Engineering's Unwritten Rules

When I was at a large company managing diesel engine testing and development, my director passed along the following document he called "Engineering's Unwritten Rules". It really resonated with me because it solidified so many thoughts I had had for years.

I suspect many engineers have a similar story of documents like this being passed down through the (workforce) generations, because through some googling I found out that this was actually someone's summary of a series of three articles from 1944 by W. J. King, originally published in Mechanical Engineering magazine as "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering". (The full document has since been made available for purchase via ASME and includes some modern updates. A scanned older version is also available on Google Books.)

Regardless, what I received years ago was a nice document on its own, though was surely modified by a few people over the decades. It focuses on the first portion of the original article series, on the successful behaviors of new engineers. It is presented here with minimal modification [with additions by Mike in brackets]:

Book Review—Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Thinking in Bets (Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts) has been a wildly popular book, and I can see why. I was really excited about the prospects—who isn’t interested in better decision making? And as an engineer, finding that balance between gathering enough info and taking action is a key career skill we can all improve. Did this book deliver? Partly.

Book Review—Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy

Eat That Frog! is a pithy business success book that is effective and short. Basic premise: begin each day with the most important and difficult task that will have the greatest impact on your job and life. After that, everything will seem easy in comparison.

"It has been said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment."

Book Review—The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

The Lean Startup is an influential business book by Eric Ries that seemed to really make waves through the software industry and beyond. The premise, reduced to just one sentence: build a “minimum viable product” to get early feedback from customers to avoid the risk of a long development process that results in a polished product that no one actually wants. Being somewhat familiar with the concepts of lean manufacturing, I thought I would see if some of the ideas could be applied to physical product development.

Book Review—Zero to One by Peter Thiel

In Zero to One, author Peter Thiel makes the case for unorthodox thinking in order to build the future purposefully by creating companies so good they can effectively reap the benefits of a monopoly for a long period of time, potentially decades. He argues that the path to making money long-term is to make a product at least 10x better than the so-called competition and not get trapped in the traditional thinking of making incremental advances on existing products. The all-electric Tesla Roadster, for example, was in a league of its own when it launched and created much better opportunities for Tesla than if they had made something to compete with the Honda Civic.

Mini Book Review—Making Things Move by Dustyn Roberts

Making Things Move by Dustyn Roberts is well described by its subtitle "DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists". I picked it up at the library to see if there were any fun new pieces or tricks I could learn from as an engineer. Highlights included the parts about the internal workings of stepper motors and a trick on how to drill a hole in the center of a shaft without a lathe. So while there were some cool new tidbits, it was mostly just fun to see all these topics in one place and easily approachable for new people.

Notable covered topics:

• The six simple machines
• Material types, properties, and tolerances
• Fastening and joining
• Forces, torque, power, work, energy sources
• Intro to hobby motors and servos and their control
• Bearings, gears, screws, springs, cams, linkages, and motion conversion
• Lots of example projects bringing these concepts together

For a non-engineer getting into making projects with electronics or motors, this would be a great resource I would recommend. If you are already an engineer with some making experience, this book would be just for fun.

Book Review—The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman was my first foray into studying industrial design, rather than the mechanical design techniques I am accustomed to. The number of complimentary concepts and issues definitely makes this book useful for engineers. It was updated with modern examples in 2013 after 25 years of success, and incorporates topics from many of the author's separate books and articles.