engineer's disease

English

Noun

engineer's disease (uncountable)

  1. A bias of technical professionals who think that their expertise allows them to solve problems in unrelated fields.
    • [2019 October, Randall Englund, Robert J. Graham, “Selecting and Developing Project Managers”, in Creating an Environment for Successful Projects, 3rd edition, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, →ISBN, page 181:
      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.”]
    • [2025 April 22, Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Basic Books, →ISBN:
      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.]
  2. A tendency for engineers to be protective and perfectionist about their work.
    • 1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal: Software Tools for the Professional Programmer, volume 17, numbers 190–195, Redwood City, California, United States: M&T Pub., →ISSN, page 158:
      Revealing the workings of a machine, without disclosing what the machine does, is a classic symptom of engineer’s disease.
    • 2005 February 17, Tom Oward, “1 · The History of Apple I”, in Apple I Replica Creation: Back to the Garage, Syngress, page 22:
      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.
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