A Professional Guide

For

Young Engineers

BY WILLIAM E. WICKENDEN

As Edited and Collated by

G. Ross HENNINGER

Re-edited Feb. 1967

Copyright 1949 by

ENGINEERS‟ COUNCIL FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

United Engineering Center

This book was scanned and proofed by

medwatt

for educational purposes only

Engineers’ Council for Professional Development

FAITH OF THE ENGINEER

I AM AN ENGINEER. In my profession I take deep pride, but without vainglory; to it I owe

solemn obligations that I am eager to fulfill.

As an Engineer, I will participate in none but honest enterprise. To him that has

engaged my services, as employer or client, I will give the utmost of performance and fidelity.

When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given without reservation for the public

good. From special capacity springs the obligation to use it well in the service of humanity;

and I accept the challenge that this implies.

Jealous of the high repute of my calling, I will strive to protect the interests and the

good name of any engineer that I know to be deserving; but I will not shrink, should duty

dictate, from disclosing the truth regarding anyone that, by unscrupulous act, has shown

himself unworthy of the profession.

Since the Age of Stone, human progress has been conditioned by the genius of my

professional forbears. By them have been rendered usable to mankind Nature’s vast

resources of material and energy. By them have been vitalized and turned to practical

account the principles of science and the revelations of technology. Except for this heritage of

accumulated experience, my efforts would be feeble. I dedicate myself to the dissemination of

engineering knowledge, and especially to the instruction of younger members of my

profession in all its arts and traditions.

To my fellows I pledge, in the same full measure I ask of them, integrity and fair

dealing, tolerance and respect, and devotion to the standards and the dignity of our

profession; with the consciousness, always, that our special expertness carries with it the

obligation to serve humanity with complete sincerity.

Prepared by the Ethics Committee

FOREWORD

THIS BOOKLET has been written for and is dedicated to the young engineer. Its purpose is

to give to young people seriously entering upon an engineering career an authentic

introduction to, and insight into, the professional career of their choice. The advice and

suggestions which it presents are drawn directly from the engineering profession‟s reservoir

of accumulated experience, and are offered here in the hope of shedding light upon some of

the vital personal questions which will be encountered, and of aiding thereby in the

decisions which only the individual can make for himself.

The planning of a career is of the utmost importance to each individual. It should start

at least in high school and continuously be reviewed as collegiate work progresses. As

collegiate work comes to a close and the threshold of a professional career is reached, a

thorough re-evaluation and re-crystallization of plans for that career will be of especial

value to the individual. In fact, career planning should be a continuing and growing activity

throughout life. It is a hopeful objective of this booklet that it will help to reveal and

identify some of the essential guide posts to a successful career.

The Engineers‟ Council for Professional Development—being concerned alike with the

upbuilding of professional qualities among engineers; with the development of a clearer

understanding of the engineer‟s status in industry, private practice, and public affaire; and

with a wider appreciation by society at large of the engineer‟s attributes and

responsibilities—has sponsored the writing and publication of this volume in the hope that

the accomplishment of its purpose may be helpful to many thousands of young men and

women.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WILLIAM ELGIN WICKENDEN, engineer, educator, philosopher, administrator, and

humanitarian, was engaged in the preparation of the manuscript for this booklet at the

time of his sudden death from a heart attack September 1, 1947. This occurred just one day

after his retirement from an 18-year period as president of Case Institute of Technology,

and brought to a close a 43-year career of widely diversified activity.

Dr. Wickenden was born in Toledo, Ohio, in December, 1882, and graduated with

honors from Denison University in 1904. He worked as a printer‟s devil to pay his expenses

through the university.

After a year of junior engineering work, Dr. Wickenden embarked upon his major

career activity of collegiate education by joining the faculty of the University of Wisconsin.

After five years there, he was nine years on the electrical engineering faculty of the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leaving in 1918 to go into industry. Returning to the

educational field in 1923, Dr. Wickenden became affiliated with the American Society for

Engineering Education as Director of its Investigation of Engineering Education,

responsible for a nation-wide survey the results of which have had a marked and beneficial

effect upon the development of engineering education. In 1929, Dr. Wickenden became

president of Case Institute of Technology, which position he held until he became president

emeritus on August 31, 1947. Indicative of the wide recognition given his work, Dr.

Wickenden was the recipient of many honorary degrees. These included not only technical

degrees such as Doctor of Engineering and Doctor of Science, but also such degrees as

Doctor of Laws and Doctor of Humane Letters, reflecting the diversity of his interests and

activities.

Dr. Wickenden also had gained first-hand experience in industry. From 1918 until

1922 he was personnel manager for the Western Electric Company, New York, N. Y., and

during 1922 and 1923 he was assistant vice-president of the American Telephone &

Telegraph Company, New York, N. Y. Continuing his interest in industrial activity after

returning to the educational field, Dr. Wickenden served as a director of such enterprises as

an electrical manufacturing company and a savings and loan company.

Widely known for his civic activities, Dr. Wickenden at various times had been a

director of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, chairman of the Ohio Planning Board and

of the Ohio Labor Board, director of the Cleveland Community Fund, a member of the

board of trustees of Case Institute and also of Lake Eric College and other such activities.

Representative of his professional activities, Dr. Wickenden had served as vice-

president and president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, chairman of the

American Council on Education, president of the Ohio College Association, president of the

American Society for Engineering Education, and vice-president of the American

Association for the Advancement of Science. Also, he was a member of the American Society

of Mechanical Engineers, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the

Cleveland Engineering Society. In 1935, he was awarded the Lamme medal of the

American Society for Engineering Education. At the time of his death, Dr. Wickenden also

had been appointed by the Engineers Joint Council as its representative on the United

States Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural

Organization.

An Appreciation

To reflect the esteem in which his associates held Dr. Wickenden, the following is

quoted from a resolution adopted by the ECPD Executive Committee at its meeting

September 15, 1947, and appearing in the minutes of that meeting:

“In the untimely death of William Elgin Wickenden, the engineering profession has

lost one of its most valued members. Always constructively minded, Dr. Wickenden brought

to bear upon his many and varied activities the highest type of intelligence and a trained

and disciplined mind. Throughout his distinguished career he devoted his great ability

chiefly to younger members of the profession. To this end, he made contributions of the

highest order of importance in advancing professional standards and ideals. In his own

character, he exemplified the aims he sought to accomplish in the personal development of

others. His work in the Investigation of Engineering Education exerted an important

influence on the inception and formulation of aims and purposes of the Engineers Council

for Professional Development of which he was a member from 1933 to 1938. His publication

„The Second Mile‟ was read by many thousands of young engineers, and has aided them to

form their conceptions of the applications and opportunities inherent in a professional

career. At the time of his death, he was engaged in the completion of a „Manual for Junior

Engineers,‟ which will, when published, aid thousands of others to guide their self-

development for fruitful careers. . . .”

The “Manual for Junior Engineers” referred to is this present booklet, “A Professional

Guide for Junior Engineers,” in which “The Second Mile” appears as Chapter IX.

Table of Contents

Chapter I ................................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter II ................................................................................................................................. 8

Chapter III ...............................................................................................................................18

Chapter IV ...............................................................................................................................26

Chapter V.................................................................................................................................36

Chapter VI ...............................................................................................................................42

Chapter VII ..............................................................................................................................50

Chapter VIII ............................................................................................................................62

Chapter IX ...............................................................................................................................76

1

Chapter I THE ENGINEER‟S HERITAGE

ENGINEERING was an art for long centuries before it became a science. Its origins go back

to utmost antiquity. The young engineer can say with truth and pride, “I am the heir of the

ages. Tubal Cain, whom Genesis places seven generations after Adam and describes as the

instructor of every artificer in brass and iron, is the legendary father of my technical skills.

The primitive smelters of iron and copper; the ancient workers in bronze and forgers of

steel; the discoverers of the lever, the wheel, and the screw; the daring builders who first

used the column, the arch, the beam, the dome, and the truss; the military pioneers who

contrived the battering ram and the catapult; the early Egyptians who channeled water to

irrigate the land; the Romans who built great roads, bridges, and aqueducts; the craftsmen

who reared the Gothic cathedrals; all these are my forebears. Nor are they all nameless.

There are: Hero of Alexandria; Archimedes of Syracuse; Roger Bacon, the monk of Oxford;

Leonardo da Vinci, a many-sided genius; Galileo, the father of mechanics; Volta, the

physician; the versatile Franklin. Also, there are the self-taught geniuses of the industrial

revolution: Newcomen, the ironmonger Smeaton and Watt, the instrument makers; Telford

the stone mason; and Stephenson, the mine fireman Faraday and Gramme; Perronet,

Baker, and Roebling; Siemens and Bessemer; Lenoir and Lavassor Otto and Diesel; Edison,

Westinghouse, and Steinmetz; the Wright brothers, and Ford. These are representative of

the trail blazers in whose footsteps I follow.”

The young engineer well may bear himself proudly as the heir of a great tradition.

Merely to recite these names is to mark it as a democratic tradition, one which has

recognized no aristocracy but genius. A sound instinct has worked to keep engineering a

career open to talents, and not let it harden into a learned caste. Its never-failing source of

fertility has been a blending of the efforts of hand-minded men and of men of profound

science. The spirit of engineering is cosmopolitan as well as democratic. National lines have

never impeded its progress. Arabic ideas of quantity, Greek ideas of form, Roman solidity,

Italian imagination, French precision, British practicality, German thoroughness,

Scandinavian tenacity, and American versatility, all have left their imprint on it.

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International collaboration has been notable in times of peace, and when interrupted by

war has been quickly re-established.

By instinct and tradition, engineers are good collaborators. A true engineer is so much

more intent on getting things done than on getting exclusive credit for them that he

willingly lends a hand with other workers. His natural impulse is to share his experience

rather than hoard it as an exclusive possession. Science made slow progress until observers

began to preserve detailed records and to organize co-operating groups in order to pool their

observations and submit their discoveries to critical scrutiny. This exchange of information

is typified in the meetings and publications of the great national engineering societies. The

progress of knowledge and its applications in the ancient world was almost wholly a

product of rare individual genius. The essence of modernity is that progress no longer waits

on genius, instead we have learned to put our faith in the organized and coordinated efforts

of ordinary men. To this idea the engineer has been a major contributor. To it we owe the

first impetus to unite engineers in professional organizations.

Professional Beginnings

Engineering and architecture stem from common origins now lost in antiquity. Their

division into distinct professions is not easy to trace. In all probability the separation took

place in medieval France, then the most advanced of the European nations. The

construction of roads, bridges, and waterways was a royal concern from the days of

Charlemagne. A royal Corps des Fonts et Chaussee’s is known to have existed as early as

the thirteenth century. Charles V (1364-1380) mentions “nos ingenicurs des ponts et

chaussee‟s” in a royal ordinance. An episode of the reign of Louis XIV (1642-1715) makes it

clear that the engineering profession had begun to develop a consciousness of its own. In his

enthusiasm for monumental structures, the Grand Monarch commissioned his favorite

architect, Mansard, to build a stone bridge at Moulins on the Allier River. Mansard was a

master of masonry construction, but he knew nothing of hydraulics and the erosive action of

streams. His bridge soon collapsed. The engineers of the period capitalized this set-back

with a rare sense of publicity and let it be known

3

“that they had at their command an art of construction, applicable to great public

works, more learned and more varied in its resources, looking to solidity rather than

monumental decoration.”

British engineering came to flower as one of the later fruits of the industrial

revolution. In a period when the British educational system ignored science and made no

provision for technical and professional training other than apprenticeship, and when no

established body of practitioners existed to give apprenticeship an orderly character, it was

a formidable thing for a young man to enter upon an engineering career. The first formal

organization of engineers, The Institution of Civil Engineers, organized in 1818 and

granted a royal charter in 1828, was conceived by its founders to serve as an agency of

mutual education to supplement the then prevailing scheme of pupilage. An official account

of the founding of the Institution states:

“It was toward the end of the year 1817 that a few gentlemen, then beginning life,

impressed by what they themselves felt were the difficulties young men had to

contend with in paining the knowledge requisite for the diversified practice of

engineering, resolved to form themselves into a society.”

The eight founders, who were principally builders of machinery, began their

deliberations by discussing the familiar parallel motion of Boulton and Watt. It seems clear

that this group had no thought of setting themselves apart as a distinct branch of

engineering concerned with permanent structures and public works when they chose the

title “Civil Engineers”; rather, their purpose was to mark themselves off from military

engineers. The special significance we now associate with that title appears to have grown

up around certain personalities, notably Thomas Telford, who became by invitation the first

president of the Institution and strongly influenced its character. Telford had begun life as

a stone mason and had risen to eminence as a planner and builder of great works of

construction. The pioneers of the industrial revolution were strong individualists, and

stamped their character on the profession as it developed. By 1847, the dominant interest of

the Institution of Civil Engineers in fixed construction had grown pronounced. George

Stephenson, the self-taught genius who began life as an illiterate mine fireman and who

had learned to read in an evening school in order to master the principles of mechanics,

4

gained great fame as the father of the steam locomotive. Finding the atmosphere of the

older society uncongenial and himself possibly unwelcome, Stephenson lent his influence to

the formation of a new British society, The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, whose aim

was

“To promote the science and practice of Mechanical Engineering and all branches of

mechanical construction and to give an impulse to inventions likely to be useful to

members of the Institution and to the community at large, and also to enable

mechanical engineers to meet and correspond and to facilitate the interchange of

ideas respecting improvements in various branches of mechanical science and the

publication and communication of information on such subjects.”

The Engineering Societies

Thus began the movement which has brought engineers together as a great fellowship

and at the same time has divided them into a score or more of organized branches. It is well

to note certain qualities in this movement which have been strongly marked from its early

beginning down to the present day. First, there was much less concern to set up an

exclusive caste than to create the means of mutual helpfulness. Second, the organized

profession was particularly interested in young men who were trying to establish

themselves in its ranks. Third, the strongest encouragement was given to the free exchange

of experience and the wide publication of knowledge rather than seeking to guard these as a

personal or group monopoly. Fourth, almost as much weight was given to social fellowship

as an aid to progress as to technical deliberations and publications. Without claiming it as

an unique experience, it is safe to say that engineers have found unusual profit, inspiration,

and enjoyment in this organized professional life. It is one of their choicest heritages.

The most prized heritage of the engineer is the good name which has been earned by

his profession. Men in every walk of life have deep respect for the engineer‟s characteristic

straight thinking and integrity in action. Men who deal with the stubborn and inflexible

facts of nature are little disposed to intellectual sublety and have scant scope for wishful

thinking. Specious thinking will not serve where lives are at stake and millions of invested

wealth are involved, nor is there room for men who are merely “smart,” or smooth, or

5

clever. The habit of integrity, alike in thought and action, is as indispensable to an engineer

as the habit of cleanliness is to a surgeon.

As in so many other realms of life, when one set of attributes is strongly marked,

others are likely to be less highly developed. The engineer usually has the defects of his

virtues. The very fact that he is supreme in some realms makes him less likely to be

outstanding in others. It is better to be both a good specialist and a good team member,

than to attempt to be all things to all men. The engineer is habitually factual, quantitative,

analytical, and impersonal in his modes of thought, a definite virtue in his realm of

responsibility; his capacity for judicial thinking, by balancing conflicting evidence, is

usually less pronounced; and his intuitive faculties, which might give direct insights into

the motives and reactions of other people, are usually so overshadowed by his analytical

habits, that he may lack the instinctive gift for evaluating and handling purely human

situations. His strong sense of integrity may make him think of right and wrong in terms of

white and black; he may seem somewhat inflexible, whereas a lawyer whose ideas of right

and wrong are more relative is likely to be more expert in working out a compromise.

The engineer usually is too forthright for adroit politics or suave diplomacy. On the

other hand, he is too much a pragmatist in matters concerned with political and economic

systems to be a dogmatic follower of any party, judging any one to be good in so far as it

works. One consequence is that the engineer seldom is prominent in politics. When an

engineer is elected to public office, it is likely to be at a mature stage of his career and in

recognition of high administrative abilities. Herbert Hoover and Ralph Flanders are typical

cases. In his earlier years, the engineer usually considers himself to be too busy to do

political chores or to climb the long ladder of party preferment.

Creator of Scientific Management

But if the engineer‟s role of political leadership has been a minor one, his leadership in

industry has been conspicuous and dynamic. The roster of engineers is studded with names

like Roebling, Edison, Westinghouse, and Ford, which are cherished as major assets in the

industries which they created and built to greatness. Leadership in industry belongs to the

engineer not only as a creator of structures, materials, machines, and technical services,

but also as an organizer of other men‟s work. He was the creator of scientific management,

which aims to take the guess-work not only out of processes and products, but also out of

6

every possible element from financing to profits. The Bell Telephone System, as one typical

industrial example, has reduced guess-work in an impressive degree; in part by research,

by standardization of equipment, and by establishing units of measurement and goals of

performance for all its repeated operations; in part by the close integration of development,

manufacturing, and operating functions; and in part by the forecasting of its loads, traffic,

revenues, expenses, construction program, and capital needs. Its policy is not one of

watchful waiting for business opportunities, but one of deliberately searching out by

engineering analysis in advance at what times, in what places and forms, and in what

amounts an investment or expenditure may be made to yield the maximum in economics or

improvements of service. It is undoubtedly the most completely engineered undertaking in

America, if not in the world, and its consistent prosperity and the universal esteem that it

has enjoyed in a public atmosphere politically incited to be not too friendly to “big

business,” lire tributes to an enlightened leadership in which engineers have played a major

part.

Experience indicates that the engineer-executive is likely to achieve a dominant role

in certain types of enterprises and only a secondary role in others. The engineer‟s habit of

caution and instinct of safety, bred of the desire to be as nearly right as possible every time,

lead him to reserve judgment until all obtainable evidence is in and the gap of uncertainty

is narrowed to its minimum. His instinctive concern centers in economy through

elimination of waste, rather than profit from unlimited exploitation. The very qualities

which make him highly effective in his own realm, tend to unfit him for quick intuitive

decisions, for speculative risks and for dealing with unpredictable aspects of human nature.

