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10/25/2007: "Why technology is addictive and misleading"

Microsoft may be suffering from engineers' syndrome, something you run into all the time. This is quite amusing, even to engineers, who see it occurring in other engineers but never see it in themselves.

The idea is that once you learn engineering disciplines, you project them onto endeavors other than engineering, since everything you ever do in life is actually some sort of engineering. While there is some modicum of truth to this notion, it's the leap of faith that pushes the idea into the absurd. What happens with engineers' syndrome is this: You start believing that since you're an excellent engineer in one specialty, then you're a friggin' genius in everything you do, because it's all the same, really.

[ This describes our approach to problems. We can never look at our internal deficiencies and fix them because we're used to manipulating external resources. ]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2204613,00.asp