Engineering in Title, Not in Heart: Why IT Keeps Falling for Shortcuts

The Illusion of the Title

In today’s technology world, the word engineer often appears as a title, but rarely as a lived discipline. Software engineers, DevOps engineers, data engineers, all these labels abound, yet the true essence of engineering often remains absent.

Practices emerge where speed overrides quality, ego overshadows craft, and delivery at any cost replaces careful design. The result is a culture that calls itself engineering but behaves like reckless tinkering.

The Value of the Degree

A degree in engineering is not merely a certificate. It represents a profound investment. Years of study focus on learning rigour, quality, cost awareness, and mathematical thinking. These years train more than technical skills. They shape a mindset: problem solving, process discipline, and respect for constraints.

The degree deserves respect precisely because it embodies sacrifice, commitment, and the will to learn what truly matters.

Much has been made of the famous dropouts in IT. Jobs, Gates (known to isolate himself for days to devour books on all topics) and Zuckerberg often appear as proof that formal education is unnecessary. This interpretation is flawed. None of them rejected learning. They rejected a particular institutional path.

Each had already immersed themselves in the habits of rigour, experimentation, and craft. The myth that a diploma holds no value misses the point: those who succeed without one still carry the heart of engineering within them.

The Heart of Engineering

Whether acquired in a lecture hall or a workshop, the heart of engineering does not rest on titles. It rests on mindset. An engineer is someone who:

• Treats quality as non-negotiable.
• Designs for cost and efficiency, not only for speed.
• Anticipates failure and builds resilience into systems.
• Sees problem solving as a craft to be honed, not a hurdle to rush through.

Degrees can instil this mindset, but they do not form the only path. Some autodidacts embody the discipline naturally, while some graduates never internalise it. What matters is not only what one knows, but also how one approaches problems: with discipline, humility, and commitment to lasting solutions.

What Happens Without the Heart

When the title exists but the heart does not, laziness creeps in under the guise of modernity. IT culture begins to worship shortcuts. Myths repeat themselves as truths:

• Fail fast: confusing recklessness with learning.
• Move fast and break things: celebrating fragility instead of resilience.
• We will fix it later: pretending entropy can be postponed.
• We can scale by hiring more: mistaking headcount for systems.
• Metrics slow us down: flying blind in the name of speed.

To add insult to injury, people have forgotten their original meaning and abused the sentences until they lost their true intent. These ideas do not express principles of engineering. They expose the absence of it.

Modern evidence is not hard to find. Global outages caused by mismanaged cloud configurations, rushed rollouts of critical software that break essential services, or platforms collapsing under growth they never planned for. These are not unavoidable accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of treating engineering as a badge rather than a discipline.

What happens to a craft when learning itself becomes offensive?

Why IT Was Originally Different

The earliest IT pioneers were not mere coders. They were physicists, mathematicians, and electronic engineers, figures such as Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Grace Hopper, Dennis Ritchie (inventor of Unix), and John McCarthy (creator of LISP).

They approached computing with the habits of true engineering: processes, rigour, cost-consciousness, and awareness of physical limits. That discipline gave IT its legitimacy and early credibility. As the industry scaled, it lost its anchor in that tradition.

The Ego Trap

At the root of this drift lies ego. Delivering at any cost does not constitute engineering. It constitutes vanity, fuelled by an economic model with no foundation that relies on the cyclic inflation of bubbles.

Rushing to ship features for applause, ignoring metrics because they prove uncomfortable, and hiring recklessly to avoid hard decisions do not represent acts of craft. They represent acts of ego.

Ego burns out people, systems, and organisations. True engineering designs for permanence, not vanity.

The Fragility of Our Age

We live in a fragile age. Once, societies praised learners and honoured those who invested in knowledge. Today, many find it offensive to be reminded that others have studied, worked, and mastered difficult skills.

A culture emerges where people prefer not to hear what hurts, where the very notion of effort and discipline appears as an insult to those who chose comfort. This reluctance to acknowledge learning erodes respect for mastery and normalises mediocrity.

Engineering cannot survive in such a climate, for it thrives only where learning, sacrifice, and discipline are celebrated rather than diminished.

Closing Reflection

The industry does not need more engineers in title. It needs more engineers in heart. The degree deserves respect as a strong and honourable path, one that represents sacrifice and commitment. Titles alone cannot sustain an industry. What sustains it is the heart of engineering: the mindset of discipline, rigour, and craft.

Engineering without the heart reduces itself to delivery. Delivery without discipline reduces itself to ego. Ego builds nothing that endures.

The industry must decide whether it wishes to remain a culture of shortcuts or rediscover the discipline that once earned it the right to call itself engineering.