I think the results of that poll are very telling of the modern attitude to engineers. Specifically, the attitude of management and marketing people. I make the dangerous assumption that, given the context, we are mainly talking about electronic design engineers rather than all engineers in general.
1. Problem solver. Yes-ish!. Inquisitive. Yes. Has a need to continually question the unknown. Hell yes.
All the great engineers I have known are innately inquisitive, and have been since before they were able to talk. Taking stuff apart, asking "what's that?" and "how does it work?", "how can I get it back together before mum finds out" and the incessant "yes, but why?".
Okay, the "yes-ish'' to problem solving has to be qualified. I believe problem solving is largely a learned skill, a big part of which isn't taught at university or college! It goes along with that innate inquisitiveness. For many, our problem solving experience in life has been in the form of "why isn't it working",which came long before "how does it work?". In a commercial environment there is a huge amount of problem solving but, at it's core, engineering is about creating, not fixing. Much of the problem solving is, at least in theory, in the management domain (What is the right product? Am I using resources effectively?), or the province of technicians (dry joints, overheating or failed components). Arguably, a great engineer will have no problems because everything will be perfect first time!
Good engineers question the unknown, but great engineers question the known too. It is no coincidence that many engineers are cynics and will often think "I could do better than that".
2. Ability to work with a design team, including global members, a team player, yet independent thinker/worker.
I think this is a managementspeak way of saying not autistic (do engineers say "team player?" I bet the great ones don't). Not sure what global teams have to do with it, other than being something you put on your CV to sound good to a potential employer. The best engineering teams I have known are all very tight knit (not necessarily physically close!) knowing each others strengths and weaknesses. The strongest engineers within those teams often don't have a good grasp of the entire field. Incidentally I have known a fantastic engineer with autism. Not easy to work with, but with the right guidance, his eye for infinite detail was massively valuable. Not a "team player" but nevertheless a really good engineer.
Independent thinker can be a euphemism for "has stupid ideas but gets lucky now and then so we let him have his way". Quite often this is something management will not tolerate, and is at odds with recognising the need for a viable product! Remember, the word Engineer has the same root as ingenious. That strange ability to put 2 potentially disparate concepts together and come up with something new. A good engineer has to be able to constrain this independent thought to know whether that idea is workable. Otherwise the person is simply called an artist.
3.Strong communication and listening skills.
Listening; hell yes. Listening between the figurative lines. Listening to what the person is thinking, not what they are saying. However, communicating is not essential for a good engineer. Many good engineers are deeply techy and have trouble holding a pen at the right end never mind using it. Diagrams on the backs of envelopes, words and equations scribbled on the back of a data sheet. This does not make them a bad engineer! Some of us have a little more in the way of authorship and presentation, but even my time is far more productive spent in the lab. if you want a 100% professional business, don't do half a job. Use a technical author, a sales engineer or an artist. That may be taking things to the extremes, but even small businesses should use a different person to create documentation and marketing material.
4. Recognizes the constant need to create viable products, within budget, that are also marketable
Again, this is a job spec written by management and recruiting people. Great engineers make stuff. Just stuff. Brunel did not make a viable product within budget. R.J. Mitchell didn't worry about focus groups and marketing. He simply had a passion to make the best he could and keep making it better than the other people. To many of us, we don't care what we make, we are just told what we should be doing by marketing people who want a "something to do this, this and this, and at this price". We may like it, we may not. It rarely has any bearing upon the sales viability of a product. Indeed making non-viable stuff is essential! Many huge products are made of brilliant ideas that came from products that were originally commercially poor at best. For example: the ARM.
5. Expertise in modeling, simulation and other advanced design tools
No. Absolute poppycock. These are simply tools, and tools which come a long way down the line. Hammer, screwdriver, soldering iron, oscilloscope, CAD. All tools. To be honest, someone who a does CAD entry and simulation is mainly a technician. Way before the CAD stage, and even before the pencil-and-paper stage, an engineer will have an innate sense of what is feasible and what isn't. All the abstract modelling is being done in the brain. A great engineer will know that the best filter for so-and-so is a 5 pole elliptical, not a 7 pole Chebychev, he doesn't need to take hours to model it. This is not to say an engineer should not know his tools, he certainly should. He just does not have to be the ultimate guru. Great engineers were around well before computer simulations.
When I was at uni, many excellent students got Firsts. They were great at the numbers, but even at MSc level, around half of them didn't know what an Amp or a Volt "felt" like, let alone what a 0.1uF ceramic cap should cost. They could design things on CAD, and only find out at the prototype stage that it was never going to work due to the lack of 0.0713 Ohm 5000 watt surface mount resistors (or whatever).
Okay, plenty of disagreement there (I guess it is inevitable), but what do I think makes a great engineer? In one word, attitude. If you want to know if someone is a good or a great engineer, don't ask people who use formal metrics and test scores, just ask another engineer. They will tell you whether the other person is a real engineer within 30 seconds, and a great one in 5 minutes. Engineering is a soft kinda squishy human skill, not an automatable process capable of being run on a Turing machine, so use soft squishy humans to find it.
More formally, beyond a good standard of communication and that rare commodity, common sense, I believe that there are 4 essential parts. In increasing order of importance;
1.A good technical background, with a scientific way of thinking. This can be taught.
2. A huge mental store of products, components and processes. This can only really be done by examining a wide range of products to see what other people have done, how they have done it, and why it is done that way. As a kid, I used to love reading my dads service manuals and the Farnell / RS catalogues from end to end. This is not so easy now they are 5 million pages thick and only available in print to big customers! Read enough data sheets and service manuals and you will get a feel of what is right and wrong for a particular situation.
3. An expert in the art of compromise: On Time. On Budget. On Spec. Pick 2. Leave an engineer to his own devices, he will create you the coolest, best performing, sexiest Gizmo the world has ever seen. But your budget will have gone, and it will have taken 15 years. We do try to build the perfect beast I'm afraid.
4. Call it experience, ingeniuity or knowlege. Call it the X-factor. Call it what you will. I believe that good engineers are made, but great engineers are born that way.
I think the survey respondents fell into the trap of reading the question as "what makes the ultimate all-round commercial engineer", when there can be no such thing. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to know everything about power, analogue, digital, RF, software, case design, legislation, failure modes... and if they did, the engineer would demand an immense salary and be unemployable!
I suspect a great engineer is also someone who can express complex ideas concisely. That's me out then...
Mike
