Meaning of engineer's disease | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A bias of technical professionals who think that their expertise allows them to solve problems in unrelated fields.
   uncountable
2. A tendency for engineers to be protective and perfectionist about their work.
   uncountable

Examples

“The idea of “engineer’s disease” developed while I (Graham) was talking with a crew of project managers. I was talking about Legionnaires’ disease, and they thought I said “engineer’s disease.””

“Humanities denial is enabled—and enables—another affliction that’s endemic within the tech industry: “engineer’s disease,” the belief that expertise in one field (usually in STEM) makes you an expert on everything else too.”

“Revealing the workings of a machine, without disclosing what the machine does, is a classic symptom of engineer’s disease.”

“After that, I started working on a debugger and a Fortran compiler, but got bogged down with engineer’s disease (kept designing to get⟳ it perfect, but never actually finishing) so never finished.”

CEFR level