If you have to spend 8 hours a day stick tubes up peoples arse's and mopping up their sick or sit in a nice office drinking coffee, staring out the window and changing thousands of peoples lives with a well designed thing, tell me who's more caring?
Engineers are cold and dead inside, research shows
A study carried out by psychology researchers in Sweden has shown that people who go into engineering are less caring and empathetic than those who enter professions such as medicine. Chato Rasoal and his colleagues determined this by surveying 200 students from six different study programs, using a "well-established …
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Tuesday 22nd January 2013 18:01 GMT MissingSecurity
I think the answer can be found ...
In the following:
Patients listen to doctors, who are likely to be right 90% of the time, and a such problems are resolved with minimal issue.
Users on the other hand never listen to an Engineer (even if they are 90% of the time right). So, out comes the sarcasm. We'll randomly spout about things you should check, while we surf the web, than when you have forgotten what we originally suggested, we tell you to try that, than low and behold, you system is now operational.
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Tuesday 22nd January 2013 21:08 GMT medstudent88
I read the actual study [Chato Rasoal , Henrik Danielsson & Tomas Jungert (2012): Empathy among
students in engineering programmes, European Journal of Engineering Education, 37:5, 427-435] and this register article kind of missed the boat on the actual findings of the study. The engineers didnt actually do that badly in comparison to the other students. Also all of the other students were in nursing/medicine/social work/psych so you'd hope that empathy would be among their strengths. Most of the difference in empathy was actually sex-related, not program-related. The other students didn't actually score better than engineers in most aspects of empathy when you take sex into account. Also the study didn't report what is an average or good rating for empathy in the first place, so maybe all students had a higher than average empathy rating and some of the programs just did a bit better, who knows. Newspaper articles sometimes misrepresent study results...and I think they did in this case just to make up a story that people would read.
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Tuesday 22nd January 2013 22:56 GMT John Smith 19
Surgeons need good motor skills. Do physicians *need* good people skills?
I think people have lost the skills to effectively take an oral medial history.
The other question is how much of an ongoing relationship does the
quakmedical professional need to have with their patient.The other issue is for doctors (like lawyers and cops) their place of work is quite intimidating and frightening to most people.
BTW this issues was addressed some years ago in the dental profession, which now includes lessons on basically how not to act like Laurence Oliver in Marathon Man.
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Wednesday 23rd January 2013 01:51 GMT BlackOps
When I was getting my engineering degree, psychology and hummanities classes were required to ensure that this would not happen. Clearly, these educators are failing us.
In the intervening 20 years, I have witnessed engineers acheive amazing technology to help better the human condition. Psychology has given us Doctor Phil.
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Wednesday 23rd January 2013 10:21 GMT aeroking
You are one of them .. people who don't care about others.
We're aware that we also have many readers in the physics-based professions, but we needn't worry about them ... (hypocrisy)
You are just one of them, except that you apparently are not an engineering student/ or graduate.
On the contrary, I have studied and practised engineering (Mech) and am back for more. Yet I care about people a lot more than most of those doctors. I hate it when people survey 200 people and use the result to judge a billion people or more. Any body can choose not to care. This article is just another blog-for-money article. ...
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Thursday 24th January 2013 08:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Joke of the century, really. I'm not going to argue about nurses and such, but just try the difference between going to a tech and a doctor, pointing to a person nearby, and telling them "that bloke's gonna be dead in a few months". Behind the inch-thick sugar-coating of medical bedside manner, the typical reaction of a doctor is simply "Yeah, so? Tough s##t, pal. Deal with it." For them, that's the reality of their daily lives so basically if they simply fail to recognize some more exotic ailment that's gonna kill someone as a result well that's just too bad for them. They stop caring in the first year or so on the job simply because it would emotionally destroy them if they kept giving a flying f### about every single patient. So they make sure they don't. I have yet to see any engineer with that level of callousness...