Just as there is "science envy" in parts of liberal arts/humanities leading to pseudo-scientific superstructures on their subjects, there is a sort of "engineering envy" that leads adjacent fields to create engineering-like agency fictions on their fields.
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Invariably, when I've picked battles (either in my past career, or now as a consultant), the adversary is a pseudo-engineering management "process" or a pseudo-scientific marketing or strategy approach.
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By contrast, when I like something native to management, it's because it doesn't pretend to be engineering and owns the softer, subtler, poetic aspects which are hard to cast into an engineering. I'll take a poetry spouting marketer over a lean-six-sigma ideologue any day
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While I have sympathy for a lot of engineering-adjacent types who are often mistreated or undervalued in engineering culture, the fact that they have to resort to rights advocacy rather than just fait-accompli doing what they want tells you where the agency lies.
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By contrast, asshole linchpin engineers can be so irreplaceable that they can be effectively dictatorial in their decisions and others have to adapt to them (good managers know how to tame them). A sign of how critical you are is how much you can get away with being an asshole.
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Which is not to say you should... When you look at indispensable-assholery in the non-engineering professions, invariably you'll find that they're the ones who ignore the pseudo-engineering stuff, have no engineering envy, and just get things done their own inimitable way.
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