[zamnos]

> Technical people suffer from what I call "Engineer's Disease". We think because we're an expert in one area, we're automatically an expert in other areas. Just recognizing that helps.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812804

[hnfong]

I think the more interesting question is why this symptom mostly happens to "engineers".

I've seen enough engineers presume they can easily become experts in law; I haven't seen many lawyers presume they can easily become experts in engineering.

Why?

[rsynnott]

It's certainly not _just_ engineers; you see it in the hard sciences and medicine to an extent, as well. Someone recently posted a study purporting to show harm caused by masks to HN, say; while its authors didn't appear to include anyone with expertise in the relevant medical specialties, they did include a chemist and a veterinarian. And, if you're a fan of Matt Levine, you'll know that dentists stereotypically tend to think of themselves as being experts at high finance.

But it definitely does seem to be especially pronounced with engineers.

(NB. I am a software engineer, and not a sociologist, so, argh, this is potentially getting a bit meta.)

[OkayPhysicist]

IMO, there's a certain level of arrogance intrinsic to engineering: To build something new, you need a belief, first and foremost, that you can build it at all, and almost as importantly better. Weeding out all the people who don't have, at least to some degree, that belief, and you end up with a disproportionate fraction of people who think that way about everything.

[wakaru44]

you could also call it 'the halo effect'.