The uneducated engineer

You can have a Master’s degree from the University of Liverpool and still be uneducated, if you do not have the ethics to use what you have learned.

You can have a Bachelor’s degree from a leading university in Lahore and still be uneducated, if your heart has no spirituality.

I am writing this from the perspective of someone with both degrees, who employs engineers from both kinds of universities, and who has spent most of his adult life thinking about what it means to be educated and not finding the answer in the diploma.

There are three buckets that combine to make an education complete.

The first is the bucket of science, art, and technology. This is what schools teach. This is what you measure with grades, board exams, GPAs, and certifications. The first bucket prepares you for the world: how to design a system, write a proof, run a calculation, manage a project, ship a product. Most of modern formal education is poured into this bucket and only this bucket.

The second is the bucket of morality. How do you treat the people you work with? Do you negotiate a deal in a way the other side feels good about, or only in a way you feel good about? Do you mean yes when you say yes, and no when you say no? When you are senior to someone and you can take advantage of them, do you? The second bucket prepares you to deal with the people of this world. There is no diploma that certifies you have filled it.

The third is the bucket of spirituality. What do you believe is happening when you are not in the office? What is the work for? What part of the work survives you when you are not the one doing it? Is there an audience for your life that is larger than the people who can read your LinkedIn? The third bucket prepares you for the world after this one, if you believe one is coming, and even if you do not it disciplines the way you live in this one.

In our time, we have narrowed the focus to the first bucket only. The other two are treated as personal hobbies that do not appear on a resume. We graduate brilliant engineers from elite institutions every year, and many of them are uneducated by the older definition of the word. They can do the science. They cannot navigate the people, and they have not asked themselves what the work is for.

I am not arguing for less first-bucket education. The first bucket is real, and Pakistan in particular needs more of it, not less. The training pipeline that produces senior engineers in this country is one of the most underrated infrastructure projects of the last twenty years. I have employed Pakistani engineers for sixteen years and I would build the company on this talent layer again without hesitation.

I am arguing that the first bucket alone produces what my own tradition would call an uneducated engineer.

When I hire, I look at all three. The first bucket gets you the interview. The second bucket gets you hired. The third bucket gets you promoted. None of those rules are written down anywhere in DevBatch’s hiring rubric. They do not need to be written. The pattern shows up reliably enough across sixteen years that I trust it.

If you are early in your career, fill the first bucket as fast as you can. Then start filling the other two. They will not show up on your transcript. They will show up in the people who decide whether to keep working with you fifteen years from now.

That is the longer game. It is also the only game that matters.