# Real engineers deliver results

**Published by:** [Pioneering Spirit](https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/)
**Published on:** 2026-08-02
**URL:** https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/real-engineers-deliver-results

## Content

Engineering, at root, is the application of science and mathematics to solve practical problems and build useful things. That is the whole definition. Not a credential. Not a licensing category. Not a guild membership. The word comes from the Latin ingenium, native cleverness, the same root that gives us "ingenuity." An engineer was originally someone who devised things. The credentialing apparatus came centuries later. For a good chunk of my post-college years, I developed a strange habit of reading the introductory sections of math and science textbooks, the parts everyone skips to get to the actual content. I was hunting for how each author chose to define their terms. What is math, really? It's the only major branch of human inquiry that eludes a precise consensus definition and is both an art and a science. What does it mean to apply math as a tool? Every author had a slightly different answer, and I found the variance more interesting than any single problem set. Taking that spirit to the areas of infrastructure and public works where I've spent my career, I posted this little substack note a few weeks back that went moderately viral (by my low standards at least). Today the word has drifted from the definition. In public works contexts, "engineer" signals a license, a stamp, a professional designation you earn through an accredited degree and a state exam. That is a legitimate and useful category for certain purposes. Nobody wants an unlicensed person signing off on a bridge's structural calculations. But it is a narrower thing than the original word, and the narrowing has consequences. Part of what happened is that public works slowed down. When you are building a lot, the feedback loop between idea and structure stays tight. Someone proposes something, it gets built, it either stands or falls, and everyone learns. When you build rarely, the loop stretches out over years or decades, and into that gap creeps ritual. Process for its own sake. Form standing in for function. The permitting review that exists because it always has, not because anyone can trace it to an outcome it actually prevents. The other thing that happened, somewhat independently, is specialization. Modern engineering organizations, public and private, increasingly ask each person to own a subsystem of a subsystem. You design the valve, not the pump. You review the pump spec, not the system it feeds. That has real advantages. Depth matters. But it also means fewer and fewer people build anything end to end anymore, from concept through fabrication through installation through the inevitable field fix. Tacit knowledge, the kind that only accumulates in your hands and your gut from actually doing the thing, gets lost at every handoff. Each team knows its slice cold and knows almost nothing about how the slices fit together, and there is no one left whose job is to hold the whole picture. I say this as someone who is not, in any official sense, an engineer. My background is mostly in engineering digital solutions. I have shipped production data pipelines for Fortune 50 companies, which is a fancy way of saying I worked a few months basically as an intern at an "it" startup back in grad school. I have also carried some of that same instinct, build the thing, watch what breaks, fix it, into the physical world here and there. I do not have a PE stamp and I am not claiming one. What I am claiming is the older sense of the word: someone willing to apply math and reasoning to a real problem and see it through. Every so often someone reminds the world what the older sense of engineering actually looks like, and the reminder tends to arrive from an unlicensed direction. In 2013 Mats Järlström's wife got a $150 ticket from a red light camera in Beaverton, Oregon. Järlström, an electronics engineer by training with a degree from Sweden, sat down and worked through the kinematic formula traffic engineers have used since 1959 to time yellow lights. He found a gap. The formula assumed drivers either sail straight through an intersection or come to a full stop. It did not account for drivers slowing down to make a legal right turn, who decelerate mid-intersection and can get caught by a light that changes to red while they are still turning. He reworked the math to account for that deceleration and sent his findings to the Beaverton city council, local media, and the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying. The board's response was not to engage with the math. It investigated Järlström for two years and then fined him $500, for two things. He had used the word "engineer" to describe himself in correspondence, and under Oregon law at the time that word was reserved for people holding an active state PE license regardless of whether the description was accurate. And the board found that by analyzing public traffic light data and critiquing the formula used by licensed engineers, he had engaged in the unlicensed practice of engineering. Board meeting minutes show a member stating plainly that by refuting the professional opinion behind the original formula, Järlström