this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Sounds like a problem for later
Flippancy aside: the fundamental rule in all engineering is solving the problem you have, not the problem you might have later
It's rarely the case. You rarely work in vacuum where your work only affects what you do at the moment. There is always a downstream or upstream dependency/requirement that needs to be met that you have to take into account in your development.
You have to avoid the problem that might come later that you are aware of. If it's not possible, you have to mitigate the impact of the future problems.
It's not possible to know of all the problems that might/will happen, but with a little work before a project, a lot of issues can be avoided/mitigated.
I wouldn't want civil engineers thinking like that, because our infrastructure would be a lot worse than it is today.
That doesn't apply to all engineering. In ChE, it'll literally blow up later...
“Not blowing up later” would be part of the problem being solved
Engineering for future requirements almost always turn out to be a net loss. You don’t build a distillation column to process 8000T of benzene if you only need to process 40T
but you could design it to be easily scalable instead of having to build another even more expensive thing when you suddenly need to process 41T
POITROAE