Engineers: Will Never Be Thanked Nor Pardoned

My maternal uncle is Civil Engineer and he works for Indian Railways, whenever I meet his friends they tell me as an Engineer they always fantasize being like him because he is almost perfectionist in his job. So far as I know him, when he was a college guy he wasn’t a high marks maniac but even his lecturers used to fear his mastery over whatever he did. Last month he told me why his work always remains and appears perfect. So if you are an Engineer I must say that my this work is for all of you, I am sharing one of those secrets why my uncle is best in whatever he does.

Before last month I went to meet him and saw him working on new railway line project map on his computer, there were lot of complaints from everyone in family that now a days he is spending lot of time on computer for his new project. When I asked him he told me about his project and geographic conditions where he wants to apply that project and surely I don’t doubt laying railway lines in such conditions might be very difficult. Last month I again visited him and saw him working on same project map again and I asked, “I thought you completed that project map last month.”. He replied,  "Yes. I had completed it but now I am trying to reduce cost of project by making some changes and changes must not damage the quality of project." I asked why is he trying to reduce cost of project and he told me that the sanctioned money had been curtailed. I started arguing with him why he haven’t complained about it, then this is #-Link-Snipped-#what he told me. As an Engineer you are the one who have to complete his job in given time, with given amount of money and with given resources, no excuses are entertained. A real job of engineer is to create or develop something better, powerful, cheap and of course there should be no lack of quality. And you should always keep in mind an Engineer is never thanked for his work when he builds something awesome, some politician, organization, government or institute takes the credit and when even though mistake is not his and finger gets pointed at him, he never get pardoned.

After our discussion I thought what he explained to me is cent percent correct. Don’t you think so? Let me explain you with some powerful examples. Have you ever read article like this in newspaper “MSEB Engineers Trashed By Mobs For Load Shedding”, with little change in title this it is weekly news in every newspaper? So are those Engineers are responsible for load shedding? Of course not! Electricity is a resource and it have some limitations, Indian people spend lot of electricity during festive seasons. A research shows electricity spent during those ten days of Diwali, Ganesh Festival and Navratra equals to electricity that can be supplied for next 60 day. In fact if we calculate aspect ratio we must compensate with 4 hour electricity to it every day but since we can’t close down commercial cities, load shedding problem is faced by small city people as well as villagers and thus we face 6-12 hour load shedding everyday. So is it their fault that you spend electricity mercilessly on unnecessary lightened decorations and high end music players for puja-pat. They do their job with full dedication and they don’t deserve this kind of treatment.

Steam Engines cars were once dominant in vehicle markets since those cars use to run on hot distilled water, a bad engineering publicity lead to complete disappear of those cars from market. Wanna know how? Steam cars were the cars with most light weight yet power engines, there were a days when only these cars used to run on road and races. Once while in race one of those cars met with a blast just like we see them in movies and it was termed as Engineering fault by media and was highly publicized after it. So far as I can think, a steam car hardly had any combustible thing to make it blow like that, I still think that must be some kinda conspiracy against steam cars. And now what we are left with result of bad publicity about Engine design of steam cars is their ultimate disappear from market.

If you think that doesn’t happen today then this is most recent example, a month or two ago facebook servers were not accessible for four hours due to some minor programming problem which took them some hours to fix and restart servers. We can’t even imagine how much criticism they got and compensation they have to pay. Facebook had to call media conference several time to say sorry and even had to pay compensation to advertisers and publishers. The next on list is Ubisoft’s anti-piracy DRM which got cracked within 24 hours from its release, you can’t even think of how Ubisoft is paying by considerable fall in its sales rate. The games from Ubisoft which were termed as most awaited game of year are now waiting on stacks for some gamer to purchase them. Gamers never bothered to even think since so many years Ubisoft supplied them with awesome games which they might never had dreamed of and this is pay-back, just for a single mistake.

If you are an Engineer step out, stand in middle of city, look everywhere, towards every person. You’ll find everything they like, everything they have, every technology they praise anyhow is just because of you but you’ll be never thanked for that but for your one mistake they will never pardon you. So if you are an Engineer take pride being a human being who is born to make no mistakes and no wrong decisions and contributing to world become 100% flawless. Love being an Engineer because when you opted to become an Engineer you actually opted to become a perfectionist.