It’s interesting how engineers love to solve problems but much more importantly, love to solve challenging problems. The more challenging, the better.
The problem is that solving the problem becomes secondary because the challenge is what is important.
One example: green energy. We need more of it and the numbers say worldwide, 42% of the Co2 produced comes from buildings and homes (39% in the US). Around 30% from transportation and the rest from the industry. So it’s pretty well spread over three sources, right?
But which one is “hot” and makes people dream? Transport. Electric cars. And why? Because the challenge to make a safe car with great mileage running on electricity is a huge challenge.
Making a house reduce its energy consumption by 95-100%? it’s too easy! Hemp, passive housing and much less constraints compared to engineering a car. There’s no challenge, just optimizations to build on.
Green house > Tesla. Sorry.
You can see how we’re missing out on solving this green energy challenge: rationally we should attack the building/housing problem first because it’s the biggest source of pollution and because we have the solution, right here right now.
“Buildings have a lifespan of 50-100 years during which they continually consume energy and produce CO2 emissions. If half of new commercial buildings were built to use 50% less energy, it would save over 6 million metric tons of CO2 annually for the life of the buildings—the equivalent of taking more than 1 million cars off the road every year.”
I’d rather have that than having a couple thousands of electric cars running every year, at best. We can build green pre-fab houses much faster, with a much lower carbon print and virtually no hazardous material than any electrical car so why the fuck aren’t we?
It feels like the same with browser’s 3D technology. So challenging but so useless in a world of extremely powerful native solutions. The goal is noble -code once and run anywhere- but it turned out to not be true at all -different browser, different stuff- and the performance headaches are bigger than compiling natively.
Engineers you gotta focus on what counts, solving the overall problem. Forget exploit or “cool” stuff. Aim for effectiveness. Make the world better today, not tomorrow.