The odds are in his favor where success hinges on economics in production, on creating and

maintaining an intricate plant, on keeping a complex service in operation against physical

odds, or in meeting the risk that the whole enterprise may be superseded by some new

invention or research product. The engineer is less likely to direct where the chief concern

is with finance, risk-bearing, or marketing consumer goods; but the odds favor him where

competition is waged around costs rather than sales promotion; also where labor has to do

with mechanical skills rather than with personal services or with clerical or mercantile

functions.

The engineer‟s heritage of leadership is not solely a tribute to his qualities of mind

and character; it is equally a reflection of the civilization of our times, which cannot be

maintained or defended without his ceaseless service. The world‟s population, which more

7

than doubled in the last century-and-a-half, has greatly outrun its agricultural

requirements. One fifth of the world‟s people can feed the world. If all are to enjoy a high

standard of living, the rest must live by industry, trade, personal service, and the work of

government. As society‟s endowment of natural wealth shrinks, it must be replaced by

wealth originating in the laboratories of science. The engineer is the indispensable executor

of science in an industrial society.

The heritage of engineering gives high place to pride of achievement rather than pride

of place or pursuit of gain. Nearly all famous engineers have borne their greatness

modestly. Engineers have in some eases accumulated great fortunes from their inventions

and the enterprises they founded, but for the most part their great men have contented

themselves with modest monetary rewards. When the whole account is added up, their

contributions to man advancement have been extraordinarily unselfish. Science and

technology have grown like a coral atoll principally by the contributions of millions of men

now nameless who have found a sense of fulfillment in the making of a great civilization.

The young engineer of today thus has the challenging opportunity to contribute his bit to

this growing heritage.

8

Chapter II THE THRESHOLD

Transition from Engineering Student to Engineering Graduate.

As THE engineering student approaches or crosses the threshold of his college career,

outward bound into a chosen lifelong career of great and unknown potentiality, it is time to

pause and take stock. Time to take a back-sight and to project this line of progress forward

to the next intermediate stations toward the goal of the chosen career; time to review and

evaluate the experiences and intermediate objectives of the collegiate career; time to choose

and to initiate positive steps toward some definite objective, the first and important steps of

a professional career. When the young engineer entered college, he stepped from a locally

exalted area of a high school senior, where he had “learned his way around” by progressive

experience, into an area of much broader proportions and possibilities, but where he was

new and inexperienced and had to find his way around all over again. As he steps across

the collegiate threshold into the area of his chosen profession, the young engineer once

again emerges from the relative warmth and security of a compact area that has become

well known to him by progressive experiences into an area of vast proportions, an area

where once again the young engineer has become a neophyte and once again must

especially exercise his initiative to make the best use of his accumulated talents and the

raw materials at hand. The almost limitless array of opportunities which confronts the new

engineering graduate well may be confusing in their variety, although they perhaps are

more likely to be somewhat obscure and difficult to locate or identify except by the

determined and careful observer.

Back-Sight

Before charting our course forward, let‟s see where we are, and how we got here. The

fundamental purposes of the colleges and universities in the life of our civilization are to

collect, to preserve, to correlate, and to transmit knowledge; also, to stress the importance

of and to promote the development of the moral, ethical, and spiritual qualities of the

human race, toward the objective of producing intelligent citizens capable of responsible

9

leadership who will be animated by sound ideals and pledged to the common good. This

process we call education.

The schools and colleges cannot give an education to anyone, but they do assume the

obligation and responsibility to offer to their students the facilities for acquiring an

education.

Especially with an engineering education, a fundamental purpose of the collegiate

period is to enable the engineering student in a very much foreshortened period of time to

learn of and to profit by the experiences, discoveries, and interpretations of the thousands

who have gone before him in the application of nature‟s laws and materiel for the use of

mankind. To the engineer who stands thus at the threshold of his professional career, it

must be very clear this his education has only begun. It has been said of education that, in

its broadest sense, it is the orderly accumulation of factual knowledge and progressive

ability to interpret and apply that knowledge to human needs; it is the sum-total of all

indelible impressions left upon the human mind by every life situation through which an

individual passes. Thus, it may be said that the well-educated man is the one who secures

from his life-experiences the factual knowledge and the ability to interpret and apply this

knowledge so that not only he, but everyone within the scope of his influence may be richer

and happier and more determined to bring about a state of universal peace and harmony,

further, it has been said that man is a social animal endowed with an intellect upon which

an education may be directed; that he would not have been so endowed unless his ultimate

end were to exercise his endowment so that mankind could live harmoniously together.

These thoughts are particularly and peculiarly applicable to the engineer, since it is he who

has most to do with the creation, the development, the building, the installation, and the

operation of most of the physical elements that go to make up modern life.

What Is Engineering?

What is engineering? What are its implications and ramifications? The young person

stepping into an engineering career must for his own guidance and orientation have

definite concepts in answer to these questions, and must formulate his personal qualities

accordingly.

“Engineering,” broadly defined, is the combination of art and science by which the

materials and power of nature are made useful to mankind. An engineer, similarly defined,

10

is a person specifically trained and experienced in planning and developing the structures

and devices, and in supervising the processes, that bring about this objective. We are

completely surrounded by and dependent upon the work of engineers: The steam, gas, oil,

electrical, water supply, communication, and sanitary systems that serve our homes and

industries; our mines, factories, tools, and machines; the highways, railroads, airplanes,

and other means by which we travel; and other items too numerous to mention. Upon the

accomplishments of the engineer this civilization has come to depend to an unprecedented

degree for the food we eat, the clothing we wear, the shelter by which we are protected from

the elements; in short, for the material content of our civilization, without which there

would be a very serious retrogression in the level of human living. From antiquity, human

slavery, or the enforced labor of the many, had been the source of the production that has

sustained the various past civilizations of history. Now, however, man-made machines and

the harnessing of natural resources is progressively relieving humanity from the distress of

an oppressively heavy physical toil and is affording improved opportunity for the

development of mind and spirit. This is the challenging opportunity—and responsibility—of

the engineer and his profession.

What It Takes

To a very definite extent, the young engineer must have as he enters upon his career,

and certainly must develop consciously and progressively as he pursues his career, some

very specific qualities. Some of these qualities are quite homely, some are quite rigorous.

They include: Courage and integrity, a strong purpose and determination, a thirst for

knowledge, imagination, sound judgment, accuracy of thought, instinct for economy, the

habit of thinking back from effect to cause, aptitude for leadership, ingeniousness, and the

capacity for hard work.

Although the domain of engineering is enormously broad, no young person should

attempt seriously to undertake or to continue a career in the professional phases of

engineering until he has done the best that he can to assure himself that he possesses these

qualities in distinctly more than casual form. In elaborating somewhat upon these points in

the following paragraphs, it may be easier in some instances to point out the “don‟ts” than

to point out the “do‟s”, for it is easier to recognize the deficiencies which have handicapped

11

men than it is to estimate the degree of success to which their personal talents may lead

them.

Courage and integrity are prime requisites for a successful engineer. Do not

continue in engineering if you are afraid to take calculated risks and to make decisions on

the basis of available information, for very seldom will you be able to figure out a dead-sure

answer in advance for any major engineering problem. Don‟t go in for engineering if you are

satisfied just to “get by”; shoddy work will not do where human lives and heavy

investments are at stake. Engineers deal with the laws of nature. These laws are fixed and

inescapable. The engineering practioner, therefore, must be rigorously honest in thought

and in action; no amount of brilliance will enable an individual dealing with such matters

to ignore or to attempt to distort even the simplest laws of nature. Don‟t go in for

engineering unless you are willing to live up to an inflexible code of integrity and honest

dealing; the habit of straight thinking and honest action is just as important to an engineer

as is the habit of cleanliness to a surgeon. The laws of man may be propounded, enacted,

enforced and changed in accordance with the whims or expediency of the human mind. The

laws of nature, however, require forthrightness and steadfastness if disaster is to be

averted or the wastage of money and materials avoided. Engineering has no place for men

who are merely smooth or clever. Clever argument and disputation may not be substituted

for the integrity which an engineer must possess.

A thirst for knowledge is an attribute which must be possessed by all individuals

who hope to succeed in professional life. The engineer in particular must have the active

native inclination to delve into the fundamental truths of mathematics, physics, and

chemistry. No substantial progress can be made in the acquisition of knowledge without

resorting, to the use of a continuous process. A prominent educator has said “the acquisition

of knowledge is like holding a torch aloft in the dark—the larger the torch happens to be,

the more darkness can be seen.”

Imagination of conception, a strong native sense of quantity and form, properly

may be called one of the factors most vital to successful engineering. Most accomplishments

of importance, in their initial conception have been just lowly simple ideas which became

great through imagination and creative thinking. Don‟t continue seriously in engineering if

the ability to think in dimensions, magnitudes, ratios, percentages, roots and powers, does

not come naturally; nor if you find it hard to “see things in your mind‟s eye,” or to visualize

12

them as they would be in actuality. Every engineering product, great or small, is someone‟s

mental picture made real.

Capacity for sound judgment is an inborn trait. Like native intelligence, this

characteristic cannot be created in an individual, although it definitely may be developed,

refined, and sharpened. The successful engineer must be able to see all aspects of a

question or problem, must be able to place a proper value upon each phase of a situation,

and must be able to forsee and estimate the consequences likely to result from each step

taken in the solution of his problem or project. The capacity for sound judgment enables the

engineer to differentiate between feasible projects and mere speculative promotion; between

the solution of a problem and the covering of an undesirable situation by deception or

strategem; between the rendition of a service to humanity and the acquisition of mere

personal glory; between ethical conduct and chicanery.

Accuracy of thought and action is an essential trait of the successful engineer, and

must be cultivated by every person who hopes to succeed in technical pursuits. It may be

said with considerable emphasis that engineering should not be undertaken by persons of

careless or casual traits. Accuracy in thought not only ferrets from the daily welter those

tasks, which are essential to the objective in hand, but it likewise makes possible the

technically dependable and economically sound solutions which are required to convert

ideas into worthwhile realities.

An instinct for economy is a major requisite for the successful engineer. There is

a distinction which must be discerned between cheapness and economy. In an engineering

project, it is not necessarily the cheapest way of doing it that is of paramount importance,

but the way which will produce the most effective results or the largest useful return for the

money and effort expended. This instinct for economy must apply not only to materials, but

to men and the efforts of men, because engineering projects are translated from ideas to

realities primarily through the co-ordinated efforts of many people, and thus team work

and properly organized manpower effort are of cardinal importance in the overall economy

of any project.

The habit of thinking back from effects to their causes—the inherent

natural trait of looking behind a manifestation to determine its cause—is an essential

requisite of the successful engineer. Another way of describing this requisite is thinking in

terms of functions. As a simple example and test of what we are talking about here, try to

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explain simply but accurately just what essential purpose is served by each of the several

elements which connect the engine at the front of an automobile to the two wheels at the

rear which are on art axis transverse to that of the engine.

Aptitude for leadership has grown to be a requisite of tremendous importance in

this modern civilization. In substantial degree, the individual engineer‟s professional

advancement bears a direct relation to his development and application of leadership

ability. The ability to work harmoniously with people of different views is paramount; the

ability to “sell” ideas, projects, or principles on the basis of sound reasoning, with

convincing logic and understanding tolerance, is essential. Also, in the field of civic and

social problems, the engineer has a challenging opportunity for constructive leadership, as

an engineer and as a private citizen. In the past, the engineer has betaken himself in such a

fashion as to make possible the production of a legion of commodities in super abundance.

So prolific, in fact, has been the productive capacity of the engineer in this direction that he

has contrived to build the equipment in ever increasing numbers by which toil may be

transferred from man to machine. In doing this, he has contributed to the uprooting of the

work and lives of many people. If humanity is to receive the complete benefits of the

engineer‟s work, then the engineer himself must assume some interest and responsibility

for seeing that the full productive capacity of his accomplishments is utilized most

effectively for the welfare of humanity. This does not mean that the engineer has all the

“answers,” but that he humbly should do his share to find them.

Ingeniousness is another prime requisite for a successful engineering career. If it

can be said that necessity is the mother of invention, then by similar token it must be

admitted that ingenuity is the father of invention. Necessity and ingeniousness go hand in

hand to bring about the inventions, developments, and applications which figure so

prominently in the work of engineers. Without ingeniousness, the fabric of which

engineering is composed would literally be reduced to unwoven threads. The practionists

who are able to take commonplace situations and apply imagination of conception and

ingenuity to produce and improve results are the ones who contribute great benefits to

mankind.

The capacity for hard work is the surest road to success in any enterprise.

Success is not just a happy accident, it comes to the individual who does his work better

than the other fellow. Success does not just “happen,” although gratuitous circumstances

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and unexpected opportunities may be turned substantially to benefit by the individual who

is aggressive, alert, and prepared to recognize and take advantage of such circumstances.

You may rest assured that you will never achieve greatness, or even become prominent,

without continuing study and generous hard work. Men may be born rich or poor, white or

black, noble or lowly, but they never are born as great men. Greatness is the reward of

effort. Labor is necessary to give strength and vigor to the intellect—and to give it the third

dimension of depth; intelligence is necessary to give effectiveness, honor, and dignity to

labor.

The ability to think and speak lucidly is a quality of paramount importance to

engineers, and one all too often neglected or overlooked entirely. That the engineer must be

able to think in orderly fashion, to break his complex problems into small units which can

be solved, to select and apply the requisite reasoning and principles, is quite obvious. That

it is just as important for the engineer to be able to write and speak lucidly seems not to be

so obvious. But how is the engineer to convey the results of his professional thinking and

hard work to his associates, his boss, his profession, or mankind in general except through

the written report, the spoken word, or the published article or technical paper? And what

good are these reports or discussions unless they are sufficiently well prepared and

presented as to be readily understable, and sufficiently interesting in manner of

presentation to sustain attention? The “king‟s English” is a tool which can give maximum

effectiveness to every other quality which the engineer possesses, and without it all other

qualities are impaired or shadowed. Every engineer, and especially the young engineer, will

do very well by himself to give consistent attention to this phase of his self-training.

Visualizing the Engineer

Everyone knows a lot of things which engineers do, but young people often are at a

loss to make mental pictures of the men who do them. You cannot visualize an engineer

unless you can see what is happening in his mind. You see a man at a desk going through

files of papers and occasionally looking into books, then making calculations, but you can‟t

see his mind digging out facts, fitting them into the laws of nature and comparing them

with past experience in order to determine how many telephone, teletype, telegraph, and

television messages can be sent together over a coaxial cable. Or you see a man peering into

a microscope, or twisting a dial, or balancing weights, or fitting a piece of metal into a

15

machine that is going to shake it to death, but you can‟t see his mind setting up a series of

tests and measurements which will tell him whether a new kind of alloy will “stand the

racket” in airplane propellers.

Perhaps what you see is a man putting figures into spaces or spotting points on a

chart, but you can‟t see him mapping out in his mind just when and where each component

part of an automobile is to be fitted together and just what each worker on the assembly

line is to do. You see a tense man standing for an excavation and apparently giving orders

to someone down below, but you can‟t guess that they have struck quicksand down there

and that he is thinking fast how to save lives and prevent the ruin of weeks of work. You

see a man talking into a telephone, but you can‟t know that a cable carrying thousands of

horsepower has just burned out and hear him telling the crew how to clear the breakdown,

protect life and property, restore service, and avert a repetition of the trouble. You see a

man drawing lines on paper, measuring them, erasing them, changing them, but you don‟t

see the machine he is building in his imagination and critically studying and testing as he

transfers it to paper. You see a man figuring on what might be his income tax or his

household budget, but what you can‟t see is that he is getting ready to prove to his

president upstairs that it would pay to scrap a million dollars worth of perfectly sound

machinery and spend two millions on new and more efficient equipment.

These things you can see are merely superficial details. The things that you can‟t see

are the realities of engineering. What it takes to be an engineer are not certain knacks and

skills, but a certain kind of mind, backed up by plenty of courage, persistence, honesty, and

common sense. This little series of snapshots may suggest that an engineer must have fact-

gathering and fact-organizing mind, an analytical mind, a resourceful mind, a constructive

mind

They suggest that while an engineer works mostly with materials and machines, he

also works with money and men. Four things an engineer must have: a mastery of

applied science, an instinct for economy of effort and of cost, the power to

visualize ideas by imagination, and the power to express ideas clearly in speech, or

writing, or drawings to other men. Sound character is indispensable, and sound health

scarcely less so. As engineers mature, three-quarters of them take on executive

responsibilities and not a few become executives pure and simple. Only rarely does an

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engineer get far without a good understanding of human nature and of the art of handling

men.

The Engineer’s Opportunities

So far, we have been thinking about the problem if of getting square pegs into square

holes. That is first in importance because brilliant opportunities in any calling are merely a

mockery to the man who has no aptitude to grasp them. But there are other important

questions. What is the prospect of there being a good hole for the peg to occupy, and will

there be ample room in it for growth? Is the engineer‟s job in life one that counts in a

human way, by advancing human welfare and by making the world a safer and a happier

place in which to live? Or is modern technology a sort of Frankenstein monster that

threatens to turn on its creator and destroy him?

Will there be opportunities in the technical professions for the youth of today? The

answer is yes and you can underscore it strongly. The engineer‟s work should afford plenty

of room for growth and expansion. One effect of World War II was to greatly accelerate the

technical exploitation of the knowledge we already had. Since then a vast amount of

research in both basic sciences and applications has been unleashed. The results are now

evident in every phase of modern life whether we consider industry, government, or

education. Present and future generations will do their prospecting for new sources of

wealth in the research laboratory. A century ago the hidden wealth which lured men to

adventure was the gold of California, the copper of Utah, the iron ore of Lake Superior, the

coal of the Appalachians, and the oil of Pennsylvania and Ohio. That era seems to be

closing. The laboratory is now the open door to adventure. Instead of the surveyor

accidentally kicking up the red ore of the Mesabi Range, it is the chemist finding ways to

extract magnesium from sea water and the physicist unlocking the energies of the atomic

nucleus who open highways to new wealth.

