineer sits in for questioning - not the accountant general manager that refused to put enough resources on the job.

Some of the biggest engineering failures in history have happened because of honest human failure. Instances when engineers simply did not know any better. But I'm more comfortable with innocent human failure that was an honest mistake - and not the failures that happen due to dishonesty and malpractice. That is simply unconscionable, unforgivable, unprincipled, immoral.

And that is why I left engineering.