Engineering: Science, Economics, Communication

For a long time I thought of engineering as the intersection of science and economics. To me, it was that special place where that which is possible through the laws of nature meets that which is economically feasible through the laws of market forces and scarcity, like this:

But I’ve lately come to appreciate that modern engineering has a third component: communication. The world’s most impactful engineering efforts include the combined work of many people. If you are a brilliant engineer, but you are unable to communicate well with others, your impact will be severely limited.

The value of effective communication with other human beings is crucial to engineering in several ways:

Marketing

Some engineers think of marketing as a web of lies aimed at selling products, that marketers will say or do anything to get you to buy their wares. But I like to think of marketing as the means by which ideas spread. Without effective marketing, even the best engineering ideas are dead. I heard a great example from Christopher Allen on Episode 198 of the Changelog podcast, who said (paraphrased) that a library’s landing page is a social cue that tells you how much effort the creator has put into the library. Likewise, Eric Shoffstall, creator of Gulp, said on episode 205 of JavaScript Jabber that an open source project’s logo is quite possibly the most valuable investment an engineer can make to ensure the project gets off the ground. I agree with both of them.

Teamwork

Engineering has gotten more sophisticated as technologies have become more advanced and ubiquitous. Gone are the days of the one person dev shop. Literally none of my peers work alone. Today, most successful engineering efforts require expertise in lots of areas: web, mobile, infrastructure, security. Very few individuals have all the skills to do all these things expertly. Good engineering requires technical communication among teams of engineers. And technical communication is really hard. Evolution did not bake this capability into our language for us, so we have to develop it proactively. The best teams know how to communicate correctly and quickly, and they don’t lose time to miscommunication and re-communication.

Conclusion

As engineers, when we put the same level of rigor into effective communication skills as we do with the rest of our work, we can become better engineers. Indeed, in my opinion, this is absolutely required.