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Engineers Quotes

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Engineers Quotes

“He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.”

LanguageLogicEngineersExpertiseDevelopersCode Jockeys
Book:Sorry Please Thank You
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“It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more "product thinking" in leadership--leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed. Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status--Steve Jobs--recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.”

LeadershipHuman BeingsTechnologyHumanismLeadersEngineersComputersLiberal ArtsAppleSteve JobsProduct Thinking
Author:Damon Horowitz
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“Lilah did little more than sleep and eat and cry, which to me was the most fascinating thing in the entire universe. Why did she cry? When did she sleep? What made her eat a lot one day and little the next? Was she changing with time? I did what any obsessed person would do in such a case: I recorded data, plotted it, calculated statistical correlations. First I just wrote on scraps of paper and made charts on graph paper, but I very quickly became more sophisticated. I wrote computer software to make a beautifully colored plot showing times when Diane fed Lilah, in black; when I fed her, in blue (expressed mother's milk, if you must know); Lilah's fussy times, in angry red; her happy times, in green. I calculated patterns in sleeping times, eating times, length of sleep, amounts eaten. Then, I did what any obsessed person would do these days; I put it all on the Web.”

InternetParentingDataStatisticsEngineersBabiesComputer Science
Book:How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
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“After 'cat', Lilah next learned 'flower'. Flowers (scrunch up nose as if sniffing) were everywhere, first only outside on plants, but soon she generalized to flowers on her clothes or her shoes, or in pictures in books and magazines. I wanted to hook up wires and do experiments and comparisons and studies to understand it all. 'You want to do what?' Diane would say. But really, who wouldn't?”

ScienceParentingExperimentsEngineersBabies
Book:How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
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“What separates us into engineers and robots, puppeteers and puppets, kings and pawns, is not the status we hold at any given time among others - status is irrelevant; it is the level of ever-present awareness we have of a grey-matter tailor's tools [of flattery, persuasion, and cunning.]”

PeopleInfluenceAwarenessPerspectiveKingsSelf AwarenessSeparationQueensCharmManipulationEngineersPersuasionRobotsFlatteryCunningPuppetsOthersPawnsStatusMass InfluencePuppeteersGrey Matter Tailor
Book:Rise of the Morningstar
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“This is an awesome(probably not very famous) one liner in hindi on engineers. I could not stop myself: Aamir Sarfraz (aamir rajput khan) "Chaar saal lagte hai insaan ko engineer banne mein phir chahe wo puri zindgi laga rahe dubara insaan nahi ban sakta" Translation in English: "It takes four years for a uman to become engineer after that even if he tries for whole life he can't become human again”

InspirationalEngineersFunny QuotesThoughts Of The MindAmazing QuotesWorlds Without End
Author:Aamir Sarfraz (aamir rajput khan)
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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.”

EngineersAtomic Bomb
Book:Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon
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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”

Engineers
Book:Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
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“The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part; But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart. And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest, Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest. It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock. It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock. It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain, Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.”

ReligionHumbleEngineersService Of OthersMartha
Book:The Years Between
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“Because of the tendency of engineers to focus more on engineering matters rather than on archaeology, history, or anthropology, they are often accused of stripping artifacts of their cultural context and cherrypicking the evidence. Yet as an engineer, I strongly argue that the engineering context is, in fact, a cultural context in and of itself--one that is less susceptible to ambiguity than the cultural context of mummies and potsherds, which can be added decades or even centuries after a building has been completed.”

CultureHistoryEvidenceEngineeringEngineersAmbiguityArchaeologyArtifactsMummies
Book:Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs
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“Meanwhile, the original programmers will have left, and their replacements -- believing they understand the code -- will make some truly spectacular errors, mistakes that will suddenly make everything completely stop working for a while. So that what had seemed to be a descending curve of bugs, a fall toward the ever-receding zero, will reveal itself as the shape of another equation altogether: a line of relentlessly rising, bug-counts climbing in an endless battle against infinity.”

