Most of engineering, if we’re being entirely honest, involves sitting quietly with a client’s request until you realize it isn’t a request at all, it’s a description of a workaround.
Someone asks for a faster horse because they haven’t the faintest idea what a car looks like; someone asks for a glowing red button because they don’t actually understand how their own inbox works. It’s an old problem, famously packaged in that suspicious Henry Ford quote about equine velocity. But while it’s a well-documented phenomenon when selling things to the general public, and it becomes downright surreal when you enter the twilight zone of B2B software.
In the corporate ecosystem, motivations are siloed into impenetrable fortresses. Marketing wants one thing, Procurement wants another, and IT just wants everyone to stop touching things. Trying to find the true source of a problem through these layers is what defines an excellent engineer.
So, how do they do it? They channel our inner child.
There’s a management technique called the “Five Whys,” which involves asking why a problem exists, and then asking why to that answer, and so on, until you reach the bedrock of reality. Anyone who has spent more than eleven minutes in the presence of a small child will recognize this as the exact mechanism used to determine why grass is green or why water is wet.
Engineers, much like toddlers, are inherently designed to probe, validate, and test boundaries. When a client brings us a beautifully bound, fifty-page specification document for a “faster horse,” our job is to look them in the eye and gently ask the questions they didn’t sign up for. Where are you actually trying to go? And does the horse have anything to do with it?
Sometimes, after all the grilling, the answer is yes. You build the horse. You make it exceptionally fast. But more often than not, you realize you need to build something entirely different—and that is where the real work begins. It’s loud, it’s frustrating, and it involves a lot of squinting at the whiteboard, but it’s incredibly necessary.