was practicing engineering. He teamed up with the Institute for Justice and sued. In December 2018 a federal magistrate judge ruled decisively in his favor, finding that critiquing public infrastructure and doing math about it in public is protected speech, and that the word "engineer" has enough ordinary meaning in English that a state cannot bar a citizen from using it truthfully. The board was permanently enjoined from enforcing either restriction. The postscript is the part I actually love. In 2020 the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the international body that sets the standard, formally adopted Järlström's corrected formula, replacing math that had gone unchallenged for fifty-five years. An unlicensed hobbyist working at his kitchen table found something the credentialed profession had missed, and once he was allowed to say so in public, the profession updated its standard. That is engineering working exactly as the word originally intended, applied math meeting a real problem and making something better. The two-year detour through licensing enforcement was the system trying to decide whether that kind of contribution was even allowed to happen. So here is a thought experiment, silly on its face but I think less silly than it sounds. Every twenty years, Ise Jingu in Japan is completely dismantled and rebuilt from scratch. Not restored. Rebuilt, on an adjacent plot, using the same specifications, by a new set of hands. Salvaged timber gets redistributed to shrines across the country, and the cycle keeps traditional craftsmanship alive by forcing it to be exercised rather than merely preserved. More than two thousand master artisans pass their specialized skills down through the actual doing of the work, not through a manual. The tradition has run for something like thirteen hundred years. Nobody documents Ise Jingu into obsolescence. They just build it again. Where is the Ise Jingu equivalent for public works? I do not mean a museum piece or a reenactment. I mean a real, regular, load-bearing cadence where a group of people build an actual piece of infrastructure from scratch, install it, watch it fail in some small way, hot fix it, and take apart what they learned before they take apart the thing itself. An aqueduct model, a pump station, something with real water or real current running through it and real consequences if it is built wrong. Something small enough to complete in a week, not a generation, because twenty years is too slow a heartbeat for a discipline that needs to keep its hands calloused. And crucially, something end to end. One team, one build, from concept to commissioning, so the tacit knowledge that gets lost at every handoff in a specialized bureaucracy has nowhere to hide. AWWA already has a version of this instinct on the operations side, the annual meter madness competitions where crews race to install service lines against the clock. That is real and it is good. It keeps a physical skill sharp through actual repetition rather than certification renewal. But it lives on the ops side of the house. Nobody is racing to design and stand up a new small system from first principles, then argue about what to change next time. I don't know what the right tempo is. Faster than twenty years, certainly. Maybe annual. Maybe seasonal, if you wanted something closer to a harvest rhythm than an anniversary. I don't know what the right scale is either, though something small enough for a dedicated crew to complete in a week feels roughly right as a starting guess. What I do know is that the feedback loop is the whole point. Ise Jingu is not maintained by admiring the plans. It is maintained by tearing the thing down and building it again, in public, with your own hands, on a schedule short enough that the knowledge never has time to calcify into a form nobody remembers how to execute. Further Reading The March of Folly reflections on institutional feedback loops For more on what happens when the map decouples from the territory and no one is positioned to notice. (This is a review I wrote on Barbara Tuckman's wonderful book about folly from fall of Troy to Vietnam). AWWA Meter Madness competitions Worth a look as an existing proof of concept for what a physical, repeated, hands-on public works ritual can look like, even if it currently lives entirely on the operations side rather than the design and build side. Järlström v. OSBEELS case materials, Institute for Justice The full case record, useful if you want the primary source on how far a licensing board was willing to go to keep a citizen from doing math in public. Having never taken an engineering course, I have been self studying a bit of some of the engineering tests and courses relevant to utilities. One piece that's fascinating to me is how much approximations from the 19th century like the linear method or Manning equation are still largely used. The development and patterns reminds me of statistics and this magisterial book. Writing coda I spent some time digging into the history of engineering and poking around with ai on interesting examples to unearth the Oregon case study. I used that and some fairly lengthy instructions to have this piece written using a bespoke Claude skill. I debated the punchy title a bit internally but then thought hey why not own it.

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