77 Quotes About Engineers
- Author Philip Greenspun
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Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have- how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering.
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- Author Max Barry
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He strode briskly away, to do whatever it was the managers did. Have meetings, I guess. Make phone calls. It was hard for us on the technical side to understand why the company required so many managers. Engineers built things. Salespeople sold things. Even Human Resources I could understand, kind of. But managers proliferated despite performing very few identifiable functions.
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- Author Craig Nelson
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Trinity’s witnesses responded just as those to Apollo 11 would, as J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent." Oppenheimer later said the he beheld his radiant blooming cloud and thought of Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Aloud, however, the physicist made the ultimate engineer comment: "It worked.
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- Author Ellen Ullman
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This is what makes them good engineers. Perfectionism: incinerating perfectionism.
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- Author K.J. Parker
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My belief is, either you understand things or you understand people. Nobody can do both. Frankly, I’m happier with things. I understand stuff like tensile strength, shearing force, ductility, work hardening, stress, fatigue. I know the same sort of things happen with people, but the rules are subtly different. And nobody’s ever paid for my time to get to know about people
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- Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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People with an engineering-oriented mind will tend to look at everything around as an engineering problem. This is a very good thing in engineering, but when dealing with cats, it is a much better idea to hire veterinarians than circuit engineers…
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- Author James Rollins
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...when it came to explosives and radios, bad things sometimes happened to good engineers.
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- Author James S.A. Corey
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Jim, they make these things not to be fiddled with. The civilian version of this device fuses itself into a solid lump of silicon if it thinks it's being tampered with. Who knows what the military version of the fail-safe is? Drop the magnetic bottle in the reactor? Turn us into a supernova?
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- Author Austin Grossman
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Lisa had an engineer's way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking.
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