Neoengineers

neo­engi­neer - noun

An in­di­vid­ual, part of a resur­gence, who em­braces and re­spects the craft of en­gi­neer­ing. Often en­joys solv­ing hard prob­lems.

I was re­cently in­tro­duced to the term “neoengineer”, whose de­f­i­n­i­tion you will find above and in the at­tached blog post. It tick­led my brain in a rare way.

For sev­eral years in a row, my New Year’s res­o­lu­tion was to be­come “the most ef­fec­tive per­son pos­si­ble”. In some ways, that re­mains my pri­mary res­o­lu­tion. To put it an­other way: I seek to be­come the most ef­fec­tive en­gi­neer pos­si­ble.

I think what makes the term “neoengineer” so tick­lish to my gray mat­ter is that it draws a line be­tween those who care about the craft and those who do not. What’s more: the term does not make a lack of care seem like a bad thing. It is merely a dif­fer­ence in pri­or­i­ties.

You Can Choose to Be a Neoengineer

In the dis­course, both within Automattic and at large, we con­stantly re­fer to some un­quan­tifi­able met­ric known as “productivity”. We seek to op­ti­mize it and in­crease it to what­ever ex­tent pos­si­ble. Why? Be­cause we be­lieve that it will make us more money, or bring us more pres­tige, or some­how even bring us hap­pi­ness. I think we are fo­cused on the wrong thing.

When we fo­cus on “productivity” we are fo­cus­ing on our out­put. But be­cause it is in­her­ently un­quan­tifi­able, we are un­able to ob­jec­tively mon­i­tor that out­put. Be­cause there is no way to quan­tify it, it’s im­pos­si­ble to know if we have im­proved our pro­duc­tiv­ity or not, which re­sults in one of two things.

In one sit­u­a­tion, a per­son can be­lieve an ac­tion, habit, or tool is more help­ful than it re­ally is. You see this all the time with vibe-coders. They find that they are able to pro­duce a ton of stuff, but that stuff has zero to neg­a­tive value, and thus no one con­sumes it. In this way, they waste a lot of time do­ing some­thing that amounts to very lit­tle.

That is not a knock on vibe-cod­ing. It’s a knock on a fail­ure to con­sider the value of an ac­tion prop­erly.

In an­other sit­u­a­tion, a per­son can be­lieve an ac­tion, habit, or tool is less help­ful than it re­ally is. I see this of­ten with un­der-plan­ners. A per­son un­der­es­ti­mates the value of do­ing re­search or pro­duc­ing a plan. They think, “I will just get started and pivot later if nec­es­sary”. In this way, they spend less time do­ing some­thing help­ful than they should have.

If we change the frame of ref­er­ence a lit­tle, we earn our­selves ac­cess to a neat men­tal trick. In­stead of ask­ing the ques­tion “does this tool make me more pro­duc­tive?”, ask “would an ef­fec­tive en­gi­neer use this tool?” You may re­place “this tool” with “this habit” or “this ac­tion”.

When I do this, I find the an­swer changes dras­ti­cally.

Would an ef­fec­tive en­gi­neer choose to learn a com­plex al­go­rithm deeply, or would they choose the easy route and ask ChatGPT to write the code for them? They would choose the for­mer, since it in­creases their per­sonal level of skill and im­proves main­tain­abil­ity of the pro­ject long-term.

Would an ef­fec­tive en­gi­neer ap­prove code that is dif­fi­cult to read, so they can go ahead and al­lo­cate their men­tal en­ergy to some­thing more pro­duc­tive? No. They would give care­ful mea­sured feed­back or none at all. If some­thing else is more im­por­tant than re­view­ing the code, an ef­fec­tive en­gi­neer would do that other thing.

By choos­ing to adopt the iden­tity of an ef­fec­tive en­gi­neer, I cre­ate a habit of choos­ing to do things an ef­fec­tive en­gi­neer would do. Even if I am not in fact, an ef­fec­tive en­gi­neer, I can come closer to be­com­ing one by adopt­ing that iden­tity.

The Term Itself

The only is­sue I have with the term “neoengineer” is that when bro­ken down, it means “new en­gi­neer”. Neo- usu­ally refers to some­thing “new” or “young”. So a “neoengineer” is a young en­gi­neer, per­haps of the lat­est gen­er­a­tion.

The thing is, I do not think that the lat­est gen­er­a­tion is the only gen­er­a­tion who has cared about the craft of en­gi­neer­ing. I be­lieve that re­spect for the craft goes back thou­sands of years. If any­thing, it feels like forces are push­ing the lat­est gen­er­a­tion to care less about the craft than ever be­fore.

As an aside, I highly rec­om­mend you check out Jonathan Blow’s fab­u­lous talk, Preventing the Collapse of Civilization. It’s rel­e­vant, I promise.