w8, but I thought all of the big slash important projects like bridges and whatnot had tentpole engineers, like the really superstar smart ones who act as tank on-project, and then armies of regular-sized engineers who handle all the minutea. :3

Engineer hive mind? 100 thinking heads is better than one right?

Yep, that is the horrible truth of the matter. Nobody is really smarter than another person. Some just focus on other things and apply themselves more than others. It is really that simple.

Try hanging out with crane and telehandler operators. If you knew who was lifting you up in that access platform or putting the pallet on the scaffolding your crew are working on you'd quite rightly be scared.

>_> Same thing goes when you hang out with chefs, how many things can go WRONG with a dish or things that are undercooked that go out because someone didn't double check a dish.

Also with how many people alone touch your plate edges before it even gets to you, when I found that out I'm now terrified to put anything close to a plate edge.

Try hanging round bunch of Navy Nuke's, kind of scary to think that we operate power plants

I tutored the next generation of American engineers for 3 years at UMass Lowell. I hit that realization at about year 0.5. "Ok, so all you have to do is a little bit of vector math... What do you mean 'what's a vector?' How did you pass physics 1?!" ...45 minutes later... "Ok... so we've established that you know how to add... except in cases including decimals..." I am sometimes tempted to tremble with fear when using anything I didn't build myself.