Beyond the Glitz
A New Yorker cartoon, years back, showed a hometown crowd celebrating a worker for his artistry in assembling a small part of a medieval cathedral. I giggled big time but no one in my family nor most of my friends understood. They tend to see great buildings and monuments as analogs for the designer, the Pharaoh of the moment, or maybe the money bags behind it.
I see the little guys, chiseling sandstone, lying on their backs molding plaster curves, or passing rivets between stories of girders—let along the guys who figured out how to harness steam to shovels or water lines to levels.
I had to admire Steve Jobs for his style, passion and come from nowhere (and come from behind) pluck, but I’m also enthralled by the designers of Smalltalk and the sound tech puzzling out a standing bass wave in a church.
One of the first things I saw, even as a student was that geeks got no respect. This was as true in my working class high school as anywhere else. I was told that there was a cheer at Caltech, given when the other team scored that went “That’s all right. That’s okay; you’re going to work for us someday!” You have to admire when bunches of really smart people elect to stay naïve as long as they can.
I was pretty arty by the time I first worked at Tektronix, having substantial failures as a playwright and director to point to. But the job brought me right back to geek world and their rather specialized problems. I recognized geniuses around me, but ones whom had not enjoyed the social cache I’d gotten as a campus writer and poet after I’d left Physics. Some introspective types had trouble being understood by their bench mates.
So as a training designer I served as an explainer and translator, not only to my direct customer students, but to other engineers. This was in the days after tech companies had quickly grown too big for that “small startup pulling together” information flow and had not yet started team work training for people whom had never been chosen to be on a team (except last).
Like poets, artists and physicists, good engineers may in their passion, totally miss social clues. But unlike their intellectual brethren, they have lousy person PR. Yes, there are many exceptions, but there are still more who aren’t.
We need more engineers. We need more technicians. (For that matter, we need more skilled plumbers, carpenters, electricians, arborists, and welders—but that’s a related rant.) We’re not going to get them into the math and science classes when we also treat the students as pariahs.
What we need are trade skill classes in the arts academies, and arts training in the tech schools. We need to stop judging people by their jobs or defining ourselves by our paycheck. We need hopeful cyberpunk novels (ooops, that’s another related rant). Have you hugged a hardware engineer today?
Come on people, if we try, we can change this!
Right. Sure. I’m booking a seat on the next Flying Pig too.