A Career of Human Significance

Finally, one can confidently assure the young engineer, chemist, or physicist who is

not content to be just a skilled technician but who wants to do something that will count in

terms of human welfare and advancement, that he will have a great opportunity. All

mankind is facing a future full of uncertainty. Life is bound to be an adventure, no matter

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how you face it. The ifs of life begin right at home, and they expand to the furthest bounds

of human destiny. Many of them are in the hands of the men of science and the engineer.

Let‟s look at some of them. If you are to have a chance to carve out a satisfying career; if

your community is to be happy, healthy and prosperous; if the region in which you reside is

to share fully in the fruits of progress; if America is to provide jobs for all who seek them; if

our people are to be safe from injuries and free from epidemics; if they are to live in

comfortable and convenient homes; if they are to enjoy time- saving transportation; if they

are to live in the open and not huddled in slums; if the news and culture and entertainment

of the world are to be brought to them by radio and television; if we are to continue to grow

and prosper as a people when the iron ore grows lean, the oil scarce and the coal dear; if our

soil is to be kept fertile and not washed away into the sea; if America is to do its share to

assist developing nations through technical cooperation and sound financing, thereby

helping to raise living standards; if ignorance and disease and blind hates and passions are

to be banished so that reason and enlightenment may rule the world; if any of these real

feats are accomplished, the men of science and technology will have a vast and challenging

job to do. They could never do it alone, of course, and men of good will in every calling and

profession will have to lend a hand, but without the work of engineers, chemists, physicists,

and metallurgists it could never be done at all. The material foundations would be lacking

and the new world of men‟s dreams would be only words.

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Chapter III THE ENGINEERING GRADUATE

Some Important Choices and Decisions are Required

THE young engineer‟s career of practice and professional responsibility brings with it his

first choice of job. A wise choice is important in shaping his career, since one can gain or

lose time at the starting line, although it seldom determines a man‟s final place in the race.

It is only natural to look upon the choice as tentative, for life is full of contingencies. One

has yet much to learn about himself and even more to learn about the world of professional

activity. Let us consider some of the issues in a wise choice.

To Seek for One’s Self, or to Be Sought After?

Graduation is the time when one must begin to take the principal risks of life into his

own hands. One simply cannot afford to say to himself, “Some employer is expected to take

the responsibility for setting me up in life and making a success out of me;” cannot afford to

look upon a job just as a personal perquisite to be taken lightly or to be tossed aside at will.

A novice engineer gets his first professional rating by the way he handles his first

engagement.

Some of the greatest opportunities for young engineers lie in fields and concerns

where little use has hitherto been made of engineering talent and which are not covered by

any plan of systematic recruitment. Ordinarily this type of opportunity must be sought out.

It involves many uncertainties, but offers much latitude for individual initiative. Usually

there is no scheme of standardized starting salary rates or periodic increases, no organized

introductory training program, no systematic plan of transfers and promotions and often

little or no top-grade professional supervision. The rules of employment may provide no

specific recognition of professional training and status. However, once the young engineer

has gained a firm foothold, the competition may be light or almost nonexistent. Perhaps

half the world of industry, including most of the small concerns and also some of the largest

organizations such as the operating departments of many railroads, is open on these terms

to young engineers who are willing to bet on themselves.

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Whatever the approach, a young engineer stands to gain by handling all matters of

employment from the start in a professional manner and spirit. He should look the field

over with care, but with an open mind. He should keep himself well-groomed, maintain an

attitude of poise and politeness, listen with attention, and question with discrimination. It

behooves him to put the emphasis on ultimate opportunity rather than immediate rank and

pay. He should be careful to acknowledge all correspondence promptly and in good form, to

reach a decision without either undue haste or delay, to accept in writing and to decline all

other offers courteously by direct word or letter. Then, having given his word, make good on

it.

The Large Concern,

or the Small Organization?

In general, the pros and cons are surprisingly even. The big organization has a wider

diversity of jobs, but may expect closer specialization; the top of the ladder is higher, but

early progress is likely to be more routine and less individual; a man can gain a wide

variety of experience without leaving its ranks, but it is likely to have many centers of

activity and to shift men around without too much regard for their personal taste or

convenience; it can use a wider variety of talents, but its very size entails more

standardization of rank and salary; its policies must be stable and farsighted, but the

individual engineer may have little part in shaping them. The large concern may be less

nimble than its smaller competitor in adopting new ideas, but the wide diversity of its

products and activities is better insurance against depressions and superseding inventions.

Research is now both a powerful tool of progress and of insurance against being put out of

business, but only the large concern can carry it on extensively. On the other hand, an

ingenious and inventive individual usually can make more of an impression on a smaller

concern. An organization of intermediate size may in many instances offer the more

important advantages and avoid the major disadvantages of either the very large or the

very small one, such as better contact with supervisors than in the very large concern and

better diversity of activity in the very small concern.

A Position Near Home, or One At a Distance?

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Work near home is attractive in terms of comfort, convenience, economy, keeping up

with personal ties, and capitalizing on family influence. Work at a distance, by the sheer

necessity it imposes of organizing one‟s life and associations independently, has great

educative value which may be particularly important to one who has lived at home during

his college years. Most young people need to go through a weaning period to become fully

adult. Where family backgrounds differ widely from the setting of a career one has planned,

distance is very helpful in gaining the independence to choose selectively the associations

and traditions to be preserved and those to be discarded. The less a young engineer leans on

his earlier family and neighborhood ties, the more likely he is to form early and warm

associations in his professional group. Career-wise, this may be very important to him.

Choosing With a View to Permanence, or

With the Intention of Shifting About?

This is also a balancing operation. Every gardener knows that some plants can thrive

or even survive only in their original locations, while transplanting is almost as necessary

to bring others to their full vigor. Most engineers will find a certain number of well-timed

changes very important to their development. The question is: Can one get those benefits in

a single, large organization, or must he shift from one to another? In some areas of

engineering, notably in great construction projects, employment is not ordinarily

permanent but on a project basis. Many civil engineers are destined to more roving lives

than most electrical engineers; the same is true of mining engineers as compared with

metallurgists. Roving lives breed a certain type of independence and resourcefulness, and

an ability to live and work with all sorts of people and in any sort of environment that is

very necessary to men who must organize and execute great projects under difficult

conditions. Settled lives, however, are more conducive to the higher levels of intellectual

and scientific endeavor.

Two things seem essential: One is that experience, however varied, must be

cumulative, must progressively add up to something coherent and steadily rise in its levels

of responsibility; the other is that it must not be allowed at any level to bog down into sheer

routine. Fundamentally these essentials are the direct responsibility of the individual

engineer rather than of the employer. Growing concerns usually are hard-pressed to fill top-

level posts and will do as much as possible to bring young men of promise up to the

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required standard of experience. At the same time, most large concerns have so much sheer

repetitive activity to handle that they find it convenient to let capable but unadventurous

men gravitate to high- grade routine responsibilities. A word of warning here: It is the man

and not the job which is routine! Any job is just about whatever the individual makes of it.

Finding better ways to do work, even such purely repetitious tasks as shoveling ore or

piling pig iron, became in the hands of the great management pioneer, Frederick W. Taylor,

one of the most original and romantic jobs of engineering development ever undertaken.

Work to Suit One’s Abilities and

Tastes, or Just Any Good Job?

This is perhaps the most critical question of all, and often the most difficult to decide.

Work has a powerful molding influence. The engineer graduate will do well to ask himself,

“What kind of a man will a given type of work or engagement make of me in the course of

fifteen years?” The recruiting representatives which visit the colleges are in a sense “goods

in the show window” and the graduate may get some help in answering this question by

simply studying them.

The young engineer usually chooses his general career by his choice of a curriculum in

college. So far as inborn gifts and aptitudes are concerned there are‟ no great or critical

differences between the major branches of engineering. Much the same abilities are needed

in each, and each offers much the same range of outlets for talent. Within each area there

are different functions which demand fairly distinct types of individual interest and

capacity. While there is no uniform descriptive classification of these functions, many will

be easily recognized from their common occurrence. For example, one group centers around

the task of investigation—experimental, analytical, or economic; another around the task of

design and development; another around the task of planning the programs of construction;

another around the supervision of operations; another around the application of products or

services; and another around the closely related selling of goods and services.

In fitting himself into this complex, the young engineer‟s task is to match what it

takes and what he has. One way to approach it would be to lay out a chart on the

checkerboard plan, with divisions on one axis corresponding to a list of functions such as

those enumerated above and with divisions on the other axis for a group of distinctive

abilities which all engineers are supposed to possess in some degrees such as (1)

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mathematical, (2) experimental, (3) critical, (4) visualizing, (5) inventive, (6) organizing, (7)

expository, (8) persuasive, etc. Having prepared this chart form, the next step is to try to

think out on a scale of 1 to 5 or perhaps 1 to 10 the relative importance of each of these

abilities in performing each of these functions. (Faculty men and friendly engineers will

gladly criticize and advise.) This done, the next step is to make as honest appraisal of one‟s

own abilities on the same scale and to try his individual profile against those of the several

functions.

Work in engineering also differs widely in the medium employed. Some engineers

work mostly with materials, some mostly with machines, some mostly with money, and

some mostly with men. An interesting and suggestive bit of self-appraisal can be made by

drawing two intersecting lines at right angles, then marking the successive quadrants

respectively materials, machines, money, and men. This done, try to draw an ellipse so

placed on these four quadrants that the relative areas enclosed correspond to what you

believe your own interest to be in the corresponding types of work.

Training Course, or

Immediate Responsibility?

The young physician coming out of college with his M.D. degree knows that he is only

partially prepared for the practice of his profession, and enters upon his internship as a

matter of course. The path of the young engineer is not so clear. As a graduate he, too, is

only partly educated for his profession. How shall he get the rest? Continue as a resident

graduate student? Begin his professional work and enroll as a part-time graduate student?

Enter a school of business? Follow some educational program provided by his employer?

Take courses by correspondence? Map out some plan of independent study? Try for a job as

personal assistant and disciple to some outstanding man? Acquire what he lacks by

experience, or “through the pores?” All these methods have some merit, and no one fits all

individuals.

These various possibilities should be carefully considered by the young engineering

graduate and discussed with as many qualified people as possible, for his decision probably

will have profound bearing upon his career. To attempt to give specific advice through the

medium of a booklet such as this would be unwise indeed, but the following general

comments are offered in the hope that they will help each individual to recognize and

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analyze his own peculiar problem in the light of the circumstances in which he finds

himself.

If the novice wants to do research or enter upon a teaching career, the answer is fairly

simple. In nearly every case he will need graduate training. This also will stand him in good

stead if he wants to do development work on new products or services, or work on the more

involved problems of design, or put the results of research into production or operation. The

choice between resident graduate work immediately following the undergraduate period

and part- time graduate work associated with active employment is not so self-evident. If

the goal in view is a more profound mastery of scientific fundamentals and experimental

techniques as a preparation for research or teaching, there is advantage in immediate

resident work; if the goal is specialization in some area of advanced practice, there is

advantage in a period of experience for orientation and testing, to be followed by part-time

graduate training; if the goal is management responsibility, there is advantage in

postponing special training until the candidate has had enough experience to “find” himself

and to raise the study of management above the level of mere book lore. However, the case

for postponement in any of these circumstances is weakened by the fact that delay

increases the possibility of the individual actually never doing the work planned. Each

person must make his own decisions in such matters, in the light ol his own peculiar

circumstances, but for his own ultimate good should most seriously consider all such

contributing circumstances as those expressed—and implied—in the foregoing comments.

Education courses offered by employers are of widely varying character and merit.

Some are little more than orientation courses in company geography and personnel; others

are indoctrination courses in company routine, or visual demonstrations of company

products. All these are useful in helping the novice to know his way around, but of minor

value as supplementary professional training. Some company courses reach the higher level

of a preview before departmental assignment or specialization. Some are accelerated

programs of experience, intended to shorten the acquiring of the needed know-how of

production or design. Some are extended combinations of experience and of instruction

which approximate or equal the character of post-graduate study in college.

Each individual for his own good should pursue some organized plan of post-collegiate

training appropriately related to the technical work in which he engages upon graduation

and to the furtherance of his professional career. The man who thus applies himself to

continued learning instead of resting on the collegiate laurels represented by his diploma is

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the man who attains the upper levels of professional success and recognition. The

progression of the art and science of engineering toward ever new and broader fields of

knowledge and application is steady and inexorable, and hence the individual who does not

make specific effort to keep up will find himself left behind.

Advanced training by correspondence never has appealed widely to engineers. In the

past, considerable numbers enrolled in supplementary business courses of this nature, but

this practice has declined as the colleges have increased their full-time and part- time

offerings in administration subjects. Some of the best education in the world has been

gained through personal discipleship. Before the establishment of engineering schools, this

was the principal method of acquiring basic training. Even now it remains as one of the

most valuable means of supplementary training after graduation.

On What Basis Are Young

Engineers Selected and Hired?

Recently, the Engineers Joint Council, joint agency of a group of national engineering

societies, conducted a survey to learn directly from a representative group of industrial

employers their attitudes and policies pertaining to the selection, training, placement,

advancement, guidance, and professional activities of engineering-graduate employees. The

published report of this survey showed that the points of consideration which carry the

most weight with employers in selecting a candidate for an engineering position rank in the

following order of importance:

1. Personality

2. Scholastic record and indicated promise of development in specific field of

engineering

3. Experience

4. Evidence of ability to co-operate with others

5. Recommendations by qualified persons

6. Indicated promise for executive development

7. Standing of college from which candidate was graduated

8. Salary requested

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Careful note should be taken of the fact that, although technical qualifications are

paramount in an engineering job, it is the composite of personal traits and characteristics

defined by the term “personality” that determine which young engineering candidate will be

selected for the best job.

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Chapter IV BEGINNING PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

ALTHOUGH the engineer in a general way chose his career when he chose his courses of

collegiate training, and perhaps also gave increasing definitions of that choice with

intermediate part-time or summertime employment, the first full step toward his practice

in his chosen branch of the engineering profession is taken with his first full-time

employment. Having completed his initial preparatory work, and having made the decisions

leading up to this point, the young engineer now sets out on his own toward his career

objective. There are several aspects of this phase of his career that merit his specific and

thoughtful attention.

Subordinates Are Important; Be a Good One

As he enters this stage, the young engineer‟s first concern is to learn to be a good

subordinate. In most cases, the engineer is a line (operating) or staff (planning) officer of an

industrial corporation or a public agency. The novice may find it difficult for a time to keep

his professional goal from being obscured by his status as a junior salaried employee. In all

probability, his superiors will not rate him as a budding professional. They will go out of

their way to impress upon him that he is working for the company or agency, that he must

follow its rules, mostly unwritten, and that he must give it his first loyalty at all times.

Labor representatives urge him to join a union and may strive to impress upon him that

this is the only sure and quick road to better pay and working conditions. The great

professional societies may seem to him to be concerned mostly with the specialized interests

of mature engineers, or matters of professional and public policy far removed from the grass

roots of his own daily duties and interests. In a sense, he is like a soldier, he must have

special qualifications for his arm of service, but his effectiveness at this stage depends upon

his team-play rather than upon his individualism. He must know how to follow before he is

qualified to lead; he must learn to obey before he can give orders; and he must win his way

to responsibility upward from the ranks.

Although mostly unwritten, there is indeed a “code of successful employeeship” for

young engineers, as well as a code of professional obligations. The following list of items is

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set forth as representative of the many which merit the thoughtful attention of the engineer

in general and the young engineer in particular.

With Reference to Your Work. However menial and trivially your early

assignments may appear, give them your best efforts. The spirit and effectiveness with

which you tackle your first tasks will be watched carefully and may affect your entire

career. If you always take good care of the job you currently have in hand, however minor it

may at first appear to you, your future will very largely take care of itself. Remember that

there is a premium upon the ability to get things done. To capitalize upon this, you should

cultivate the personal qualities of energy and initiative, resourcefulness and ability,

persistence and tenacity. When given an assignment to do or a complaint to clear up, get at

it promptly and stick to it until done.

Avoid even the appearance of vacillation; reserve your opinion or action until you have

ascertained and studied all available pertinent facts, then make your decision and see it

through to conclusion unless subsequent fresh evidence makes it folly to persist. Be

extremely careful of the accuracy of your statements; it is very much better policy to say “I

do not know, but I shall find out right away,” than it is to destroy confidence by guessing or

running a bluff when you do not know.

With Reference to Your Boss. Remember that every executive must know what is

going on in the area for which he is responsible. This is an obvious and a trite rule, yet it

frequently is violated or overlooked. Keep your boss informed of all significant

developments, in sufficient detail to assure that he knows what you are doing and why. Of

course in a broad way you are working for society, the company, the department, your

family, and yourself; but directly and primarily you are working for and through your boss

and, as a rule, you will best serve your own and all other interests through this channel.

Be as particular as you can in the selection of your boss, as men are molded by the

influence of their superiors. If your boss is deficient, either accept him in the line of

authority in good grace, or seek a transfer; but do not ignore, modify, or deride his orders.

Don‟t be over anxious in following the boss‟ leads, by plaguing him for minute directions or

trying to get him to tell you how to do your job, or in following blindly a previous plan which

new evidence has shown to be wrong. Don‟t be timid; speak up. Express yourself and

promote your ideas; don‟t be just a yes-man. Keep your mouth shut when it is appropriate

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to do so, but speak up respectfully whenever you can contribute something to the project in

hand.

With Reference to Associates and Outsiders. Never invade the domain of any

other office or division without the advance knowledge and consent of its executive head. In

all transactions, be careful to inform all who have a right or a responsibility to be informed;

failure to do so gives offense and invites errors. When you are dissatisfied with the services

of another individual, office, or organization, undertake to come to an understanding

settlement with the individual most directly responsible for the function involved, before

making any formal complaints to higher authority. In dealing with customers and

outsiders, remember that you represent the company or organization, and be careful of your

commitments, remembering that you will be understood to be speaking with full

responsibility and authority.

