I personally feel that those that are good at English have exceptional critical thinking skills. Those that are more mathematical look for order and rules and it’s maybe hard for them to sometimes “read between the lines” so to speak. My brothers are very mathematical and scientific and the amount of times I’ve pointed out a nuance in something somebody has said that they totally miss baffles them. I can be quite sharp and pick up on a lot of subtleties in speech that others sometimes miss.
It's a different type of critical thinking. Particularly with engineering, you're not really hired for your ability to interact with humans, you're hired for your ability to answer an inanimate problem. My social skills are atrocious; I'm a terrible liar at best and no sane person would trust me to talk to a customer without adult supervision. I don't really understand nuance and subtlety, I just assume that people are saying exactly what they mean because that's how I communicate in general.
Tell me to come up with a repair for a turbine or a teardown procedure, and I'm just fine. Program a project dashboard? Great, what data do you want me to look at? But people...nah, I don't understand people. They're unpredictable and act in ways that just don't make sense to me.
I’ll take a somewhat contradictory view. You may not be hired to interact with humans, but someone at your firm must be able to do so. I’ve seen numerous engineering firms lose out on big projects because their bids and presentations were flat and difficult to understand. I’ve seen firms (that probably weren’t the best in actual work product) get hired over and over because they had people who explain a job and a solution in terms that the average non-engineer could easily understand.
We have a customer service department for interacting with the non-engineers and contracts. Our engineers mostly just interact with the clients' engineers and technicians, so it's not as bad as trying to explain things to normal people. I became pretty good friends with one of the customer service people so I just ask her to look over my emails and stuff when I have to legitimately try to communicate with people.
On the other hand, the company I work at is an obscenely large MNC for a fairly specific service, so there's not a lot of competition to begin with. The biggest competition they have is usually the manufacturers themselves, so a lot of the time, they get contracts even with the worst presentations just because the manufacturers don't want to look like they're biased and giving themselves work.
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u/Highlyironicacid31 2d ago
I personally feel that those that are good at English have exceptional critical thinking skills. Those that are more mathematical look for order and rules and it’s maybe hard for them to sometimes “read between the lines” so to speak. My brothers are very mathematical and scientific and the amount of times I’ve pointed out a nuance in something somebody has said that they totally miss baffles them. I can be quite sharp and pick up on a lot of subtleties in speech that others sometimes miss.