Mr Postman

My quality engineer friend was lamenting to me that he agreed with the views of an American that there were no engineers in Singapore.

He explained to me that most of them were no more than email routers. The so-called engineers would receive feedback from production when they encounter a problem, and would send this information to the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for help. And should the OEM require additional data, they would drop the engineer an email, who would then forward this queries to production for them to answer. The so-called engineers are no more than middlemen who relay messages between the production and the OEM.

My friend terms them as email routers because these days most of these engineers are housed in nice offices and spend most of their time in front of their PCs doing email routing. Over where I work, such people are called postmen for the same reason.

Looking at this perspective, such positions do not value add to the process chain and are somewhat redundant. To be fair, there are positions other than engineering guilty of such redundancy.

Perhaps not enough emphasis has been put on inmproving engineering standards and quality in our nation. Many organisations realise they need engineers but are unwilling to train them due to costs. Yet a good engineer can bring in value to a company. Engineers need to be technical experts in their fields, not postmen or email routers. High engineering quality is what will drive a company to new heights of competition.