Engineer’s Disease

There’s a term colloquially used in engineering (and connected) circles, “Engineer’s Disease” (sometimes “Engineer’s Syndrome”), that refers to the tendency of people with an engineering mindset (thinking about things from a technical angle and often in terms of systems) to believe that because they’re really, really good at engineering-related tasks, they are also good at (and understand) everything else.

This isn’t a formal term, and its use and application varies. But the core premise is that because engineers (people who build software or design hardware, for instance) do what’s commonly considered to be difficult work that most people cannot do, and because they are often skilled in fields (like math) that are considered to be “smart people fields,” they must also be good at other things, because that’s how smarts work.

This concept has been used to lampoon physicists and mathematicians, too, as these are all fields that deal with big, thinky topics, and because these topics inform so many other fields (and by some measures also underpin them). So why wouldn’t these people who are so good at working within these difficult, meta-scale areas also be good at thinking about other, subsidiary-level concerns?