engineer's disease

Noun

engineer's disease (uncountable)

1. A bias of technical professionals who think that their expertise allows them to solve problems in unrelated fields.
   • The idea of “engineer’s disease” developed while I (Graham) was talking with a crew of project managers. I was talking about Legionnaires’ disease, and they thought I said “engineer’s disease.”[2019 October, Randall Englund, Robert J. Graham, “Selecting and Developing Project Managers”, in Creating an Environment for Successful Projects, 3rd edition, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, →ISBN, page...
   • Humanities denial is enabled—and enables—another affliction that’s endemic within the tech industry: “engineer’s disease,” the belief that expertise in one field (usually in STEM) makes you an expert on everything else too.[2025 April 22, Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Basic Books, →ISBN
2. A tendency for engineers to be protective and perfectionist about their work.
   • Revealing the workings of a machine, without disclosing what the machine does, is a classic symptom of engineer’s disease.1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal: Software Tools for the Professional Programmer, volume 17, numbers 190–195, Redwood City, California, United States: M&T Pub., →ISSN, page 158
   • After that, I started working on a debugger and a Fortran compiler, but got bogged down with engineer’s disease (kept designing to get it perfect, but never actually finishing) so never finished.2005 February 17, Tom Oward, “1 · The History of Apple I”, in Apple I Replica Creation: Back to the Garage, Syngress, page 22