Isambard Kingdom Brunel needs YOU!

You ever wondered what it would be like to own a Top Trumps pack full of the Greatest Engineers of all time? Yeah so did I. So I made this...

Top Trumps - The Greatest Engineers of all time

Well actually I created 35 of them. Each with their own statistics, but not wholly accurate at the moment. Since researching the lives of each and everyone of the chosen 35 Engineers lives or reading their biographies would have taken me years, then let's get a little bit of Christmas online collaboration going!?


[Stage 1]
I have already begun the task by naming the 5 attributes by which they are to be measured. Experience [in years], this represents the years which they were in the industry of engineering. Buildability [1-100], representing technical expertise. Creativity [1-100], how inventive and concerned they were with design subtleties. Business [1-100], did they run their own business? How successful were they? Inspiration [1-100], how well were they received by piers and the public. Did they inspire a generation?


If anyone has any better ideas, then please drop me a message!


[Stage 2]
The naming of the Engineers has taken me a small amount of research - and I did not want to name only Civil and Structural Engineers. Therefore I chose a representative sample of mechanical, product design, electrical and industrial engineers to cheer up the soiree a little. 
So here they are - please give me your input.
1.Isambard K Brunel    2.Sir Marc I.Brunel    3.Steve [Wozniak] 4.Sir James Dyson   5.Robert Stephenson    6.Eugene Freyssinet    7.Nikola Tesla    8.Archimedes    9.James Watt    10.Thomas Brassey    11.The Wright Brothers    12.Henry Ford    13.Thomas Edison    14.Leonardo da Vinci   15.Gustave Eiffel    16.Sir Henry Royce    17.Sir John Fowler    18.Othmar H Ammann    19.Sir Benjamin Baker    20.Anthony Hunt    21.Sir Ove Nyquist Arup    22.Alexander Graham Bell   23.James Brindley    24.Edgar Cardoso    25.Sir John F.Baker    26.Arthur Casagrande    27.Charles de Coulomb    28.Henry Darcy    29.Dr Oscar Faber    30.Clifford Holland    31.James Buchanan Eads   32.Joseph Locke   33.Thomas Telford    34.Fazlur Rahman Khan   35.Lillian Gilbreth

[Stage 3]
Once I have set the designs from the earlier stages, the final step [and most arduous] is to set some accurate levels for the each Engineer and their attributes. 
Doing this will take some effort. I suggest the best way to enable it is to set a maximum number of top level and lower level statistics. For example; only 5 individual attributes can be set at 100. We then decide which Engineer gets them. Then we set a total of 5 attributes at the lowest level of 10, and apply them to Engineers.


Finally we arrange each of the 35 Engineers in order of their perceived value for each available attribute. 

So please try this at home over the next few weeks of the holiday season. I will do the rest. 


Finally, the open poll and debate flooding the LinkedIn Engineering Groups dealing with Pay & Status will be concluded tomorrow [currently 99 votes / 88% voting not happy]. Watch out for that one.




Engine[er]




[update - Replaced Steve with Steve] Thanks Anon.

2 Months in - Starting up an Enginee[er]

UPDATE: Almost 100 views for this month for this post alone! Thanks so much for your interest and please remember to comment!

This is a quick stock take of what's been happening to me over the last 2 months, and what is currently on my mind. It finishes off with a bit of a rant. Many apologies.

1. On doing Stuff
I love doing stuff. Who doesn't love waking up and doing lots of stuff all day long? Since I started working for myself, in amongst the productive hours of a new working week, doing stuff has become my life [I call them productive - my accountant may call them fee earning hours]. Truth is that all my week is productive of a kind, and working for yourself causes a major shift to your perception of what work actually is. The basic principle though is that every moment you spend thinking, considering what to do next, acting upon it, listing, dreaming, prioritising or learning, then you are working. So there.

2. 30/70 split seems fair
You need to earn a wage, and doing this in the shortest possible time gives you more time to brain storm a better delivery system, network, improve your service or re-adjust your attitude towards your chosen market.. I currently run at about 30% practical fee earning work to 70% dreaming and learning. I've been told by an accountant that this is a poor level of output, and I intend on doing something about it once I have crossed a few goals off my 'magic' to do list first.

3. There are 2 halves to every story
Before I started out on my own, I was told that if I can earn a wage on 40% of my time during the week then I would be doing very well! [TOP TIP: price your hourly rate to deal with this eventuality]...but that's not what my ex-bosses have told me over the years. Sweating it for a large company saw me 100% utilised on fee earning projects - which perhaps goes a long way towards why it is that large consultancies have trouble, especially in holding onto key technical personnel, and possibly this is why they are my ex-bosses? The lesson here is that you cannot sustain a 100% productivity without a cost. This could be to your general health and well-being, or it could be your creativity. Both add up to major burn out issues though. It is lucky then, that the majority of us were born with two halves to our brain - and our left-hand side would be screaming "GET US OUTTA HERE YOU MORON!" especially since this portion of the brain is very good at predicting our future. If my future = depressing [then] I re-adjust my environment to suit. In other words, make some changes. All my decisions are not as life changing as this though.

4. Be Proud of who you are
If you are an Engineer like me, but not me, then you are a very very lucky person! You keep good company [Steve Jobs, Sir James Dyson, Bill Gates, Henry Ford etc.] . Some of the last centuries most prolific inventors, designers, and entrepreneurs were Engineers of some sort. We get introduced into jobs where our insane ability to focus completely on a single process gives us a steady role in most organisations. We also make others lives better, because we are such useful people and are deeply influenced to serve the communities around us. Naturally we are creative creatures, but the majority of the time we take it upon ourselves to capitalise upon our technical skills. Why? Because to put it simply - we can. We can do both.

5. Do it to be on the A-Team
Being solely technical is not the kind of existence that we would wish upon ourselves for the entire length of our careers, it just happens that we are very good at solving problems. Importantly, the longer we stick at carrying out this unselfish, non-egotistical existence, the more successful our projects are as a result. It's a symbiotic partnership. We get to build stuff, design stuff and breath life into more stuff... the rest of team get to practise their creative, managerial and other useful organisational skills etc. Skills we have also.

6. Engineers serve society best by continuing to innovate
Most non-engineering types will not have the same dedication to continually plugging away at some new skill until they are the expert in a field, because they don't understand the pain and the eventual pleasure of being able to speak 'engineerish' on any given technical subject. Non-engineering types will be quite happy handing over this responsibility. We must not lose interest in the world around us, because this may incarcerate our freedom to innovate freely. The minute that we give up learning and stop applying all these cool talents to any given real world problem, is the exact same 60 seconds that commits us to a life long of slaving away nine to five, slowly losing the will to learn or worse... revoking our responsibility to pass on our great enthusiasm to a new wave of prospective engineering students.

I realise that the above points could  fill several blog posts of varying subjects, but I apologised for my  crassness already. There is no doubt that I will eventually pick one or two of these and expand upon them further... have you any preferences?

Have a great day.


Engine[er]