How does engineer think

Sign up to get the latest in industry thought leadership, trends and insights. Need an agency? Let's Talk Business. Work with us Join Our Team. We love cookies, but not just because they're tasty.

Our website uses cookies to give you the best experience possible. By continuing to explore Godfrey. Learn more about them on our privacy policy page. Related Posts. Even if there are no constraints, good engineers know how to apply constraints to help achieve their goals. Time constraints on engineers fuel creativity and resourcefulness. Financial constraints and the blatant physical constraints hinging on the laws of nature are also common, coupled with an unpredictable constraint—namely, human behavior.

Engineers often augment their software products, incrementally addressing customer preferences and business necessities— which are nothing but constraints. You have to find a way to keep the old thing going while creating something new. Engineers make design priorities and allocate resources by ferreting out the weak goals among stronger ones.

For an airplane design, a typical trade-off could be to balance the demands of cost, weight, wingspan, and lavatory dimensions within the constraints of the given performance specifications. Applied Minds: How Engineers Think will help you borrow strategies from engineering and apply them to your most pressing problems. Read Next. The greatest engineers solve problems that no one else even notices yet…. He is very passionate about cars and bikes.

Visit www. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Reverse-Engineering You will also find that the engineer has an innate desire to tinker and to take things apart. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.

Normal thinking: you always think about how life dealt you a bad hand of cards. Thinking like an engineer: you think about your lack of financial awareness. So, you analyze your spending habits and research how to be financially savvy. Next, you stop purchasing useless things and begin budgeting and saving.

Engineers realize their work can cause millions of dollars in damages and hurt people. So, engineers work with a healthy level of paranoia. This includes always double and then triple-checking their work. Even more, asking others for feedback on their work. Because the more filters they use to catch mistakes, the better they can sleep at night. And you realize the following driving variables are out of your control:. So you view your safety as a function of these variables.

Every sound, visual, and observational point is a data point to engineers. Because engineers know the more inputs they gather, the better decisions they can make. For example, with underground high voltage cable design, a bad design can be costly. So, the following data points an engineer needs to have at a minimum:. In engineering, you need to make certain assumptions. But, the more factual data you have, the better you can design.

Problem: you buy an expensive appliance because of how great it looked in an ad. Normal thinking: you become angry because the company duped you. The ad said the product could do X perfectly, and now you see it cannot. Even more, you never thought an ad appearing on a popular TV channel would deceive you. Thinking like an engineer: you collect as much data on the appliance as you can before you buy it.

Your data collection includes the following:.