Synergistic Red Fuse ...

Mapman ...

As a general rule, each personality type has its main fear. Fear of criticism for the engineer type. Fear of being taken advantage of for the law enforcement type. Loss of social approval for the back-slapping salesman type. I forget the last one. But, these fears are with us all. Its interesting stuff and very important for folks who work with the public to know. ... especially people in sales. 

I used to be intimidated by the engineer type in a sales situation because they would ask so many minutia questions. I thought they were questioning my integrity. With me, it was that loss of social approval thing.

Once I learned that engineers CANNOT make a decision right after the sales presentation, and that they MUST "think it over," my closing ratio with engineers went up exponentially.

In most cases, the engineer type is going to interview at least several salespeople to get all the facts he/she can. These salespeople, not understanding the psyche of the engineer type, would pull out their hammers and try to beat the poor guy into submission in an effort to close the sale.

 Ha ... I'd just leave the paperwork overnight, let him/her dissect it to their heart's desire, then call them the next day to see if I could pick up the signed paperwork and start working for them.

I've been told many times by these folks that the reason they decided to work with me was that I was "so low pressure."

OP

When in product development, I worked with many technical marketing folks and always got along well with them, especially the ones who also valued integrity and accuracy. The best companies always place top value on that.

Also I will add that the creme of the crop when it comes to engineers have extreme confidence in their knowledge and abilities and fear little in that regard. Also pretty much true with the best in most any profession I suspect.

Mapman 7-14-2016 12:42pm
The best engineers strive for accuracy and avoid making mistakes that will have consequences to someone down the road.

+1.  A good engineer recognizes that it is almost always best to get things right the first time, for example during the design process, than to have to fix them later.

Although having dealt with countless engineers during the course of my career, as well as being one of them, my perception has been that there are many cases in which perfectionism tends to be carried to extremes.  And many engineers tend to be a bit too dogmatic and inflexible in how they approach their work.  All of which can result in the paralysis by analysis that OP referred to.

One thing I have never perceived, however, is any particular tendency among engineers to fear criticism.  In fact perfectionist tendencies and paralysis by analysis, in a professional setting, can be expected to often result in big-time criticism, when schedules are missed and budgets are exceeded.

One thing that worked to my advantage in my career was being able to recognize that different circumstances call for differing degrees of perfectionism, and flexibility in how different situations are approached.  With the choice of how to proceed often being made just by technically-based instinct.

In any event, my thanks to Wolfie for having taken the time to provide an additional data point on these fuses, in a manner that sounds like it was done with requisite thoroughness.

Regards,
-- Al
 

mapman
13,507 posts
07-14-2016 12:42pm
"Read up about the Challenger space shuttle disaster for a textbook example. I worked in Huntsville Al. at the time down teh road from Marshal Space Flight Center where those engines were tested. My companies Computer Aided Design software at the time was used to design the shuttle. Human error not technology led to its fate. I was still a young pup but I witnessed how all the engineers I knew were totally shattered that day."

My friend from school in the Aero dept. at UVa wound up as executive director of the Challenger disaster Investigation, the Rogers Commission. He was the one who didn’t allow Richard Feynman’s report to be included in the main report, from what I can gather, because they clashed personally and because Feyman was rather eccentric. Too eccentric for Keel, apparently. 

Its true that "analysis paralysis"  is a common plague historically, but in software engineering for example, modern Agile or iterative development paradigms address it.   

Older traditional  development paradigms often referred to as "waterfall"  development have fallen out of favor these days in most any progressive development organization. 

Waterfall development depended on thorough analysis of the problem up front to determine a plan for development.  That approach fails as problems become too complex to assess completely and accurately up front, leading to either analysis paralysis ie doing nothing until the analysis is complete or heading down a poorly understood path doomed to fail.

Iterative development is more agile because you attempt to build something based on the key known requirements regularly, like once every few weeks and then stop and reassess so what was learned can be applied effectively to the next iterative phase of development.

So analysis paralysis can certainly still exist but is far less problematic as a whole these days than in years past. 

Today's complex and fast moving world has no room for "analysis paralysis" in product development.