EngineersBugsComputers
Book:The Bug
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“They were mostly in their 20s and 30s, and, with a few exceptions, were playing a major role in a program for the first or second time. In many ways they resembled the teams that made up the Apollo Project: young engineers, often right out of school, with seemingly limitless confidence and energy. NASA people who worked on Apollo and stayed with the agency for twenty years or more hold the fondest memories for that frantic period and time of their life. In interviews for this book, there often was a similar sense of nostalgia and accomplishment among the F-8 DFBW alumni. However, if for many of those immersed in Apollo the rest of their careers seemed anti-climatic, this is not true of the F-8 engineers. They went on to several more projects before many of them landed on the administrative floor of Center Building 4800, each with challenges comparable to those of the fly-by-wire program.”

EngineersApollo
Book:Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience
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“Engaging specialists in interpreting ancient artifacts in Egypt is absolutely necessary in establishing a credible hypothesis. Without their input, there cannot be a comprehensive understanding of the past. For instance, the pyramids on the Giza Plateau were built not by Egyptologists or archaeologists but by engineers and craftsmen. It is not surprising, therefore, that Egyptologists overlook engineering features and nuances that would be recognized immediately by those who are trained in those disciplines.”

EngineersHypothesisPyramidsSpecialistsArchaeologyEgyptologyAncient ArtifactsCraftsmen
Book:Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs
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“Florida is full of long-range, unending road jobs that break the backs, pocketbooks, and hearts of the roadside business. The primitive, inefficient, childlike Mexicans somehow manage to survey, engineer, and complete eighty miles of high-speed divided highway through raw mountains and across raging torrents in six months. But the big highway contractors in Florida take a year and a half turning fifteen miles of two-lane road across absolutely flat country into four-lane divided highway. The difference is in American know-how. It's know-how in the tax problems, and how to solve them. The State Road Department says a half-year contract will cost the State ten million, and a one-year contract will cost nine, and a year-and-a-half deadline will go for eight. Then Doakes can take on three or four big jobs simultaneously, and lease the equipment from a captive corporation. and listlessly move the equipment from job to job, and spread it out to gain the biggest profit. The only signs of frantic activity can be two or three men with cement brooms who look at first like scarecrows but, when watched carefully, can be perceived to move, much like the minute hand on a clock.”

PoliticsTaxesEngineersHighwaysRoads
Book:Pale Gray for Guilt
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“The mobile industry quickly developed, and lawyers, investment bankers, consultants and contractors offered their services. The feeling of ownership of the projects and the effort of getting networks up and running within the shortest possible time span was gigantic. Engineers slept in their cars to make sure that they could start early mornings, ‘war rooms’ were kitted out with huge maps, project timelines, pictures and milestone markers. Contests ongoing between different teams in the specific country regions where we were building. Employing a thousand people in no time and generating work for tenfold that number; network and other suppliers, construction companies, distributors, retailers and other often highly skilled third parties.”

InspirationalAdventureEngineersMobileMobile PhonesTelecommunications
Book:Your phone, my life: Or, how did that phone land in your hand?
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“In Silicon Valley, most engineers work on projects that will never be completed- this holds true at large companies as well as small. If engineers are lucky enough to witness the rare day when the product is completed and launched, they will, in the overwhelming majority of cases, witness the product's failure in the marketplace.”

Engineers
Book:Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know
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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.”

ProgrammingEngineeringEngineersProgrammers
Author:Philip Greenspun
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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.”

ManagersEngineersHuman ResourcesSalespeople
Book:Machine Man
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“I've found that all it usually takes to draw out an engineer is to ask a couple of technical questions and then remain calm while listening to the answers. Most people tend to take on a blank, frightened look as soon as they realize that a technical explanation is under way; if you can resist giving this reaction and simply listen, your engineer will open up and tell you everything you ever wanted to know.”

EngineersHumorous Quotes
Book:Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight
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“The complete Apollo team...directly involves slightly over 400,000 people...Included are some if the country's foremost scientists and engineers. This mobilization of men and resources is unprecedented in history since WWII”

ScienceHistoryMemoirEngineersNasa
Book:The Step: One Woman's Journey to Finding Her Own Happiness and Success During the Apollo Space Program
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