the failure-focused mindset

schneier wrote about what he calls the security mindset some time ago in which he uses a rather broad brush to paint a rather unflattering picture of engineers...

schneier is certainly no engineer if he thinks engineers don't think about failure... although i don't have a degree in engineering (nor the iron ring one receives as part of the ritual of the calling of an engineer) i was in the engineering program at uoft for a few years and one of the things they drilled into our heads (besides the mass/energy balance and the fact that you can't push a rope) is that people die when engineers don't think about failure... buildings collapse, bridges crumble, dams break, gas tanks explode, planes fall out of the sky, etc...

some of the comments on schneier's blog post point out the fact that engineers actually do think about failure, though some of the commenters seem to think engineers only think about the consequences of failure - this is wrong... they think about the conditions under which a failure can occur first, before they think about the possible consequences... knowing those conditions makes knowing how to cause the failure straight forward, maybe even trivial depending on the circumstances, because all you need to do is figure out how to produce those conditions...

some also think engineers are only concerned with natural failure, rather than failures caused by intelligent attackers and cite things like buildings as examples (ie. building engineers are concerned with things like force that wind can exert on the outside of a building but not the force a person can exert on the outside of a building)... the truth is there's not an awful lot a person can do to a building to cause it to fail, and those things a person can do (blow it up?) can't easily (or cost effectively) be addressed through engineering... there are, however, plenty of things where a person can cause a failure and the engineers who deal with those things do consider those types of failures...

now, i'm willing to accept that the failure-focused mindset isn't natural for a lot of people, but singling out groups and saying "it's not natural for these people, it's not what they do" is ridiculous - worse still, to use that brush to paint a group whose failure-focused mindset has saved all of our lives dozens of times over (if not more) is an insult... the failure-focused mindset may not be common but, but it's not rare enough to make you special for having it either... anyone who thinks otherwise needs to get over themselves...