Team Work Counts

The transition from college to practice has been likened to an abrupt shift from high

gear into low. The graduate comes out “raring to go.” He is usually “fed up” with books and

teachers, and wants action. He tackles his first job with enthusiasm, but soon finds it

growing repetitious. There is a sense of suddenly arrested progress. He has an

understandable but dangerous tendency to feel all to soon that he has learned what the job

has to teach, and wants to move on to a new assignment, as he did in college. He wants to

make a showing, and quickly! Where he came from, men were judged that way, as

individuals. Without realizing it, such reactions very well may lead him into the pitfall of

working for himself rather than for his organization. If he is smart, one day he starts to

look around and take his bearings. He discovers that most of the brilliant individuals

around him are headed toward one-man jobs—some of them important, some at the ends of

blind alleys—and that the chief prizes are being awarded for contributions to the work of

other men, especially in leadership capacities. He discovers that he is engaged in an almost

unbelievably complex piece of teamwork rather than a race for individual recognition.

Being smart, that is when he starts working for his organization. He has to find his place

on the team; he has to learn the plays and the signals; and he has to produce his salary,

plus overhead, plus profit before he can qualify as a regular. For a time, this is likely to

engage his full attention, and to merit it.

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As he gains a foothold in practical experience, the young engineer begins to see in

modern industrial organization an amplifier for leadership, a plan for making the small

amount of genius in the world add the most to the work of ordinary men. He begins to give

serious study to the art of planning work, making schedules, giving instructions,

untangling difficulties, detecting and correcting errors, maintaining the quality and judging

the amount and value of output and, often the most difficult of all, getting others to put

their hearts into their jobs. Much of what he has to learn, both about the organization and

about getting things done, he seems to learn “through the pores,” without the deliberate

effort for intellectual mastery he put forth in college. He discovers now that the sense of

arrested progress which worried him was more apparent than real.

None-the-less, he has one of the most critical personal problems of his career on his

hands and the level of his lifetime attainment depends on how he solves it. The problem can

be stated as a paradox: That whereas the engineering graduate comes out of college only

half-educated for his career, many a graduate then possesses a wider range of detailed

scientific and technical knowledge that he will possess at any later stage of his career. Upon

graduation, young engineers usually compare quite favorably in intellectual and personal

breadth with college graduates in general, but mature engineers who are highly competent

in particular realms of practice do not always compare well in these broader qualities with

men in other professions whose work compels a habit of life-long study. Among many

reasons, two are conspicuous. One is that specialization often begins earlier and usually

runs higher in engineering than in other professions. For examples, compare architecture,

medicine, law, accountancy, social work, and the religious ministry. The aids to

specialization are likely to come to an engineer‟s desk automatically while means of broader

self-improvement have to be sought out deliberately. For too many young engineers, the

beginning of specialization is marked by a passive acceptance of narrowing interests.

A second reason arises from the fact that the art of production and the directing of

corporate effort depend so largely on knowledge which no school can impart. The young

engineer is tempted at every hand to become a student of experience, rather than a student

of men and of books. Such a habit tends to be narrowing, for it limits the range of

experience at one‟s command, especially the generalized forms of experience embodied in

history, the social sciences, and philosophy.

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Post-College Development

In seeking perspective on the problem of post- college personal development, certain

forms of verbal simplification may be helpful. Almost any problem in engineering can be

stated in the one-syllable trilogy: “Will it work? Will it pay? Is it safe?” Or as, an

alternative, in the three tests ascribed to Theodore N. Vail, the organizing genius of the

Bell Telephone System: “Why do it at all? Why do it now? Why do it this way?” Reflection

on such simple questions will go far to suggest how much more than technical specialization

is involved in the higher levels of engineering attainment.

Still another approach may be made by pointing out that virtually all engineering

problems fall on some one of three fairly distinct levels: (1) the level of known laws and

data; (2) the level of technical judgment; and (3) the level of policy making. The young

engineer just out of college finds himself fairly well equipped for work on the first level, but

that most of the problems there already have been reduced to such a routine that you

merely look up the details and put the answers together. The problems met on the second

level have gaps in them which known laws and data do not cover. How well will a certain

material stand up under some long-sustained unusual condition? How reliable is a complex

relay mechanism likely to be in the hands of the ordinary user? One usually can devise

tests to narrow these gaps of uncertainty, but sooner or later a judgment decision has to be

made and its risks assumed. Then there is no substitute for ample and well digested

experience. The third or policy-level problem is likely to go to the top office for decision.

For illustration, suppose your firm has developed a radically new product in a highly

competitive field. Shall you try to keep it as an exclusive line, trusting to your ability to

fight off all patent infringements or evasions and to outdistance all rival efforts at invention

and development? Or, shall you license your competitors and take part of your reward in

royalties rather than in sales profits? To solve that problem will take a lot of fine weighing

of technical questions, of business questions involving capital investment, competitive costs,

sales possibilities, industry relations and legal contingencies, and probably of economic and

social policies of the broadest nature.

The engineer graduate will do well to recognize that his training in college fits him

only for the first of these levels. Training for the higher levels is yet to come. Most of it will

be up to him. Experience together with specialization usually will carry him to the second

level, but the time required and the area of coverage will depend largely upon the

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individual‟s interest and initiative. Experience and specialization alone will never carry

him to the third level of responsibility. To reach it he will have to be qualified for a broader

kind of thinking, with more variables involved and many of them of a highly intangible

character.

Let us now look at the problem of the young graduate‟s further education from a

somewhat different angle. Engineering consists not only in solving problems, but equally in

making programs of execution. College teaches the rudiments of problem-solving, but little

about program-making. It will help a student engineer to grasp the distinction if he will

visit some great engineering project in the latter half of its construction stage and take a

careful look around. On every side he will see in the elements and components of the project

evidences of problems in design, selection, and co-ordination that had to be solved in

advance on desks or drafting boards or test floors or laboratory benches. He also will see

evidences of program-making on a grand scale, the comprehensive and detailed mapping of

an orderly sequence of operations to prepare the site, to bring to it the right tools, the right

working forces, the right materials, in the right amounts and to the right places to deliver

the components for installation at the right time and place and with the right handling, and

to clear away progressively all waste materials and all temporary structures and facilities

without confusion or delay. This job of program planning is one of intricate co-ordination,

much like a military campaign. It is not taught at college or at West Point. It is one of the

major goals of an engineer‟s post-college education, as it is with a soldier.

The word breadth is always appearing in discussions of education. Usually, it is

undefined. Often there is a vague intimation that its purpose is to develop an appreciation

of social and cultural values. These are important to an engineer as to every other sort of

educated man. Engineers are fair readers of periodical literature in their own specialties,

but comparatively few read widely or study independently. Often, without realizing it, they

thus set limits to their careers. One of the best things a young engineer can do is to

subscribe at the outset of his career for one or more of the best monthlies dealing with

literary, social, and philosophical matters at the essay level and read it regularly, cover to

cover. It is surprising what a range of acquaintance with men and their interests ten years

of such reading will give him. It will make him infinitely better company for his non-

engineering friends and open many doors to him. One of the lessons young engineers most

need to learn is that technical information alone does not make interesting conversation.

Men with no other resource are usually bores.

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Breadth to an engineer has an additional and special meaning. It is the kind of

education that frees him from the limitations of his own experience and enables him to

assimilate and make use of that of other men. That is what books can do for a man. Lacking

it, he can hope for little better than a high- grade routine career.

Thus, for his own best good in the long run, the young engineering graduate will do

very well to give specific and serious consideration to the three interrelated phases of his

own continuing education: (1) the obtaining of a substantial foothold of practical experience;

(2) the continuation of technical studies which, coupled with his growing experience, will

keep him abreast of or ahead of development progress in his chosen field; (3) the

development of a social and civic relationship with his professional associates and with his

neighbors that will enable him to take his place as a citizen.

In addition to the foregoing suggestions, the young engineer will gain much for

himself by promptly establishing an active membership in the national professional society

of his chosen branch of the engineering field. By becoming an active participant in the

meetings and social affairs of the nearest local section of such national society, whether it

be in working with the reception committee or in presenting a technical paper or discussion,

the individual will achieve a worth-while sense of “belonging” in the world of adult affairs

and will materially enhance his opportunity for self-improvement through the personal

contacts and the experiences realized.

Suggestions as to Continuing Personal Development

Popular literature abounds in success stories which repay study. However, of at least

equal importance are the reasons for the failures of men. Although some failures are the

inevitable outcome of inborn deficiencies, many more could be averted by reasonable care

and self-discipline. Too many men never take the trouble even to inform themselves of the

“rules of the game”. For every man who fails outright, ten just partially fail by falling short

of their opportunities and their actual personal capacities. On this score, the verdict of

experience is quite clear: Few engineers fail for technical incompetence; few fail as a result

of gross defects and character; most of those who do fall short do so by reason of minor

defects of character or negative personal traits which could be avoided or corrected by the

individual.

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The personal qualities of character, judgment, efficiency, and understanding have a

direct and vital bearing upon the success or failure of an individual‟s professional career,

and hence warrant conscious thought and consideration. To a certain extent, each

individual unconsciously receives some measure of endowment in these qualities through

the medium of family and other pre-adult environment and experiences. During college and

subsequent professional life, the development of these important qualities definitely is

subject to the thoughtful control of the individual. College offers a special opportunity for

the individual to learn in an organized and concentrated manner a range of subject matter

which few men ever master anywhere else, but life itself is a continuing school of

opportunity for the development of character and personality. Thus, the young engineer —

especially the one who is tempted to feel a sense of frustration or arrested progress while

his practical experience and judgment are catching up with his scholastic scientific

attainments—should be particularly on the alert to take full advantage of every

opportunity to observe in others and to cultivate in himself the personal traits essential to

success.

Character, assuming sound heredity and early nurture, grows with and through

responsibility. The young engineer should do his work as if he were personally responsible

for the success of the entire project on which he is engaged. Then, when larger

opportunities come his way, the essential habits of integrity, responsibility, resourcefulness,

and initiative already will have been formed.

Judgment is the fruit of experience and reflection. It is not enough to get experience

alone. Experience needs to be digested. One must turn over in his mind, weighing and

appraising them at every point and seeking to discover how much wider the applications

could be than the particular situation at hand.

Efficiency, likewise, grows through experience and self-criticism. One of the chief

goals in education is to learn how to judge one‟s own work; to know what is good and why,

what is bad and why, and to profit from his shortcomings as well as from his successes.

There are rules underlying personnel efficiency which anyone can learn, and some of those

particularly applying to engineers have been summarized earlier in this chapter, but mostly

it is an art which each individual must teach himself.

Understanding of men is a goal worth a lifetime of effort. What one man can

accomplish single-handed is so limited that a good engineer is fairly forced to become a

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supervisor, an administrator, or an executive. Students often ask for a course in psychology

in the hope that it will teach them the secrets of executive success. When they plunge into

the complexities of human nature and its springs of motive and action, they are soon cured

of their faith in “ten easy lessons.” To learn what men live by, sympathy and even affection

are as necessary as scientific observation. One must learn to love what is common as well

as what is rare in people. He must be ready to do as he would be done by; must realize that

what he dislikes in others is just as disagreeable in himself. He must be willing to treat

men as ends rather than means, and he must have an instinctive regard for their

sensibilities. The approach is closely akin to religion. All these attitudes can be cultivated

by the young engineer to his infinite advantage. When he marries, his wife may be able to

help him greatly, for women often have more reliable insights than men into human

qualities.

The young engineer will do well not to take himself or others too seriously. He should

cultivate a sense of humor; it supplies the lubricant of life which is just as important as its

driving power. He should learn to work with concentration, but without emotional tension;

the latter, like adrenalin, is best kept in reserve for emergencies. He should make a little

profanity go a long way. Too common a use of swear words usually is an unconscious

attempt to cover up an actual poverty of ideas and words by exaggerated emphasis.

He should be agreeable in all his normal relationships, but not too affable to start a

fight when the objectives are worth fighting for. When he cannot agree with others, he

should not hesitate to fight, but should do so cleanly and with good temper. He should be

companionable at all times, but reserve familiarity, especially with his seniors, until he is

sure it is welcomed. He should avoid gossip, and not encourage animosities and intrigues.

He should not give way to personal resentments after a set-back; even politicians who fight

bitterly in public are strikingly free from vindictiveness in their personal relations.

He should keep a high sense of integrity in essentials, but learn to compose differences

on secondary issues by good-natured give-and-take. In this respect a wise lawyer is a good

subject for study. An engineer should not take advantage of double meanings, or hide

behind sophistries. He should be clear, direct, and forthright, but save brutal frankness for

the few more extreme situations. He should learn early how to present his views in

conferences and meetings, how to preside over committees and group gatherings; how to

keep discussion open and balanced yet headed toward conclusions; when to bring matters at

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issue to a decision, and how to reach decisions by agreement rather than a divisive vote

however possible.

All in all, he should remember that neither he nor the men above him are expected to

be paragons, but thoroughly human and intelligently alert; not models of perfection, just

growing men with a clear sense of values and direction. Let him learn as early as possible

the difference between energy and nervousness, and the superior worth of quiet self-

confidence to noisy self-consciousness. Finally, let him often remind himself that as an

engineer and a professional man, an attitude of mutual helpfulness and friendly emulation

will carry him further than any combative spirit of personal competition.

36

Chapter V THE ENGINEER AND LEGAL REGISTRATION

His Changing Relation to Society

WE LIVE in an age dominated by groups instead of individuals. The sort of democracy of

which Jefferson dreamed, a nation of sturdy and independent yeomen where public policy

would be formed by counting up individual opinions, has largely given way to a society

based on pressure blocs. Time may correct many of the extremes or abuses which have

arisen, but the fundamentally changed conditions remain. In Jefferson‟s day, three-

quarters of the people of the United States gained their livelihoods by the use of their own

possessions; today the number is estimated to be between one-sixth and one-seventh. Then

we were an agricultural and rural people; now we are an urban people. Then the soil or the

sea was a universal refuge in times of adversity; now when depression comes there is no

place to go except the insurance office or the relief roll. The founding fathers were a

property-minded generation, who built up the protecting arm of the law around property

rights. We are a job- and social-security-minded generation, and in our fumbling way are

throwing the protecting arm of the law around men‟s rights to employment and income,

perhaps to an unsound degree.

For the most part, this tide has swept around the professions and left them their

traditional individualism. Professions which render a purely individual service like

medicine and dentistry have been little affected. The many new rules which society has

adopted have not altered the lawyer‟s function, but have greatly enlarged his opportunities.

Professions whose work relates largely to industry, business, and public services—

engineers, chemists, accountants, and the like—have been profoundly affected by the

pressure-group movement and increasingly find themselves in between organized industry,

organized labor, and organized agriculture. At times, the national political policy could be

summed up by saying that agriculture is the protected ward of the state, labor is presumed

to be able to do no wrong, business and industry are presumed to be able to do no right, and

the professional and intellectual classes can be ignored safely as being too few and too

scattered to count.

37

Engineers, who formerly regarded their profession as a loose aggregation of like-

minded individuals, have gradually been roused to action. Now it seems important or even

urgent to be able to act in concert in social and economic affairs affecting their interests and

those which society has entrusted to them. To do so, it is necessary to increase greatly the

solidarity of the profession, hitherto a vaguely defined nucleus within a large body of

technical workers. This, in turn, calls for more accurate definition of the title engineer and

closer restrictions on its use, equally for the protection of the profession and of society-at-

large.

Loose organization and uncontrolled use of the title engineer may have done more

good than harm in our earlier individualistic society; keeping careers open to native talents

and encouraging personal initiative were probably more important than protecting the

public against the minor and localized harm which could result from misrepresentation and

fraud. In contrast, nearly all men live today in a framework of indispensable technical

services and industrial enterprises, and existence itself has come to depend on the unfailing

performance of the engineer‟s professional functions. Fraud and deceit in representing one‟s

personal fitness for these functions may have widespread public consequences, no less than

actual dishonesty or incompetence in performing them.

Voluntary Guild, or Legally

Constituted Profession?

Two schools of thought have emerged, and in some degree continue to exist, as

engineers have faced these twin problems over the years. The more conservative school has

preferred to preserve the voluntary guild pattern of the long-established societies inherited

from Great Britain, while the more radical school has pressed for the creation of a legally

constituted profession like medicine and law which may be entered only through

examination and licensure by a public body. The actual objective and immediate goal of

those who most aggressively promoted the idea of legal registration for engineers was the

establishment of a restrictive barrier which would make entrance into the engineering

profession progressively more difficult. Both groups have recognized the necessity of

drawing the line of professional rank and title much tighter. Politically, the more passive

and traditional policy proved to be no match for its more aggressive rival. The movement

for legal recognition and regulation has won an overwhelming political victory. Beginning

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with Wyoming in 1907, public licensing laws have been adopted by all the states and

territories of the Union and by all the mainland Canadian provinces. The number of

engineers who have been registered under these laws is steadily increasing, and now all

major organizations accept licensing as an established practice and none actively opposes it.

Registration—Optional or Required?

The legal ground for public registration, as stated in effect in the preambles of all laws

so far enacted, is “to safeguard life, health, and property, and to promote the public

welfare.” The more immediate goal was to gain for the profession certain advantages which

registration proponents believed only legal registration could bestow.

As a practical matter, no way has been found to define and restrict by law the terms

engineer and engineering in the same degree as physician and medicine or attorney and law.

Long usage has given the term engineering a generic character embracing an immense

variety of technical work and many levels of responsibility. It has not been possible to

divorce an American vocabulary from the older usage prevailing in Great Britain, where

the “engineering trades” embrace every operation involved in the manufacturing of

machinery. Although all engineering activity ultimately affects public safety, relatively few

engineers carry a large degree of direct personal responsibility v, of this sort. The research

engineer, who may be working on improved iron alloys for transformer cores, would usually

leave all concern for public safety to those who design, construct, erect, and operate the

ultimate product. Why should he obtain a public license, unless his employer has occasion

to establish his professional standing in court, possibly in patent cases?

Among the great body of engineers employed in industry, registration is still

considered as optional and few concerns have yet made it a prior condition of employment.

However, it is both feasible and desirable to restrict by law or public regulations certain

appointments to “registered professional engineers,” and the courts and public regulatory

bodies alike tend increasingly to limit formal recognition of professional standing to those

engineers so qualified. State and national organizations of registered engineers are making

concerted efforts to dissuade or prevent firms not including registered engineers from using

the words engineer or engineering. In some instances courts have ruled that since

engineering is legally a personal function, it is not possible for a corporation to practice it,

thus making it illegal to include the word “engineering” in its official name.

