My Vision as an Engineer

A short paper written for COOP 2100 on what I think engineering work should be aimed at.

The argument is that a lot of the technology people use every day persists not because it’s good but because leaving it is expensive — accumulated files, habits, and training make switching feel costly enough that better alternatives don’t win by being better. The useful engineering problem, then, isn’t only building something good; it’s building something good enough that the cost of switching stops being the deciding factor.

Writing it clarified something I’d only half-articulated before: the reason I care about impact over cleverness is that impact is the thing that actually moves people off the old option.