Engineering could be the best respected, most coveted and all-round 'awesome' profession.
Yet the contemporary world's best-known comic everyman, a full-time loser called Dilbert, is an engineer. Not only that, engineers the world over have taken him to their hearts and identified with him.
Engineering is an objective, logical and unswervingly realistic vocation. Engineers deal only in absolutes and the finitely measurable. Their job is to define and apply rules, and then use them to find solutions. It sounds a soulless enterprise. Yet what engineers do is rather more glamorous. They make mankind's dreams come true.
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, space exploration, printing, infrastructure, architecture, the internet and musical Hello Kitty LED key-rings would not exist without engineers. Virtually everything we bundle under the heading of 'civilisation' would be science fiction - only there'd be no science fiction then either.
Yet engineers are joked about and even occasionally sneered at, while a man with sweaty armpits, a manic expression and absolutely no interest in furthering the cause of humanity can spend his day shouting at phones and computers on a trading floor (thanks to engineers) and get all the money and kudos.
The apparent incongruity is easy to explain. All the profiling research shows what engineers and most of us who have ever worked with them already knew: engineers like to solve problems, they don't particularly like being the centre of attention and there is no such thing as too much detail.