39

Results—Actual and Potential

It is still too early for a conclusive appraisal of the Registration plan. Some excellent

positive results, however, are to be recorded: The ranks of engineers are steadily being

purged of pretenders and incompetents; a clearer distinction between technicians and

professionals in engineering work is being evolved; public appointments are now generally

restricted to licensed engineers of proved competence; in the past, no means other than

individual necessity or desire has been available to compel engineering graduates to extend

their education after they have become actively employed, and there has been no effective

evaluation of the practical training received in the introductory years. Better identification

afforded by licensing provisions is giving the engineer-in-training a recognized status as

protection against loss of identity in union or white-collar groups; it is also giving

professional groups who may need to organize collective bargaining units a more definite

basis of alignment; and it is affording aid to better standards of compensation for engineers

in classified ranks of public employment.

Some of the more Utopian goals of the movement, particularly the desired gains in the

engineer‟s individual prestige, are yet to be attained. Meanwhile, engineering in general is

enjoying a marked advance in popular esteem as a result of the wide publicity given to

striking technical achievements. A public license, in itself, seems to possess little magic in

raising status; barbers and embalmers, as well as lawyers and physicians, are licensed by

the state. However, the identifying of a particular group of persons who perform a much

needed and highly respected function gives them a far better opportunity to impress their

talents and their worth on the public mind.

Attitude of the Young Engineer

Should the young engineer, as he leaves college to enter practice, plan definitely to

secure his license? In most cases, possibly all, the answer is definitely yes, for in no other

way can he protect his investment in an engineering education. If the recent rapid growth

in registration continues, it is safe to predict that by the time today‟s graduates reach full

maturity the practice will be practically universal. The young graduate will want to have a

new and definite goal to strive for, one that will bring him a sense of achievement and the

recognition of his associates and friends now that his college degree is safely won. He will

40

want to keep all doors of opportunity open to him until he is firmly settled in his career, and

there are some he can not enter without the license as a key. He will want to share all

possible gains in recognition which engineers may enjoy, and the license may be

increasingly important to that end. He will want to assure himself of full professional

recognition by any court or legislative body or regulatory com-mission before which he may

have occasion to appear. He will want to have his professional status recognized in any

other state or country to which his work may take him.

All theory and doctrine aside, these are weighty practical considerations. Unless the

engineer graduate is clearly destined to a business career, or to a long postgraduate

training for research on the borders of pure science, enlightened self-interest and a decent

sense of professional citizenship will lead him to consider them carefully and act upon them

without delay.

The “Engineer-in-Training” Plan

Prior to graduation, or at least upon accepting his first permanent position, a young

engineer will do well to inform himself of the provisions of the registration laws applicable

where he is planning to locate. It will be fortunate for him if this area is one of the rapidly

growing number which have recognized a special status for the “Engineer-in-Training.”

Under this plan, the license • examination is taken in two stages. The first, which may be

taken immediately after graduation, covers the scientific and engineering fundamentals

which have been acquired in an engineering school. The final examination, which comes

after a prescribed minimum period of experience, is intended to test not only the practical

knowledge acquired, but also the engineer‟s powers of analysis, judgment, and procedure.

Having won his status as Engineer-in-Training, the novice has a recognized status

and a definite goal. The licensing agency is in a position to advise and guide its enrolled

engineers-in-training toward the goals of experience and attainment to be gained during

the intervening years. Local sections of the national engineering societies and the state

societies of professional engineers also may aid them in a directed manner instead of

offering merely general encouragement.

Individual Procedure

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Engineers who wish to secure legal registration or license in any particular state or

province must communicate directly with the State Board, or provincial body or department

concerned, and request its application form and regulations. Registration or license in one

state, or certification by the National Bureau of Engineering Registration, does not permit

or authorize the practice of engineering in other states. However, most states grant

reciprocal registration to registrants of other states, or temporary permits to practice,

provided they first comply with the regulations of those states.

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Chapter VI TRADE OR PROFESSION

The Craftsman and His Union

WHEN a skilled mechanic is handed a blueprint and a work-order, he is expected to turn

out the job specified within the standard limits of time and tolerance, safely and with

intelligent care of the tools and equipment employed. Whether or not the product is strong

enough, or will wear well, or is most suitable or most economical, is none of his business.

Like every other worker who exercises skill without accepting responsibility beyond the

specific performance of assigned tasks, he is a craftsman. Once he has mastered his craft,

he logically takes honest pride in it. It is his personal possession, to be safeguarded like a

piece of property. He expects to practice it for life and to receive in compensation what

others receive for similar work. Whenever there is a gain in productivity due to improved

methods, equipment, or materials, he expects to receive a substantial share of it, without

doing much to create it. He aspires to increased security, comfort, and leisure, and to better

opportunities for his family, but he has almost no means of protecting his rights or

advancing his interest single-handed. Alone he is no match for a powerful employer. By

long experience, and much of it bitter, he and his fellows have learned that they can secure

protection and advancement only by organization into a union and bargaining collectively.

Getting this idea accepted by society and recognized by law has cost a long struggle.

The union began as a fighting machine; it had to be held together against odds and kept in

fighting condition; it called for militant leadership; and it declared that it must be ready to

strike, in its extreme form a miniature war. The union came to consider its asserted “right

to strike” as being “sacred.” To hold the union together and to perpetuate their own power,

its leaders found it necessary to produce immediate and seemingly tangible benefits at

frequent intervals. Making dollars worth more by efficient production, from which every

one might benefit, brought little credit to union officials at election times, hence the goal

must be to get more dollars in pay, regardless of the value of the work performed. An air of

militancy, necessary perhaps in the early stages of the struggle, has tended to hang over

the union movement long after the fight for recognition has been won.

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Craft and Industrial Unionism

Labor unionism as now generally known is the outgrowth of the once progressive and

constructive craft guilds of history—groups of craftsmen banded together for mutual

improvement of their products and the expert training of new craftsmen. Until recent

decades, unionism was essentially an aristocratic movement in working circles.

Organizations tended to follow horizontal craft lines and great masses of workers without

special skills were virtually excluded. In recent years, especially since the advent of mass

production, organization has been mainly along vertical lines, for political strength

embracing all wage workers in a given industry. Craft unionism in general is more mature

and less militant, relatively caste-conscious and conservative and more disposed to work by

direct negotiation between particular groups of workers and local employers. Industrial

unionism, in contrast, is new and militant, more inclusive, less secure, relatively radical,

disposed to erase all caste lines, disposed to act on an industrywide front and avowedly

operates through political channels.

The Goals of Unionism

Quite naturally the immediate goals of union activity vary widely with time and

circumstances and give an impression of opportunism which often obscures the underlying

objectives. The individual worker, who may have only slender savings between him and

destitution, naturally thinks in terms of “short run” benefits or losses, in contrast to the

“long run” thinking of economists and philosophers and to the balance-sheet thinking of the

business man and the financier. Rank-and-file workers are concerned to get wages up,

hours down, and work lightened by any means at hand. The implicit goals of the movement,

however, are of a more fundamental character.

Among the most significant of these is the assertion by workers of a “property right” in

their jobs, entitling them to continuity of employment and denying to the employer any

right of arbitrary dismissal or demotion. The Federal Constitution forbids the taking of an

employer‟s property without due process of law, and labor is demanding some equivalent

protection for jobs. Closely related are the “right” claimed for the union to enforce a virtual

monopoly of employment, and the insistence of workers on reference in work privileges and

in promotion by seniority. The right of collective bargaining by chosen representatives, now

firmly entrenched by Federal law, is held to be a necessary counterpart to the right

44

investors have long possessed to pool their capital in great corporations. Both parties are

held to enjoy equal rights of collective action, to be taken on behalf of each by chosen

representatives—the union officials on one side and the board of directors or officers of

management on the other. Thus labor presses toward an equal right with employers and

Imagers to determine the goals and policies of industry and the distribution of its income;

also the right to participate on at least an equal basis in the settlement of claims and

grievances arising out of Conditions of employment.

Labor also claims as its birthright a rising standard of living and increasing leisure as

the fruits of scientific and technological advance. For bargaining purposes, labor is often

disposed to claim the entire gain, or even to “demand a settlement in advance which in

some cases it actually has received. Increasingly, however, militant unions avow the

intention of forcing the pace of progress in their own interest. Labor claims the right to

protect itself against what it considers to be a predatory standard of efficiency and to keep

restraint on production in the interest of health, leisure, and assured opportunity for

employment. The assertion often has been made by labor that wages should depend upon

the standard of living and general consumption rather than productive efficiency. Some

radical union spokesmen go even further and proclaim the Marxian idea that all workers

should be paid according to their needs rather than their merits or the amount of useful

work they are willing to do.

The Changing

Responsibilities of Management

These major planks in labor‟s platform have been outlined at some length so that the

young engineer may better judge for himself whether or not his own career‟s aims and

obligations are likely to be furthered by a personal alliance with the union movement. The

engineer, however, can ill afford to view with either indifference or contempt the epic

struggle which labor is waging for increased power, security, and sharing in the fruits of

progress. The shifting balance of power is evidence that the old centers of control of

industry, vested in the property rights of capital, have been breaking down. Some new

center will have to be created. Labor, in opposing its interests to those of capital, too often

has merely substituted one set of excesses or abuses for another. Actually there are four

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parties to the issue, not two. Investors, workers, consumers, and the general public all have

a stake in it.

Management, which was originally a function of ownership, but which has steadily

grown more and more divorced from it as corporations grew to a size such that no one

person could hold a controlling interest, is rapidly being forced to modify the sole allegiance

it has traditionally owed to capital and to take on the role of a joint trusteeship for all four

parties concerned. In doing so, management is clearly becoming predominantly professional

in function. Engineers, as the most numerous and influential professional group in

industry, are exceptionally placed to capitalize on this opportunity. To do so they obviously

must add to their skill and understanding in the technical realms of organization and

production an equal skill and understanding in the area of human and social problems. The

young engineer aiming at a management career must know the aspirations and reactions of

labor as well as he knows the rights of capital, the interests of customers, and the demands

of the general public. He must see labor organizations as part of a sweeping social

movement which will affect his activities throughout his life regardless of his own

preferences. As his responsibilities increase, he will have to reckon union influence into the

costs, the standards of production and quality, and the completion schedules of work which

he plan‟s. When he becomes an executive, labor relations will be his daily concern and his

nightly companion.

Union and Professional Goals

Some argue that union membership and collective action are by nature incompatible

with a professional career. But a majority of the most distinguished musicians in the

country are union members, as are many actors and working journalists. Many teachers

and quasi-professional civil service employees, feeling themselves to be underpaid and

unrecognized, are seeking redress through union channels. The aims of an engineering

career are really not inherently opposed to the avowed goals of unionism. Many of them, in

fact, seem strikingly parallel. What is the ultimate aim of engineering if not to raise the

general standard of living in terms of convenience, comfort, leisure, health, security, and

cultural enjoyment?

On many secondary issues and immediate goals, professional engineering and

unionism are definitely opposed. Engineers are not concerned with the class struggle and

46

generally deplore it; they prefer a fluid society in which any man may rise by industry and

talent. Engineers oppose the leveling tactics of unions; they do not want the distinction

between professional knowledge, skill, judgment, and responsibility on the one hand, and

routine mechanical skill on the other, wiped out in rigidly limited salary schedules.

Engineers are opposed to any plan of compensation that does not reward individual

contributions according to merit. Engineers desire for themselves a professional basis of

employment; they want to be free to put in over-time without stint at a critical stage in a

development or construction project and later to take time to relax without the tyranny of a

time clock and pay-roll accounting system.

Technology and the

Worker’s Standard of Living

Engineers want to improve the productive efficiency rather than protect the

monopolies of craft groups. They want to see the gains from technology‟ shared by everyone

in the form of more, better, and cheaper goods or services, and not monopolized by

organized workers who did little or nothing to create these gains. Demands for higher pay

for lower output seem to them to threaten the very existence of industry and the whole

system of free economy. Engineers know that prosperity must be drawn from a living

spring, that there is no cistern of liquid wealth from which to satisfy labor‟s demands for

compensation without commensurate productivity.

Most engineers, while recognizing the limited protective values of unionism, would

deny that it has been the primary force in raising wages, reducing hours of work, improving

safety conditions, and generally improving the conditions of the working population. They

believe they have a right to claim for themselves much of the credit for these social gains.

No small part of the wage gains for which union leaders claim credit and by which they

perpetuate themselves in power are viewed by engineers as illusory; they point to the fact,

apparently well substantiated, that despite constant union pressure, labor for nearly fifty

years has continued to receive an almost constant fraction of what industry produces and

that the increase in real income in that period has fallen far short of the rise in money

wages. In their view, labor‟s real gains have come from advancing technology, and much of

labor‟s pressure has been merely an inflationary force actually tending to reduce the real

buying power of money.

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The Engineer and

Collective Bargaining

To a young engineer who feels neglected or has an actual grievance, these

considerations are likely to seem remote or possibly academic. If he feels himself to be

underpaid, disregarded, and individually helpless, and someone urges him to join a union

and gain the benefits of collective pressure, the immediate inducements may seem fairly

compelling. He has heard of the engineering profession, of course, but it seems far away,

aloof, and perhaps vague. The union is right there on the job. Under the law the engineer

has the right of collective bargaining and here is an agency offering to act in his behalf.

Federal laws guarantee to industrial employees the right of collective bargaining

through representatives of their own choosing. These laws do not create or prescribe the

agencies by which collective negotiations are to be conducted. While the law does not make

collective bargaining mandatory, its purpose is to encourage the practice, and the

unattached individual is likely to find himself at a disadvantage or without protection when

others insist on doing his bargaining for him. As a result, many an engineer has found

himself in a jam.

There have been repeated instances where labor unions, claiming wide bargaining

rights, have used the occasion to force professional engineers into their ranks, even using

strikes and picket lines in some cases to accomplish this end. There also have been cases in

which the Board has overruled the separation of professional from nonprofessional

personnel, holding that bargaining status is determined by an employee‟s actual duties

rather than any differences of education or tradition. Once included in a heterogeneous

bargaining group, engineers have found it difficult or at times impossible to effect a

separation as an independent group.

Can Professional Organizations

Engage in Collective Bargaining?

When the situation calls for collective bargaining, some have asked, why do not the

great national engineering societies protect and serve their members by bargaining for

them? Of many possible reasons, two are outstanding. One is a matter of principle; the

engineering profession has always emphasized the ideal of individual responsibility as

48

opposed to any form of enforced solidarity and has insisted that engineers should be paid as

individuals and not in conformity with prescribed and uniform scales. When classifications

of rank and schedules of compensation are set forth, they are intended as guide lines to

appropriate ranges of compensation rather than fixed prescriptions.

The second reason why the national engineering societies cannot act as bargaining

agencies is one of legal fact; the law forbids any joint organization of employers, managers,

and employees to act as a bargaining agency. The majority of all mature engineers are

supervisors or executives, and to force a segregation of these leaders of the profession from

their juniors and subordinates, who are technically employees in the sense of the law,

would destroy the very genius of the professional organization.

Some engineers and scientific workers have set up independent organizations in an

attempt to give them the advantage of collective bargaining without the disadvantages that

go with a typical trade union. These have been recognized by the National Labor Relations

Board. One of the serious problems involved is that of separating the professional from the

nonprofessional employees in such an organization.

Do Professional Ideals Supply the Answer?

The ideal for which engineers have striven has been a golden mean between

collectivism and individualism. Its goal has been the upbuilding of the entire profession in

knowledge, skill, service, and status, in the conviction that the individual engineer stands

to profit more in the long run by that policy than by any sort of pressure-group action. Like

all moderates, their position has become harder to defend and hold in times of stress. The

engineering profession as a whole, it seems, views the rise of a pressure-group political and

social order with grave misgivings and would abandon its traditional economic

individualism for mass action only under a sense of compulsion and with extreme

reluctance.

And now, back to the young engineer. Where does he come in? Unless he is a very dull

and timid person indeed, he hopes to get on in life and to do so by personal merit. The

engineer rarely is class conscious. When he is, it is usually a sign of defeatism and

disillusionment. Mere mass advancement as offered by the union he finds distasteful, and

discipline by outsiders he finds obnoxious. It‟s not that he is a ruthless individualist,

seeking to climb by trampling on his fellows; it is rather because he can fulfill his destiny

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only by developing and perfecting his personal gifts of originality, his personal sense of

integrity, and his personal role of trusteeship rather than partisanship.

When young engineers relinquish this birthright of freedom for the supposed quick

gains which unionism offers, it is hard for their older brothers to forget the story of the

mess of pottage.

50

Chapter VII WHAT AND WHY IS A PROFESSION?

THE word profession often is loosely used. It derives from the Latin verb profiteor, which

means to avow or declare. In most of the languages of Latin origin the word profession

means any distinct or recognized occupation. The usage of modern English, which

increasingly restricts the term to a learned calling with specialized skills, distinctive

functions, and recognized social obligations, is almost unique. The term has acquired a

prestige halo which many desire to share. When barbers elect to be known as “chirotonsors”

or beauty operators as “cosmotologists” or undertakers as “morticians” in order to enhance

the dignity of their “professions”, sophisticates are inclined to smile indulgently and wax

mildly satirical, but the truth is that the higher sense in which we use the term is only

gradually becoming fixed in common use. The word profession is like a coat; what you get

out of it depends on what you put in. Engineers who covet a more adequate professional

status and recognition must do their share to give the word a more authoritative meaning.

