[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

Over half of my undergraduate degree was spent in engineering. I feel confident in saying that it's not always about the long term, even with engineering

Well...we're supposed to think about the long term. There always going to be guys who fall down on the job.

Case in point, you bring up bridges. It's a testament to civil engineering that those bridges are still standing, but I don't think it necessarily shows long-term thinking. Long-term thinking involves maintenance of the bridges. Within the past 10 years we had a major bridge collapse, and if I remember correctly, part of the reason was that they were behind on their maintenance.

I don't think that's necessarily a failure of engineers. The engineers who designed and built the bridge are not at fault if a civil servant decides to cut back on the maintenance the original civil engineers recommended. I don't think you can blame that on any engineers.

This is an example of short-term and long-term thinking. Short-term thinking states that the bridge is currently standing and working, so the maintenance can be put off and money that would have been put toward it can be used for something else. Long-term thinking states that a bridge failure would be catastrophic and would inconvenience many other areas of society, thus it's better (and potentially cheaper) to do the maintenance on schedule, and not to cheap out on it.

If you called in an engineer, and he was properly doing his job according to the codes of the profession, he would recommend the latter course of action. Engineers are very safety oriented. There's a lot of scary responsibility that goes with the profession.

If you take the former course, you're being criminally negligent(and can be put on trial for it). Taking the latter course was drilled into me on numerous occasions by my professors.

Another similar example can be seen with America's nuclear power plants. We had a bunch of plants that were built in the 1950's and/or 1960's. The exact dates aren't important; what's important to know is that those plants were licensed to operate for 40 years, after which they were expected to be shut down, having served out their useful life. The expectation was that other nuclear power plants would have been built, so taking the older ones offline wouldn't be a big issue. The problem is that building a nuclear power plant is very expensive, and we reached a certain point where our rate of building new plants slowed dramatically. I think we even stopped for a while.

Now the old plants have been re-certified once (or twice, in some cases) and have been running for much longer than they were designed for. That they're still running is a testament to their design (and perhaps a bit to luck), not to long-term thinking. Long-term thinking would dictate that we should have been building new plants to replace these aging plants, because our energy needs have grown and the plants are an absolute requirement. If a plant fails, society served by that plant will suffer losses to productivity and lifestyle. But the plants are working now and it's a lot of money to spend now to build a plant that will service tomorrow. And so we continue to gamble on our luck and the strength of the original designs.

Again, that's not really down to engineers. Engineers don't choose whether or not new Nuclear plants get built, elected officials and bureaucrats make that call, in consultation with the Engineers(and this is how it should be). The fact that the plants are functioning well past their stated life shows that the original design engineers didn't cut corners, but it equally shows that the legislators who came after did.

If we look at things on an individual level, most engineers do their work and don't cut corners. Of course there are always bad engineers out there, and when they do cut corners everyone hears about it. But when Engineers do their job as they're supposed to, they're basically invisible.

Engineers are probably the least visible(and in my opinion most important, but I am biased ) major profession out there. At least doctors get glamorous dramas made about their lives. What do we get?

One of these days someone needs to write a sitcom set on an oil rig, or something.