Prestige of Engineers

BassDad
Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:10:37 +0000

Greater good is where you find it, although I will admit that sometimes you have to look pretty hard. It could be in writing that patch in such a way as to reduce the power consumption of the processor, or to reduce the amount of unnecessary stuff that gets printed, thus saving some paper. Maybe it is simply in eliminating a bug that has been annoying a lot of people and wasting their time. When you modify the heat sink, maybe you can make it do more of the work passively so that the fan does not have to run quite as fast or quite as long, or maybe you can specify a material that is not as poisonous to the environment when the computer gets thrown away. If you work for Ford, perhaps you can squeeze out another couple of tenths of a mile per gallon on the average fuel economy. When you start multiplying these effects by millions or tens of millions of copies, you really can do some good even in mundane situations.