A Definition

What is a profession and what are the distinctive characteristics of a professional

career? Like a fabric, the pattern varies with the weaver, but the web of continuous strands

which support this is fairly definite in its nature. In its higher senses, a profession is an

occupation which:

1. Renders a specialized service based upon advanced specialized knowledge and skill,

and dealing with its problems primarily on an intellectual plane rather than on a physical

or a manual-labor plane;

2. Involves a confidential relationship between a practitioner and a client or employer;

3. Is charged with a substantial degree of public obligation, by virtue of its possession

of specialized knowledge;

4. Enjoys a common heritage of knowledge, skill, and status to the cumulative store of

which professional men are bound to contribute through their individual and collective

efforts;

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5. Performs its services to substantial degree in the general public interest, receiving

its compensation through limited fees rather than through direct profit from the

improvements in goods, services, or knowledge which it accomplishes;

6. Is bound by a distinctive ethical code in its relationships with clients, colleagues,

and the public.

Other strands in the warp of professional life can be identified, but these six belong in

common to all areas.

Of professions there are many kinds: Open professions like music to which any man

may aspire within the bounds of his talents, closed professions like painting, and group

professions like law whose members of the bar and the bench constitute a special class in

society; private professions like authorship and public professions like journalism; artistic

professions like sculpture and technical professions like surgery; ameliorative professions

like the ministry and social work; and professions which safeguard social institutions by a

technique of destruction, like the army and navy. One or two broad distinctions may help to

bring order out of what may seem confusing or contradictory. A fairly clear line can be

drawn between the professions whose functions and standards are essentially objective,

such as engineering, dentistry, and accounting, and those which are more largely subjective,

such as music, poetry, and the fine arts. The former derive largely from certain things to do;

the latter largely from an individual urge for self-expression.

The more objective professions as a rule are highly organized; they have fairly definite

standards of admission; they do a great deal in common for the advancement of knowledge

and skill, for the exchange of experience and the formulation of standards; and they

exercise a good deal of regulation over the activities of their members. The most subjective

professions are largely unorganized, except as an award of distinction. None the less, a

strong sense of comradeship and solidarity exists in all professional groups, whether it finds

formal expression in a bar association or in the far-ranging talk of a group of artists around

a cafe table. The sense of like-mindedness which comes from associating with men of

superior talents and training in the pursuit of common goals and which puts service above

gain, excellence above quantity, the rewards of self-expression above any pecuniary

incentive, and a code of honor and courtesy above the competitive spirit, is one of the most

dynamic of all the intangible forces in modern society.

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Early Guilds

The older professions, and especially the traditional four of law, medicine, divinity,

and philosophy (teaching), have their roots in the priesthood of antiquity. What is

professional in modern callings such as architecture, engineering, journalism, and the law,

can be traced back to the craft and merchant guilds which arose in late medieval times out

of the breakdown of feudalism. They arose out of the need of free men for self-government.

Feudal government was based upon the mutual obligations of barons and their retainers;

and the groups engaged in industry land trade in the cities had no organized part in it.

Lacking the support of any strong central government and the protection of army, or navy

to farflung commerce, voluntary groups of merchants had to band together for mutual

protection, as in the Hanseatic cities along the coast of the Baltic Sea. The various crafts

likewise found it necessary to join together in guilds for mutual protection and regulation.

If you have an opportunity to see Wagner‟s Die Meistersinger you may enjoy not only the

magnificent music, but also witness an unforgettable picture of guild life in its medieval

home. There being no other authority, the guilds took unto themselves the regulation of the

hours of labor, the observance of holidays, the admission of apprentices and the length and

character of their training, the wage systems, the standards of workmanship, and the

quality of goods. They observed certain festivals, administered charities, and supplied a

nucleus of civic life. The guilds also tested the progress of novices, apprentices, and

journeymen, and finally graduated them into the well-guarded ranks of the master

workmen with imposing ceremonies. Our college commencements are the picturesque

survivals of these ceremonies, and the very word degrees is reminiscent of the learner‟s

progress through the gradations of his apprenticeship.

The guilds naturally took unto themselves considerable monopolies and privileges.

When great cities grew up around them, the guilds were recognized and given a large share

of civic responsibility. To this day the City of London and the guilds are a single corporate

unit, having their scat of government in the historic Guildhall. The Church, too, lent its

blessings in keeping with a philosophy which looked upon society as a commonwealth

divided into divinely ordained functions and not as a mere aggregate of individuals. Some of

the recent Papal Encyclicals dealing with social problems have undertaken to revive this

idea of a “corporate” society.

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Privileges Bring Responsibilities

In short, the guild life which modern professional bodies perpetuate became a highly

developed form of citizenship which centered around occupations rather than policies. The

privileges and obligations were, and still are, reciprocal. The public grants to a profession

more or less tangible monopolies and self-governing privileges, in return for which the

profession engages to admit to its circle only men of proved competence, to guarantee their

trustworthiness, to insist on the observance of ethical relations and practices, and to protect

the public against bungling and extortion.

The sell-policing responsibilities of the professions in the world of today are not

merely traditional, but rest on the fact that so many of the occasions which call for

professional service are human or public emergencies in which the accepted axioms of

business, such as “competition is the life of trade” and its legal doctrine of caveat emptor,

“let the buyer beware,” simply break down. When a baby is about to be born or an appendix

must be removed, you do not want to drive a smart bargain at your own risk, nor would

your city take an ordinary business hazard on its water supply. What you want are

credentials that will assure you that the job is in fully trustworthy hands. Note that word

trustworthy; it implies both competence and character.

When the layman comes face to face with the complex specialization of professional

knowledge and practice, he is likely to be baffled and in danger of being misled. If you have

a problem of mental illness in your family, how can you be sure you are entrusting it to a

qualified and responsible psychiatrist and not to a plausible but unscrupulous quack? To

protect you in such emergencies the public wisely puts the burden of guaranteeing the

practitioner‟s competence and ethics on the profession itself. The physician you can trust is

the one who is recognized as well qualified and reputable by his brother physicians; so also

with the sanitary engineer to whom your community can trust its water supply.

Professional recognition is not just a private perquisite; it is actually a public function and

responsibility of critical importance.

Wherever professional activity involves a direct custody of private or public safety, the

tendency in America is to bring it under public control to the extent of requiring a public

license to practice. Medicine, dentistry, law, architecture, pharmacy, optometry, and

teaching in public schools offer familiar examples. Engineering and nursing also are

partially included. Public licensure does not relieve a profession of the responsibility to

54

guarantee the competence of its practitioners; it merely implements such responsibility in a

particular way, by designating a board of examiners from the professional body, authorizing

it to conduct suitable examinations and to issue public licenses to candidates who pass

successfully. These licenses give assurance of minimum attainments only and make no

distinction between the least competent persons receiving them and the outstanding

leaders of the profession.

Often the state leaves professional bodies free to select their own members and issue

their own credentials. Both public licensing and guild selection may exist side by side, as in

the realm of medicine, where each state licenses all entrants at the level of general practice

through a board of public examiners, while the various groups of specialists have voluntary

national organizations which set up advanced training programs for candidates, give

examinations, and issue diplomas in their respective fields. Still more selective bodies exist

and are known as academies or colleges, to which admission is a mark of distinction, and

which concern themselves with professional and technical goals and standards of effort at

the highest level. In the end, it comes to one basic principle: An organized profession must

guarantee to the public the trustworthiness of its practitioners. In return the public grants

the profession some special marks of privilege and esteem and protects it from the

incompetent judgment of the layman by a privileged position before the law.

Let us now examine in more detail the six characteristic strands which run through

all professional activity:

Specialized Service

Professional service, in its higher sense, rests on knowledge and skill too demanding

for a person without special abilities and specialized training. It must therefore be entered

through an orderly discipline of both education and training; the one fundamental and

general, and the other practical and detailed. Both education and training must rise to a

plane above the routine of current practice. How often the student is heard to complain,

“Why should I take . . . . . . . .? I‟ll never use it in my practice.” Surgeon, lawyer, engineer,

and soldier alike will have to face emergencies, novel situations not covered in textbooks or

standard training routine, where each will have to rely on his fundamental knowledge and

his personal resourcefulness. How much dare he risk in such a tight spot? That is where

solidarity and breadth, plus character, are indispensable. Every profession has its

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educational standard, and it always exceeds the specific demands of practice. Otherwise, it

would be just an elaborate trade. This margin is essential not only as a safeguard in

emergences; it is also a guarantee that the practitioner can extend his knowledge and skill

as needed to keep abreast of new developments.

As knowledge and technique advance, specialized service necessarily breaks down into

smaller and smaller areas of individual responsibility. Even dentists, whose whole domain

consists of the bony structures of the human mouth, include in their number a dozen or

more distinct specialists. This process of fragmentation, which is indispensable to research,

is carried over into the practice as new knowledge is employed. Thus the specialist‟s

individual duties tend to become more and more separated from the public responsibilities

of the profession at large. To insure his participation and the united action needed in

matters of public concern some over-all organization is indispensable, while many highly

specialized organizations are needed to foster research and to advance practice through

exchange of experience. Without unity above the plane of specialization a profession cannot

well fulfill its role of trusteeship in modern society. This is one of the fields in which the

great national engineering societies play an important role.

Confidential Service

When a client engages the service of a professional man, he has a right to expect that

his interests will be protected with singleness of purpose. He must feel free to disclose

secret knowledge with confidence that it will be used solely in his interest. The professional

man, on his part, must be free to question and investigate. A special sort of integrity

involved in this relationship. The client must not hold back significant information. The

professions man must observe scrupulous care for his client‟: interest in what he says,

writes, or does. He also must limit his professional engagements, for the time being, with

equal care. An attorney, for example, cannot ethically serve at the same time two clients

whose interests may come into conflict or competition, where knowledge gained from one

could even inadvertently work to the injury or profit of the other. In any doubtful case, he is

bound to disclose his other engagement before accepting a new engagement. Once he has

completed a particular engagement and is no longer retained for or employed by a given

client, highly confidential information remains confidential, but he is free to use in his

future practice the general knowledge and experience gained in such a case. An engineer is

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bound similarly in cases where conflicts of patent interests or competition between products

and service may be involved. He cannot serve two employers whose interests are in any way

opposed or competitive.

In general, the courts are bound to respect as inviolate any information given by a

client to a professional man in confidence. A clergyman cannot be compelled to disclose the

confidences of the confessional nor a physician the secrets told him in private consultation.

Such information is “privileged.” The courts also protect professional men from incompetent

judgment of their professional competence and fidelity at the hands of laymen. Should these

be called into question in any legal issue, the right to a judgment by his peers” is a jealously

guarded professional prerogative.

In this brief outline, enough has been said to make it clear why character

qualifications are no less important than technical qualifications in admitting men to

professional standing; also why codes of ethical practice and relationships are needed to

reinforce purely individual judgment in matters of professional integrity.

Public Obligation

While a professional man is obligated to serve his client or employer with singleness of

interest, he is bound at the same time to safeguard certain general interests of society

which transcend those of individual persons or corporations. The physician whose patient

has a contagious disease must not only do his St to cure him, but must also impose a

quarantine for the general good. The attorney is not only his client‟s advocate and bound to

defend his interest, but he is also an officer of the court and just as much bound to see that

the rules of justice are upheld. The minister of religion is not only a pastor and priest, but

also a guardian of public morals.

The engineer, though seldom conscious of it, is dealing with public interest at every

turn. Every problem he handles comes down ultimately to three questions: “Will it work?”,

“Will it pay?”, and “Is it safe?” The first two concern principally his client or employer, but

the latter involves a universal and unceasing public obligation, which no employer can ask

him to set aside. One of the social purposes served by professional organizations is to

protect the practitioner who feels compelled to act in the public interest to his employer‟s

monetary disadvantage.

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The public responsibilities of professional practice are not merely personal in their

incidence, they also involve entire professional groups. You expect your physician not only

to be trustworthy in consultation and skilled in diagnosis and therapy, but also to join with

other medical men in seeing to it that your community maintains the best standards of

public health and enjoys the best available standards of medical service, hospital care,

emergency equipment, and general health knowledge. You expect the bar as an organized

body to stand guard over the quality of legal service available to you and the standards of

justice dispensed in your courts. For editors, this obligation means the jealous defense of

freedom of public information as well as giving you the news. For architects, it means the

upholding of worthy standards of civic planning and public construction as well as skill and

taste in private planning. For teachers, it means working unceasingly for better schools as

well as for better teaching and teachers.

These examples should make it easy to see how engineers as a group are involved in

the public interest. It is their concern to see that the community has ample, efficient, and

economical sanitation, water supply, transportation, lighting and power service, fuel supply

and the like; that its civic planning and housekeeping measure up to high standards; that

public safety is well administered; and that its economic life is nourished by sound and

vigorous industry. Beyond this area lies a still broader public responsibility, namely to see

to it that the general public receives the fullest possible benefit in better goods, more

adequate services, lower costs, and rising standards of living from the advance of science

and the improvements of technology.

Certain specific obligations of professions to the public should be noted. First and

perhaps foremost is the guarantee of individual competence which already has been

discussed.

From this it follows that professions not only must guard carefully all admissions to

their ranks, but also must police the standards of practice. Men who must sit in judgment

on the competence and integrity of their fellows need well-tested principles to guide them in

their relations to each other, and these principles need to be made concrete in rules of

action. Something like a court must exist to try disputed eases, hence the committees on

professional ethics and conduct which act as tribunals in nearly all professional

organizations.

A profession, too, must give the public assurance that the needy as well as the rich

will receive adequate professional aid in emergencies. Engineers have less occasion to

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render charity practice than physicians, lawyers, and dentists, but they have the same

degree of obligation to see that all persons and classes receive a due share of benefit from

their services, through public or corporate channels if not through personal ones.

All professions, too, have an obligation to the public to uphold a state of professional

spirit or morale which will make professional life and service attractive to men and women

of superior gifts and qualities. The very nature of professional service is such that it is in

society‟s interest to enlist the best possible talent. Licensing standards, qualifying

examinations, policing actions, rules of conduct, and all similar devices tend automatically

to gravitate to the status of minimum levels, designed to keep the wrong persons out rather

than to draw the right persons in. Professional compensation usually is modest, or at best

limited, and of itself is not sufficient to attract the highest talents. Hence the universal

resort to morale-building practices within the professions themselves. Professional spirit is

the result of fencing off selected groups of persons having superior abilities; persons who

adhere to a common ideal that puts service above gain, excellence above quality, motives of

self-expression above pecuniary goals, and loyalty above individual advantage.

Common Heritage

No professional man justly can evade the obligation to contribute to the advancement

of his calling. The debt which one owes to his parents is seldom directly repaid; instead one

hands on to his children and grandchildren an equivalent of what he has received, with

interest. Just so in professional life. There one is heir to the ages. Without what countless

men, most of them unnamed, have contributed to the building of knowledge and technique,

to the accumulation and testing of experience, to the formulation of safe rules of practice,

and to the organization of united effort, one could never practice a profession at all.

These gifts from the past are not a private right, but a social trust. Modern civilization

is a social order based on science and technology; the product of three centuries of the most

highly organized effort of the human mind. There have been geniuses here and there who

made epochal contributions, but the essence of modernity is that progress no longer waits

on genius; instead we have learned to put our faith in the organized efforts of ordinary men.

Organization is simply the means by which the acts of ordinary men can be made to add up

to extraordinary results. To this idea of progress that does not wait on some lucky break,

some chance discovery, or some rare stroke of genius, but instead is achieved through

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systematic, cumulative effort, the engineer has contributed brilliantly. Among the

professions, engineering is the exponent of organization, par excellence. Due recognition of

his social trust on the part of an engineer involves an obligation not only to use his

inherited knowledge and skill wisely for the common good, but to contribute to the gain of

knowledge and skill; also not only to employ the safeguards of his profession and enjoy its

privileged status, but to advance it in public understanding and esteem and to strengthen

the organized channels through which he has received this heritage.

Many of the details of this obligation will be immediately apparent. One is to guide

young men and women of suitable gifts into the professional group; another is to contribute

to the advancement of education, particularly in science and engineering; another is to aid

research, either directly or through contributions of money and encouragement; another is

to share experience through discussion and publication; another is to aid in codifying

experience into I approved practices and standards; another is to support public policies

and measures which will tend to strengthen the profession and enhance its service. A

moment‟s reflection will make it clear that only rarely can an engineer do any of these

things single-handed. He does them by joining with others in organized effort. In this sense,

professional life is like religion. An individual may be able to live a righteous life in

isolation, but he can advance righteousness only by joining with others in a church, a

synagogue, or a I society.

Compensation for Service

The monetary rewards of professional service are inherently limited; they are not its

primary incentive in business, profit is the incentive to venture, to taking risks.

Professional men also take risks, but the risks are intended to bridge the gap between the

end of knowledge and some socially desirable goal, and the reward comes not as monetary

profit, but in the satisfaction of new achievement.

There need be no cant about the incentives of professional life. A comfortable and

ultimately secure income certainly is one of them. Without, reasonable security and

comfort, men cannot be free in their minds to devote their energies wholeheartedly to their

chosen service. A reasonably generous income is necessary to one‟s best efficiency in a

calling which demands continuing education, travel, organization activity, and stimulating

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contacts. Every man is entitled to aspire to the degree of wealth that will make him most

efficient.

The fact that professional men willingly accept a plan of compensation based on

salaries or fees, and frown for the most part on any contingent plans of rewards, is evidence

that the monetary incentive is secondary. The service motive certainly is present, although

most men are self-conscious in admitting it. What undoubtedly is prominent, and in many

cases predominant, is the motive of self-expression. Something inside a man wants a chance

to develop and to come out, and the profession and its activities are a welcome vehicle.

Proof of this is found in the delight which professional men take in any unique

achievements; in work as officers, directors, and committee members of their special

societies; and in any distinctive recognition or honor accorded by one‟s colleagues. To a

professional man or woman these are the durable satisfactions of life.

Opportunities for profit are not necessarily absent from professional life. Lawyers

often have knowledge which enables them to make profitable investments. Engineers

likewise are in a position to know of pioneer developments which may be very profitable.

There is nothing unethical in taking advantage of such opportunities, so long as no trust or

confidential responsibility is betrayed, but it should be clear that in doing so the lawyer or

engineer is not acting in his professional capacity, but as a business man. In the

circumstances, he does well to remain an investor and to avoid becoming a speculator. A

prudent man who is genuinely devoted to his profession will not allow his business interests

to overshadow his professional life. It is scarcely compatible with the absorbing duties of a

physician, lawyer, engineer, or architect for one of these professional men to spend his time

watching the fluctuations of a stock-market ticker.

