“Engineers don’t hope.”
Book Project · Ingenieur Sein
On a profession whose decisions always come too early.
„Ingenieure hoffen nicht.” (German) is a narrative non-fiction book about the engineering profession — 253 pages in fifteen chapters, completed. It tells of a profession that carries the world and rarely talks about itself: the project lead who, six weeks before start of production, does not ask whether the team will make it but what gets cut; the assembly worker who mounts in forty seconds what took a young engineer twelve weeks at the desk; and a dropout whose reason is left standing. The book does not advertise the profession — it examines and measures it, in scenes rather than theses.
For everyone living or working with an engineer there is a dedicated part of the book: the field guide “The Engineer in its Habitat” — seven entry points, twelve patterns and fifty-three field observations to practice on.
“In my basement stands a lathe whose cross slide has been jamming since 2012. I could repair it. But then the project would be over.”
#IngenieurSein on LinkedIn
For a year now, short excerpts and ideas from the book have been published weekly on LinkedIn under the hashtag #IngenieurSein — each with an upfront hypothesis, numbers and a written evaluation. The measured posts together reached more than 110,000 impressions, the strongest almost 38,000 — a hundred times the author’s own follower base.
Reading Sample
Three pages each from three chapters as PDF, in German:
How It Came About
This book is a passion project. The manuscript was based on more than 50 notes from eighteen years in industry and six years of professorship — and no sooner had I decided to turn them into a book than another 80 observations arrived over the following months. You start to see once you start looking. Part of the working method: a Claude helped me structure and write. Refusing a tool that structures the work would be as unprofessional as an engineer who believes he calculates more honestly by rejecting simulation. Responsibility for every sentence lies with me — and quite honestly: the work was so much more fun with immediate feedback only a few keystrokes away.
And One More Thing
The book is finished, both editions are typeset and printed, an English translation exists, and all rights remain with me. Nothing has been decided yet.
If you work at a publishing house, write to me. If you know someone who does, a name is all I need; I will take it from there.
All persons in this book are fictional.