Post #1521608

Something which frustrates me is the idea of "Engineering time" as a resource, as though engineers are robots and will do whatever you tell them to with equal effort. No, that's not how it works. As an engineer, if you get obsessed with a thing you need to build it and your brain will not stop thinking about it until it is out of your system. You're basically working 24/7 on this thing which the business may or may not need. And the thing you tell them to work on? They'll be able to concentrate on it for maybe 2 hours a day. It's not that they're not trying, they just can't help it. It's better to think of "engineering time" as chickens laying eggs. They lay eggs every now and then, you might not need an egg, but you're getting an egg, and sometimes you need a bunch of eggs, and guess what? Not enough eggs. Trying to get product and design and other disciplines to optimise that time is a fool's errand.