Code of Ethical Relations

A profession is not merely a group of men or women who possess in common certain

advanced knowledge and certain elaborate skills which they apply to specialized service for

a good salary or an appropriate fee; it is a group of persons who have entered into a

compact with each other to serve their mutual interests and the general good. At the heart

of this compact is a code of ethical obligations, written or implied. This code, like the rules

of grammar, is something which a wise and experienced practitioner follows instinctively. It

is not an arbitrary set of regulations meant to keep the individual subservient to the group,

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or a rule-of-thumb product of experience, but has definite logic behind it. It is a means of

both restraint and reinforcement. In a pinch, the engineer, doctor, lawyer, or architect does

some things and avoids others. He does not have to debate with himself, for the matter is

settled in advance. When he has to meet a difficult or ticklish situation which may conflict

with the interest of some influential person or group, he finds it a priceless thing to have

the accepted code of a body of like-minded men to back him up. In the long run, this is

worth more to him, to his client, and to the public than are the valuable privileges of free

and unlimited competition.

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Chapter VIII THE ENGINEER IN HIS PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS

ENGINEERING is not only a profession, but also is closely related to business. Nearly all of

the special problems in personal conduct which engineers meet arise from this fact. Because

of his executive and commercial responsibilities, the engineer is in a unique position among

all types of professional men. His influence is steadily extending the area of human activity

which is governed by professional principles and ideals. His personal attitudes,

relationships, and conduct have a significance that reaches far beyond the realm of purely

personal morals. A busy man in such a situation will lack the time and perhaps die wisdom

to think out every problem that confronts him as if it were a new and original situation, nor

ought he to be expected to stand alone against the pressure of custom or the temptations of

self-interest. For guidance he ought to be able to draw on a store of wisdom gained from the

experience of engineers who have gone before him, and for reinforcement he needs the

organized moral support of his fellows. The profession therefore provides the rules of the

game and the referee to enforce them, accomplishing these objectives through the medium

of the several professional societies.

The Engineer and

His Professional Society

The engineer owes it to himself to become affiliated with and active in the professional

engineering society which embraces the technical specialty which he has selected for his

life‟s work.

Such an affiliation is a major stepping stone for the attainment and continuance of the

objective of recognized professional status which he set as his goal when he selected

engineering as a career. By no other means can the engineer for so little gain so much in

the way of insurance protection of his heavy investment of time, effort, and expense in the

painstaking building of his educational foundation for a professional career in engineering.

What is there about an organized engineering society that makes it so important an

element in the professional life of a young engineer? Is it the mere act of his affiliation; does

the payment of annual dues and the appearance of a man‟s name on the roster of such a

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society give him professional status as an engineer? Is such membership just a medium for

continuing education? Is it truly an effective medium for the interchange of information

about today‟s technical problems, or is it for hero and history worship? Or, in the unhappy

modern mode, is it a means of achieving political power thorough concerted group action?

Anyhow, what about the cost? How can the young graduate, just beginning to make his way

in an engineering job, or perhaps even in a pre-engineering job, afford the cost in dollars for

dues and the expenditure of time required for effective participation in the meetings or

committee activities of a professional society? These and other questions may assail one‟s

mind as serious consideration is given to the pro‟s and con‟s of professional society

membership. Let‟s examine into the matter a bit, and see what we can find in the way of

information and possible answers to these and other questions.

Prestige and Education

Admittedly, there is a certain amount of prestige that accrues to an individual

engineer just from having his name appear on the roster of the national professional

engineering society representing his technical specialty. This is true because such a society,

through the accumulative co-operative efforts of its members, has built for itself and its

members a position of recognize standing. Further, it is known throughout the engineering

profession as well as by the lay public in general that such a professional society establishes

minimum standards of technical education and experience which must be met successfully

by candidates before they are accorded the recognition of membership. However, as

substantial as is the personal prestige which comes from such a society membership, there

is much more to it than this.

The young graduate engineer who would make the most out of his chosen career must

ever be alert and aggressive in the everlasting furtherance of his education, because

engineering is alive, ever- changing, constantly advancing into new frontiers of knowledge

and experience. A man doesn‟t stand still in such a profession without pretty definitely

becoming a back number. Thus it is true that membership in an engineering society does

pay off, to the younger engineer and to the older engineer alike, as a medium for continuing

education in his chosen technical specialty through the free interchange of new ideas ,and

experiences. A still further dividend accrues to the society member, through the

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opportunity provided s for informal contact and social intercourse with others of similar

interests. But there is still more to it than this.

Professional Objectives

In recent years, there has been a feeling fairly “ widely held and frequently

vociferously expressed, usually by the younger members of the national engineering

societies, that these societies should undertake p. improve the financial status of the

individual engineer perhaps in much the same way that the labor unions have sought to

advance the financial status of individual industrial workers. This opens up a very road

topic, one entirely too broad to be developed properly in this treatise. However, it must be

touched upon because the question does come up with reference to membership in an

engineering society, as the result of confused thinking and the by-product of troublesome

industrial times.

An organization of engineers, such as one of the great national professional

engineering societies, can be effective as a technical organization, advancing the cultural

and technical attainments of its members and benefitting mankind in general through the

resulting improvement in goods and services; or it can be the equivalent of a professional

labor union, devoting its time and effort exclusively to promoting the financial welfare of its

individual members; or it can be a political organization, devoting its time and energy to

the influencing of legislation in accordance with its collective selfish interests, and seeking

the election or defeat of public officials accordingly. Such an organization can be any one of

these things, but it can be only one, not all.

Since it was by devoting themselves to the development and enhancement of

knowledge in their respective technical fields that the great national engineering societies

have grown to strength and prominence, since there are other channels through Which

interested individuals, engineers or others, may participate in political and other activities,

it seems logical to expect that the engineering societies should and probably will continue to

address themselves essentially to technical matters and to the advancement of their

members in their respective technical fields. Thus the desire for political power certainly is

not a reason for joining a national engineering society. The opinions of such societies, on

technical matters properly within their field of knowledge and experience, repeatedly have

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borne enormous weight of influence in connection with legislative questions involving such

technical matters, with resulting benefit to the citizenry as a whole.

Expense or Investment?

What about this question of cost? All too often, and ultimately to his own detriment,

the young engineer regards with keen distaste the idea of spending some ten or fifteen

dollars a year as dues for membership in the engineering society of his chosen branch of the

profession, regarding it as too large a portion of his junior engineering salary. If, however,

he were but to pause and consider the amount of time, the amount of work, and the number

of dollars that have gone into the collegiate education that has brought him to the threshold

of his chosen engineering career, and were to regard further that the paltry ten or fifteen

dollars of annual engineering society dues represent an insurance safeguard through which

he can protect and enhance his collegiate educational investment as he works his way

through the crucial first years of his professional career, he very likely would not act so

hastily to “save” on so small an item of expense of such potential productivity. Where else

for so small a sum can he buy so much? Where else for so small a sum can he buy himself a

year‟s supply of the most authentic and the most up-to-date literature of current technical

developments in his chosen field; a year‟s “ticket” to the local technical meetings as well as

the regional and national meetings where fellow engineers in his chosen field discuss

together the advances and the questions on the problems of the current day; a year‟s

“ticket” to the social comradeship of his fellow engineers, and the lifelong friendships which

grow out of such activities and contacts?

Certainly a young engineer is “busy.” He is busy establishing himself in a new world

of activity, and very likely busy also in planning or developing his own home and family,

and occasionally engaged in a few recreational activities thrown in for good measure. He is

all too likely, however, to be too quick to give this “busyness” as a reason for “not having

time” to join or to take an active part in the local and other activities of his national

professional engineering society. It is not too good engineering foresight for the young

engineer to be too busy for an appropriate measure of such an activity that can do him so

much good in his professional career.

Membership in the professional engineering society of his chosen technical specialty

can very greatly aid the young graduate engineer in his transition from engineering student

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to professional engineer. For those who have availed themselves of the privileges of student

affiliation with the engineering society, the transition to full membership is an easy step; so

easy, in fact, that it is too frequently overlooked. For the young engineer who has gained his

diploma without the benefit of such student membership, the benefit of engineering society

affiliation will be equally great although it will require an initiative step on his own which

he most assuredly should not hesitate to take.

A Guide, Philosopher, Friend

The young engineer‟s first view of the world of practice well may bring him some little

sense of bewilderment. After the years of school and college life where risks are few and

choices are simple, and where every circumstance has been prearranged expressly for the

purpose of accelerating the development of the individual, the transition to a work-a-day

world bristling with choices, decisions, and risks, where for a time at least the individual

understandably may feel himself to be a means to production rather than an end in itself,

puts character and personality to a severe test. One feels acutely a need for a guide, a

philosopher, a friend, in place of the previously ever present parent, teacher, or dean with

their understanding ears and their words of encouragement and stimulation. This is likely

to be particularly true when, as is the general rule rather than the exception, the young

graduate engineer literally bursting with his newly acquired academic knowledge backed

up by his demonstrated abilities finds himself suddenly translated from the glorious

position of a college senior to the position of apprentice or junior engineer doing a seemingly

routine job in a hard-working production establishment. This is where the engineering

profession should come actively into his life, for this is a training period of vital importance

to his future engineering career. In working his way up from the bottom of his professional

ladder, he must learn his profession. As his profession is made up of people, as well as

technical subject matter, he must learn people as well as technical things.

The young engineer on entering practice will gain much by promptly establishing an

active membership in his national professional society, and becoming actively affiliated

with its local section. This means attending as many meetings as possible, taking part in

discussions, perhaps writing an occasional paper. He will do well to find some actual work,

even so simple a thing as giving out membership badges or attendance cards at meetings.

This will give the young engineer a sense of “belonging” to his chosen profession; it will

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rapidly increase his acquaintance, frequently bringing him into association on a basis of

equality with the engineers higher up in his own organization, a strong advantage for any

man.

Self-Government By Professions

Professions exist because their special services are necessary to the public good. When

organized, a profession thus becomes a sort of limited “state within the state,” with its own

special citizenship and government. Government implies not only citizenship, but law, and

law in turn implies courts of justice and sanctions for its enforcement. These have their

necessary counterpart in professional life.

The rules and mechanisms of professional government are not as detailed and explicit

as they must needs be in political government. If a city, state, or nation were made up

entirely of like-minded people, upholding common ideals and devoting most of their efforts

to common purposes, the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule might supply all the

law that would be needed, since it would be more important to quicken “the spirit that

maketh alive” than to elaborate “the letter that killeth.” This is largely true in the

professions. Men are guided by principles and codes of ethics, usually simple and broad in

statement, with only a few explicit rules; they are judged by associations and committees of

their fellows, rather than by formal courts; and when purely moral sanctions break down,

the one police power invoked is simply to disbar them from professional recognition and

privileges. It takes like-minded and high-minded men to make such a system work, but

under its discipline they find their freedom enhanced and their independence safeguarded

and within it they enjoy a deep sense of moral security and satisfaction.

The Significance of Professional Ethics

The word ethics deserves special attention, for it means something beyond the kindred

words law and morals. The Greek word ethos from which it comes carries connotation of

“rightness”, based on reason and foresight in human conduct. A code of ethics is therefore

not a formulary of specific rules, covering every problem of conduct, nor is it any such broad

statement of ideals as the Sermon on the Mount. It is rather a statement of the principles of

“rightness”, broad in scope and just sufficiently specific in detail to enable an intelligent

man to deduce for himself the rule of conduct which applies in a situation. What makes

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these principles “right” is the tested verdict of experience that in the wide sense and the

long run I they work out so as to give society the highest protection and the best service and

so as to assure to the professional man the personal incentive and security which will best

serve these ends.

Self-government for a profession, when reduced to concrete terms, involves six

elemental questions:

Who may be permitted to practice?

What are his obligations to his client or employer?

What are his obligations to his colleagues?

What further obligations does he owe to society?

By what standards shall he be compensated?

How and by whom shall his professional conduct be judged?

Admission to professional practice is tending to become definitely a state function. The

line of demarcation between technical employment and the professional practice of

engineering still is somewhat vague, but is growing sharper in definition with the rapid

spread of legal registration.

Professional Codes

The three questions relating to professional obligations are the principal subjects

covered in the several codes or canons of ethics which have been formally adopted by the

major engineering societies. Although the codes of the several branches of engineering

differ in phraseology, the variations reflect the differences in history and circumstances of

the different engineering fields and in no fundamental sense are they contradictory.

Consulting engineers engaged in individual practice or maintaining independent

organizations obviously meet many problems and situations quite distinctly different from

those facing engineers who are regularly employed on a salary basis. Civil engineers are

more often self-employed or engaged as public functionaries than electrical engineers or

metallurgists. Mechanical engineers are in most instances concerned with manufacturing,

chemical engineers with process industries, and mining engineers with extractive

industries.

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A notable effort has been made in recent years, under the auspices of the Engineers‟

Council for Professional Development, to bring together in a single statement the essential

substance of engineering ethics, and to secure its acceptance by the profession- at-large,

leaving each specialized group free to supplement it in any particulars appropriate to its

own field. Although not yet formally accepted by all these bodies as this booklet goes to

press, the approval given in principle has been so general that this statement is reproduced

on the facing page as a general guide and may well be used as a basis for comment.

Canons of Ethics for Engineers

All rules of professional conduct may be summed up in one simple statement: The

professional man must be worthy of the trust and belief of his fellow men. Since integrity

and competence are the engineer‟s most indispensable qualities and a good name his most

valuable stock-in-trade, he can protect his own interests only by upholding the good repute

of the engineering profession. This gives rise to an engineer‟s most universal rule of life: To

act in every situation in a manner that will add to the confidence and esteem in which his

profession is held by socicty- at-large.

In all professional realms the work must speak for the man. Aggressive self-

advertisers are suspected by their colleagues of being charlatans, but it is equally possible

for an engineer to be too self-effacing. Professional men who receive limited rewards in

money are compensated in large part by due recognition, principally from their fellows but

also from the wider public. Enlightened employers of engineers are aware of this idea and

many go out of their way to give their men opportunities to publish papers, present

significant work at professional meetings, serve on important technical committees and

professional bodies, and win the higher forms of recognition and honors.

Competition may be the life of trade and may afford the public necessary protection in

trade relations ruled by supply and demand, but it can easily be the death of good

professional service. Such service requires an essentially disinterested attitude on the part

of the practitioner. Conscious concern for personal profit at one extreme and a sense of

worry over inadequate earnings at the other tend equally to impair the fair, objective, and

balanced temper on which all good engineering depends. Engineers are expected to compete

on the basis of reputation and competence rather than price, but one‟s gain must never be

at the expense of another‟s direct loss. To detract from another engineer‟s reputation or to

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seek to supplant him in a position or engagement, either by direct or indirect means, would

undermine the very foundation of mutual confidence and public repute on which the

existence of the profession depends.

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CANONS OF ETHICS OF ENGINEERS

Fundamental Principles of Professional Engineering Ethics

The Engineer to uphold and advance the honor and dignity of the engineering profession

and in keeping with high standards of ethical conduct:

I. Will be honest and impartial, and will serve with devotion his employer, his

clients, and the public;

II. II. Will strive to increase the competence and prestige of the engineering

profession;

III. III. Will use his knowledge and skill for the advancement of human welfare.

Relations With the Public

1.1 The Engineer will have proper regard for the safety, health and welfare of the

public in the performance of his professional duties.

1.2 He will endeavor to extend public knowledge and appreciation of engineering

and its achievements, and will oppose any untrue, unsupported, or exaggerated statements

regarding engineering.

1.3 He will be dignified and modest in explaining his work and merit, will ever

uphold the honor and dignity of his profession, and will refrain from self-laudatory

advertising.

1.4 He will express an opinion on an engineering subject only when it is founded

on adequate knowledge and honest conviction.

1.5 He will preface any ex parte statements, criticisms, or arguments that he may

issue by clearly indicating on whose behalf they are made.

Relations With Employers and Clients

2.1 The Engineer will act in professional matters as a faithful agent or trustee

for each employer or client.

2.2 He will act fairly and justly toward vendors and contractors, and will not

accept from vendors or contractors, any commissions or allowances, directly or indirectly.

2.3 He will inform his employer or client if he is financially interested in any

vendor or contractor, or in any invention, machine, or apparatus, which is involved in a

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project or work of his employer or client. He will not allow such interest to affect his

decisions regarding engineering services which he may be called upon to perform,

2.4 He will indicate to his employer or client the adverse consequences to be

expected if his engineering judgment is overruled.

2.5 He will undertake only those engineering assignments for which he is

qualified. He will engage or advise his employer or client to engage specialists and will

cooperate with them whenever his employer‟s or client‟s interests are served best by such

an arrangement.

2.6 He will not disclose information concerning the business affairs or technical

processes of any present or former employer or client without his consent.

2.7 Ho will not accept compensation—financial or otherwise from more than one

party for the same service, or for other services pertaining to the same work, without the

consent i all interested parties.

2.8 The employed engineer will engage in supplementary employment or

consulting practice only with the consent of employer.

Relations With Engineers

3.1 The Engineer will take care that credit for engineering work is given to those

to whom credit is properly due.

3.2 He will provide a prospective engineering employee complete information on

working conditions and hi status of employment, and after employment will keep him

informed of any changes in them.

3.3 He will uphold the principle of appropriate and adequate compensation for

those engaged in engineering work, including those in subordinate capacities.

3.4 He will endeavor to provide opportunity for the professional development and

advancement of engineers in his employ or under his supervision.

3.5 He will not injure maliciously the professional reputation prospects, or

practice of another engineer. However, if he has proof that another engineer has been

unethical, illegal, or unfair in his practice, he should so advise the proper authority.

3.6 He will not compete unfairly with another engineer.

3.7 He will not invite or submit price proposals for professional services which

require creative intellectual effort, on a basis that constitutes competition on price alone.

Due regard should be given to all professional aspects of the engagement.

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3.8 He will cooperate in advancing the engineering profession by

interchanging information and experience with other engineers and

students, and by contributing to public communication media, to the

efforts of engineering and scientific societies and schools.

