“An engineer is a man who can do for a dime what any fool can do for a dollar” – Anonymous
The “a man” bit’s inaccurate nowadays, but the rest of it hits the nail right on the head. At its basic level, the profession is all about tradeoffs, and the biggest one of them is performance vs cost. Maximising bang for buck is what it’s all about. Awareness of the short term and long term cost implications of everything you do and every decision you make is one of the core abilities of a top-level engineer.
This is one of an occasional series of posts on the fundamental principles of engineering.
