Have you ever wondered why in this era of automation and mechanisation, engineers still get to retain their jobs? Many job profiles have come and gone away. But even with so many advances in technologies across industries and the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning, why haven’t engineers been replaced yet?
The answer is quite simple, really. But before that, let us talk theatre! I am sure you have had the pleasure of watching a nice play or two so far in your life. Don’t say you haven’t, because OMG then you have definitely missed a thing! Moving on, by any teeny tiny chance, have you ever had the good fortune of watching two performances of the same amazing play twice? Yes? Then what was the one thing that struck you? I’ll tell you what struck me the most. I once saw two back to back performances of a play within a span of hours. The day, the cast and the venue was the same. The only variable was the audience. What struck me most, was that both the performances or if I may call them renditions, felt so different! The scenes were same, characters were the same, dialogues didn’t change at all, still, I experienced the difference. If you allow me some liberty to get a little philosophical, I would say, such is life! Right? If somebody asks me to describe life, I’d say life is not like a movie, new and different is every single day, just like every different performance of a play!
Bringing order to chaos!
Looping back to the current topic of deliberation, every engineering project is essentially a fresh endeavour. No matter how many similar projects you may have done in the past, the next project will always throw something unexpected at you. If you are into construction, no matter how many buildings you build, how many bridges you construct, the next project will still be a challenge! Because something or the other will change, maybe the soil conditions, maybe the water table, maybe the wind conditions, maybe availability of material; something will change that will catch you off-guard. If you are a software engineer and are tasked to develop an e-commerce application, no matter how many e-commerce apps you’ve successfully developed in the past, this one is going to be different! The products being sold may be different, the user profiles of customers may be different, the tech-stack or the deployment environment may vary.
Life is chaotic and dynamic. With knowledge, training and experience, engineers are the ones, who can bring some order to this chaos. No matter how much progress we achieve in life, the chaos will remain and we will keep needing the skilled folk who’ll manage it, with methods, systems and innovations. We’ll keep needing engineering minds!
Knowing which problems to solve first
Every big endeavour begins with one or more problems that need to be solved. When the daring Sheikh from UAE challenged his team to build the greatest hotel ever built, the first problem they had to solve was creating an artificial island that would withstand the tremendous pressure from the sea waves and at the same time serve as the foundation of a 300 meter tall structure. Then there was also this not so little problem about the wind. The shape of this structure was that of a sail; just imagine the amount of wind a 300 meter tall sail would have to withstand! Needless to say, with such a humungous ask at hand, the team had to start somewhere. The engineers began their work. First they figured out how to build the island that met the brief. They created a rock-bed and then topped it up with a mesh of perforated concrete blocks. This artificial sponge prevented flooding and absorbed the pressure of waves. Then they addressed the problem of the structure stability. This hotel in Dubai, called Burj al Arab, is usually known for its opulence and luxury, but in actuality, is an engineering feat!
Another lesser known example comes from India, where the Government wished to build a 750 Km long railway line covering the Western coast of India. The problem was that the entire coastal strip was a mountainous region with lots or rivers, ravines and valleys sprinkled in between. If this wasn’t enough, the region was also prone to landslides, especially during the monsoon season. Moreover, the track had to be near flat and a minimum radial curvature of 1.25 Km had to be maintained to enable faster train speeds. After commissioning, the engineers began their work and completed it in record time! They ended up creating one of the most scenic train routes in the world comprising of 2000 plus bridges and 91 tunnels! It included the longest railway tunnel in Asia.
Examples are aplenty. Truth be told, in reality, very few problems get “absolutely” solved. You don’t always need an absolute solution, you need a realistic or a workable solution to get the job done. Engineers are the ones who have an eye for the right approximations and the know-how to achieve the required trade-offs!
Seeing things differently
A problem, which is complex from one perspective, suddenly appears to be simple from another perspective, and then the world is disrupted. In the early days of the Internet, ranking the results of search engines was a complex problem, which nobody really had the solution to. Two engineers from Stanford University, simply saw this problem from a different perspective and then an elegant solution unraveled, known as PageRank. They figured that simply the number of backlinks to a webpage was a good enough approximation of its popularity. This became the basis of the Google search algorithm and we all know, the world has never been the same since.
The thing
The ability to bring predictability in chaos, the skill of conjuring up practical solutions to seemingly impossible challenges and the knack of seeing things differently, have made engineers invaluable since time immemorial. The contribution of the engineering profession to humankind is unparalleled and yes that is exactly what differentiates engineers from the rest! Do you agree?