Prepared by the Ethics Committee, 1963

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How Shall the Engineer Be Compensated?

The principle of limited compensation is one of the cardinal attributes of all forms of

professional service. Business earnings are contingent on profits, but the idea of making

professional fees or salaries contingent upon some favorable outcome or circumstance is

quite generally frowned upon. The great majority of engineers receive their compensation

in the form of salaries. Engineering salaries paid by industrial concerns are competitive

rather than standardized.

Only rarely can a clear distinction be made between compensation for executive

services and for purely professional service, hence engineers in the higher brackets are

usually rated on a par with non- engineering executive officers. The salary levels in

intermediate and junior ranks where technical services predominate admittedly rest on the

less satisfactory basis of supply and demand. The inevitable specialization which

characterizes modern industrial practice tends to narrow the working of the supply-and-

demand principle favorably to the engineer in terms of security, but often unfavorably in

terms of salary. Engineers in public employ, whether included under civil service or not,

quite generally come under the provisions of Civil Service or other standard classifications

of rank and salary.

How Shall the Engineer’s Conduct Be Judged?

All major professional societies maintain standing I committees on ethical conduct, to

which cases of alleged misconduct by their members may be referred.

These committees investigate such Complaints and recommend whatever action may

seem appropriate in the circumstances. When action is finally taken by the governing body,

it may range anywhere from friendly admonition to expulsion. State registration laws

generally make provision for revocation of the license in cases of proved violations of ethical

standards involving fraud or deceit in obtaining a certificate of registration, or for gross

negligence, incompetency, or misconduct in practice. The usual provision requires that

charges be submitted in writing, under oath, and that unless dismissed as unfounded or

trivial, such charges shall be communicated to the person accused and an appropriate time

set for a hearing, at which he may appear personally or by counsel to cross-examine

witnesses and produce evidence in his own defense. In both cases, the principle that

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conduct in the practice of a profession is to be judged within the profession by one‟s peers is

fully safeguarded.

The more extreme forms of discipline have rarely been invoked in engineering circles,

and in most cases where they have been applied little publicity has been given. This

condition has led to some outspoken criticism by engineers of the supposed easy-going ways

of the profession. Actually, the engineer‟s work and relationships are so largely in the open

that purely moral sanctions have generally proved sufficient, a fact in which all engineers

may take just pride.

Professional morals, like the rules of health and grammar, are most effective when

they are observed instinctively.

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Chapter IX THE SECOND MILE

“WHOEVER shall compel thee to go one mile—go with him twain.”

This concluding chapter is not about engineering, in particular, but about a philosophy

of life. The text above, taken from the Sermon on the Mount, is a counsel of perfection, good

advice in the form of a paradox which emphasizes a profound truth by an apparent denial of

common sense. Every calling has its mile of compulsion: Its round of tasks and duties, its

prescribed man-to-man relationships, which one must traverse daily if he is to survive.

Beyond that is the mile of voluntary effort where men strive for special excellence, seek

self-expression more than material gain, and give that unrequited margin of service to the

common good which invests work with a wide and enduring significance. The best fun of life

and most of its durable satisfactions lie in this second mile, and it is only here that a calling

can attain to the dignity and distinction of a profession.

The ideal of a second mile holds good in almost every area of life. In the first mile men

must work to live; in the second they work to maintain their sense of dignity and worth. In

the first mile men seek subsistence and tangible rewards; in the second they strive for the

durable satisfactions of life. In the first mile men seek pleasure; in the second they discover

happiness. In the first mile lie the fleeting thrills of marriage; in the second, often at the

end of a long road of self-denial, are to be found the enduring fruits of the merging of two

personalities. The first mile is the mile of discipline; the second the mile of freedom. Beyond

the mile of evidence and logic or the mile of sight lies the second mile of intuition and

insight, which men and women whose work calls for creative imagination can least afford to

ignore; physicists and mathematicians are likely to be right in the first one; while poets and

artists are more likely to be right in the other.

There is the mile of technology and the mile of culture; the mile of economics where

strict value-for- value principles are supreme, and the mile of altruism where money is

something to use with a generous imagination for a constructive purpose. There is the mile

of hard sense and the mile of sensibility, the mile of literal meanings and the mile of

symbolism, the mile of skeptical criticism and the mile of creative faith.

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The Mile of Life’s Durable Satisfactions

Let us explore a few of these second miles. About sixty years ago a track inspector on

the right of way of the Nickel Plate Railroad, just to the rear of the campus of the Case

Institute of Technology in Cleveland, came upon a young man fussing with a strange

contraption of mirrors. Suspecting the stranger of being a crack-pot or worse, the track

walker asked brusquely, “What are you doing here?” “Why,” was the mild reply, “I am

trying to measure the velocity of light.” “Well, why should any fool make such a fuss about a

thing like that?” “Because it is such corking good fun!” The man with the mirrors was

Albert Michelsen, Case‟s young professor of physics, who became the great master of optics.

His fun lasted a lifetime. When he died a few years ago he was busy with an evacuated tube

a mile long, trying for a still more accurate determination of the one invariable measuring

stick for the physical universe. Life‟s durable satisfactions are in the second mile.

Happiness is to be found only in the second mile. Pleasure, which to most persons is a

mere diversion of the moment in which to escape from reality, is something quite different.

Happiness comes through a heightened sense of reality and not through illusion or escape;

through more complete being and giving, rather than through winning and getting. The

secret of it lies in being a wise and harmonious person, and not one thwarted or warped or

frustrated. When one attains a full and well-rounded development of one‟s inborn powers,

and adds a full and free use of these powers in forms which have meaning and worth for

others, happiness in the natural result. Such happiness is strikingly independent of

outward circumstances. A penniless artist who has just done a masterpiece is far more

likely to enjoy his work than a successful profiteer who has just made a million dollars.

This sense of self-fulfillment is the real goal for which athletes compete, artists strive,

scientists search, inventors tinker, and men in all professions give their best effort. What

gives golf its great allure is the sense of constant striving for better form and of playing

against one‟s own best score. Beating the other fellow is just a side show; just so in the

game of life.

Observe for yourself that it is the man or woman who follows a profession with a real

sense of vocation who has the best chance in life of attaining to that kind of happiness. Such

delight as Osier or Grenfell or the brothers Mayo got out of the practice of medicine,

Marshall or Holmes or Hughes out of the law, Agassiz or Remsen or Milliken out of science,

and Roebling or Westinghouse or Kettering out of engineering is one of the goals most

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worth striving for in life. A professional career when wisely chosen opens such a goal alike

to men of genius and men of modest powers. They have the best chance at life‟s durable

satisfactions—absorption in interesting and socially significant work, the type of family life

which affords the best setting for the rearing of children, a place of esteem in the

community, the friendship of generous and high-minded colleagues, honors for outstanding

achievement, a sense of national and international belonging, the unfailing stimulus of new

problems and a sense of achievement measured in something more enduring than money.

The Mile of Professional Workmanship

To balance this chance at life‟s durable satisfactions, society has a special claim on the

best human talents for its professional services. No worthy follower of a profession can he

content just to “get by”. One of our moralists has said that no other two words in the

vocabulary are so charged with moral poison. A truly professional man has only one

standard of workmanship—always and only his best. A lawyer who does not give a

penniless client the same quality of service as a rich one, or the doctor who slights a charity

case, deserves and gets scant respect. This principle, however, does not justify the engineer

in being an all-out perfectionist. His standard is not to use only the best possible

construction regardless of differing circumstances, but rather to use the best construction

that is warranted by the actual conditions as they exist. If he were to refuse to use

economical if short-lived materials and designs on a temporary structure, his ideals of

workmanship would be badly out of focus.

The Mile of Professional Education

No true professional man is content to end his education in the first mile; that is, to

learn just enough to perform his appointed tasks and no more. Those who do are not really

professional men at all, they are just more or less skilled technicians. One cannot draw a

sharp and clear dividing line between professional education and technical training, and

say that it is a matter of going first to an arts college, then to a graduate professional

school, or even a matter of sheer intellectual difficulty. It is rather a matter of individual

spirit and scope; of a personal overplus beyond the knowledge and skill a man needs to

master his specific tasks.

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A surgeon, for example, needs to be extremely adept at tying knots, which he learns

with other skills of his craft by technical training and prolonged practice, but the overplus

which makes him a professional man instead of a super-technician is the long process of

study, observation, and reflection which gives him a deep insight into the human organism

and its hidden forms of disorganization and recuperation. It is this, rather than any set of

rules, on which he instinctively relies to tell him how far he may go in an emergency and to

warn him when he must stay his hand. Professional education for a lawyer means more

than training him to draw contracts, or draft deeds and wills, or to set up trust agreements,

or to prepare briefs and try cases. It means also the study of human relations and social

processes out of which the law is continuously growing as a deposit of experience. Lacking

such insight, the law becomes just a book of rules, penalties, and precedents; a dead thing

rather than a living thing.

Likewise for the engineer, technical training is largely a mastering of a fairly

elaborate craftsmanship in computation, graphical representation, and experimental

technique, but professional education aims at a higher level. Beyond the techniques of

mathematics and the sciences it discerns universal modes of natural law and human

experience. In like manner it looks beyond all criteria for calculating costs, returns, and

depreciation, to a broad understanding of the social and economic; forces which give

impetus to technological achievement and which in turn are set in motion by it.

The Mile of Professional Advancement

The full-scale professional man is not content to stop in the first mile in making his

contribution to the effectiveness and advancement of his group. Of course, he wants to do

an honest day‟s job—that goes without saying—but, that merely pays his debt to the

present. He still has his debt to the past to consider, his return to make for the inheritance

of knowledge and technique created over the generations for his use. He can pay this debt

only in the same manner as he repays his parents, by passing on like benefits to the future.

A man has a right to regard his skill as a personal possession and to expect a due reward in

money or in service when he applies it usefully or imparts it to another. His knowledge,

however, should be regarded as part of a common fund inherited from the ages, which he is

free to use at will, but to which he is obligated to add according to his talents. Patent grants

wisely protect a man‟s economic rights in an invention for a period, but they do not free him

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from the duty to publish all gains in knowledge and to share all advances in technique for

the general good.

If the individual lacks the ability to make personal contributions to knowledge, the

least he can do to discharge his debt is to join with others in creating common agencies to

increase, publish, and preserve professional knowledge and to contribute regularly to their

support. Citizens pay public taxes as a matter of civic pride and public duty. Engineers,

physicians, architects, and lawyers have part of their citizenship in their professions and

should regard the dues of professional societies equally as a matter of civic pride and social

duty. A large part of this money is a sort of inheritance tax—it goes to support research, to

maintain means of exchanging experience, to promote the standardization of practice, and

to create an indispensable reference literature by which one‟s debt to the past is discharged.

Shame on engineers who evade such responsibilities or think of them only as a business

transaction to be judged by the question, “Just what do I get out of it?” What would you

think of a resident of your community who sought to evade his taxes on the plea that he

had no children in school or had never needed to call the fire department?

The Mile of Culture

Engineers are sometimes charged in a blanket indictment with indifference to culture.

We cannot expect engineers to be the professionals of culture who will write the books,

compose the symphonies, create the dramas, paint the pictures, or formulate the

philosophies in which an emerging American culture will find its symbolic expression, nor

can we expect them to take the larger part in shaping public standards of artistic

appreciation and criticism. What we may hope is that engineers may be found in full

proportions, when compared with any other educated groups, among those who read sound

books, see good plays performed, attend the best musical events, frequent art exhibitions,

and give ear and voice to the best ideas being discussed. Surely this standard is not too

much as ask as a goal of the more general side of the engineer‟s education, and if it is

attained there need be no apologies for his cultural rating.

People who charge engineers with being Philistines are often those who have a vested

interest in some stereotyped definition of culture or in some traditional type of institution

to defend. The earliest of our American educational institutions were created to preserve

and nurture a transplanted culture and, while the traditional discipline of the liberal arts

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has been modified and added to from time to time, it has continued as a dominant influence

for nearly three centuries. Meanwhile, American life was developing a vigorous cultural

pattern of its own. In our day we are striving to formulate some unifying and fertilizing

conception of philosophy and ideals which will be just as contemporary as that of Athens in

the days of Pericles or that of Florence at the summit of the Renaissance, and which will

find expression in art, literature, drama, music, and all the symbolic imagery of an

advanced civilization, just as spontaneously as the mediaeval spirit found expression in

Italian painting and Gothic architecture.

The emerging “culture” of our times is being fashioned out of our own needs,

aspirations, and experiences and out of their characteristic symbolic expressions, rather

than any classical models. We see it in our functional architecture, in the satisfying

catenary and structural tracery of a modern suspension bridge, in the sleek streamlining of

modern air, land, and water craft, and in a thousand other familiar ways. Why should these

expressions of our times be thought less significant than the Romanesque columns and

domes or the Gothic vaulting and buttresses of past ages that were limited to a construction

using only compression members?

There is, however, a bridge to be built between the mile of technology and the mile of

culture. Technology is impersonal, material, logical, and economic, whereas culture is

human, spiritual, imaginative, and above money reckoning. Technology has to do with

means; culture with meanings. Technology speaks in a technical vocabulary; culture in a

universal language. The ideal span between the two realms is a cantilever, to be built out

member by member from both sides. In order that the two sections may make a perfect

juncture, the engineer is expected to know the meaning of literary and art forms, but it is

just as important that men of art and letters should know the fundamental meanings of

technology. To interpret them in terms all may understand should be one of the major

cultural contributions of engineers in our generation.

The Mile of Leadership in Industry

Engineers are citizens of industry with exceptional responsibilities. Countless

unsolved problems in science and technology confront them on every hand, but these are

not the obstacles which are slowing industry‟s advance. The critical problems have to do

with human relations. The theory that industry is a natural battleground between

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investors and workers; that conflict is inevitable, hut can be kept fair by an official rule

book and a political referee; and that nothing better than intervals of armed truce can be

hoped for, has been tried and found wanting. Actually four parties have a stake in

industry—investors, workers, customers, and the general public; actually the conflicts in

industry are not being waged for control alone, but equally for security and for a share in

the fruits of progress.

Hope of reconciliation seems to lie chiefly in divorcing the control of industry more

largely from ownership and vesting it in professional management with a joint

responsibility to the four parties involved, but outside the political realm. The essential

quality involved in this professional role is that of trusteeship. Among the professions,

engineers have a unique contribution to make. Engineers have marked advantages over

any possible rivals; are already on the ground, as the dominant professional group in

industry. Engineers have already driven a deep salient of professionalism into the realm of

management. No other group can understand so well industry‟s physical intricacies.

Engineering methods—factual, analytical, impartial and inventive—promise new and

hopeful approaches to management problems now at an impasse. The engineer‟s position is

a natural bridge between science and craftsmanship, between commercial and technical

skills, and between impersonal technology and human motivation.

But again there is a bridge to be built across the gap which now separates the mile of

technical planning and control and the mile of human collaboration. No one has better

described the bridge which is needed than Elton Mayo in his little book, “The Social

Problems of an Industrial Society,” which might well be required reading for every young

engineer. It will help him see his citizenship, not only in industry but in society at large,

including world affairs, in a truer perspective. One short paragraph supplies a keynote:

“It is not the atomic bomb that will destroy civilization. Rut civilized society can

destroy itself—finally, no doubt, with bombs—if it fails to understand intelligently

and to control the aids and deterrents to co-operation.”

The knowledge and wisdom needed to build this bridge cannot be imparted in the brief

span of an undergraduate course, nor is the student engineer of college years ready for it.

Like the larger aspects of strategy which neither West Point nor Annapolis can even

attempt to teach, it must become many a young engineer‟s chief subject of study in the

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years of his early experience. The art of collaboration is the most important single thing a

young engineer has to learn either in life or in college today.

What of the Future?

In conclusion let us take up the crystal ball and risk a look into the next fifty years. It

has been just about that long since this great modern era of metals, machinery, electric

energy, synthetic chemicals, and mass transportation got really well started. What of the

period which our present student engineers are to share in shaping? The climax of man‟s

effort to subdue nature, to shift labor from muscles to machines, to abolish distances, to

make material abundance available for all, and to extend a high civilization into the

backward areas of the world well may fall within their lifetime. After that, perhaps human

interest may shift from work to leisure, from production to enjoyment, from economic gain

to culture, and from industry to art. Who knows? It appears unlikely, however, that we

have yet reached the summit of technological effort. Inevitably, it seems, industry will be

extended on world-wide lines, production will lean more heavily on science, atomic energy

sources will come into economic use, research will continue to expand, and engineers will

grow in numbers and in responsibility accordingly.

Engineers will find their way into every realm where science needs to be applied

practically, costs counted, returns predicted, work organized systematically, and favorable

conditions for collaboration established. They will be called upon to share the control of

disease with physicians, the control of finance with bankers, the bearing of risks with

underwriters, the organizing of distribution with merchants and purchasing agents, the

raising of foods with farmers, the distribution of food with packers and purveyors and the

operation of the home with housewives. In few of these new fields, if any, will engineers be

self-sufficient; to be welcome they must be good teamworkers; and to be useful they must be

prepared to deal, in Huxley‟s words, with “men and their ways” no less than with “things

and their forces.”

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REFERENCES

Three items which previously appeared as appendices to this publication are now

issued separately. They are:

EC-40 Selected Reading for Young Engineers. Revised 1962, 8p., 15c. Contains a list

of books suggested for general reading in biography, travel, history, economics, sociology,

psychology, philosophy, natural science and other literature which serves as an

introduction to the vast territories of human achievement.

EC-42 Personal Development Check List. 1968, 8p. 25c. A 39-item check list for self-

appraisal and for planning a program for development as an engineer. Allows for critical

self-evaluation which, hopefully, will generate attainable growth goals.

EC-45 The 2-4 Program for Professional Development 8p. foldout, @ 15c, per 100 $8

plus $2 handling. Outlines a program to fulfill the requirements for professional growth

and practice in terms of performance-two areas, and responsibility—four areas.

For more complete information on these and other publications covering the broad

range of ECPD activities you may wish to request the list of publications— free—or to

purchase the latest edition of the Annual Report—available after January 1st. Each report

costs $3.