Wait, did I need a lobbying budget all along?

I’m not naive… right?

My accent doesn’t give it away too readily, but I grew up on the edge of a fairly hostile estate in north Belfast—one of the bits you used to hear about on the news—at the tail end of the Troubles. I was still in primary school when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, but do retain pretty vivid memories of personnel carriers on the streets, British Army patrols, Tangi Land Rovers and armoured Vauxhall Omegas, bomb scares, riots, paramilitary feuds, and whatever else was still lingering at the end of a decades-long sectarian conflict.

The reality is that this was the norm for a significant number of people who grew up in Northern Ireland around the same time. It also provided a host of ’life experience’ opportunities that I don’t think an idyllic childhood in Kent would typically offer.

Whatever form those experiences took—being chased, attacked, having people try to start fights with you or suss out which ‘side’ you’re from, having your windows smashed, walking home through a riot, whatever—they served to help sculpt an ability to read people and to read situations, and induce a degree of acumen, vigilance, and motive questioning that I think would, in a more sedate environment, take decades to acquire.

Until recently, I would have never thought of myself as naive.

Engineering, soft skills, and suddenly wearing a suit to work

Engineering first

The professional world is obviously different, with a different set of social norms and an effectively unwritten set of rules about how you should behave.

In engineering, I think it’s generally OK to be rough around the edges on some of these things. In the UK, the engineering workforce has a higher proportion of people from low socio-economic backgrounds than most other professions. In part, this might be down to the fact that engineering-adjacent jobs like manufacturing and construction are visible to people from these backgrounds in a way that other professions might not be, but The Sutton Trust¹ also point out that engineering promotes social mobility because performance depends on having the ability to actually do stuff:

“Talent and performance may be more objectively assessed based on technical ability rather than soft skills.” — The Sutton Trust

Basically, ‘polish’ shouldn’t matter because you can’t bluff your way through a thermodynamics exam with the right shoes and a nice accent. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case once you break into management territory, where those from privileged backgrounds still dominate things².

“71% of people in their 30s from higher socio-economic backgrounds are in managerial or professional roles, vs. 39% from lower socio-economic backgrounds” — The Sutton Trust

That aside, you absolutely can rock up to work at some of the highest performing engineering organisations on the planet wearing jeans, the wrong shirt, and a pair of Dr. Martens, and as long as you can solve the problems put in front of you, you’ll become a valued member of the team.

I have to wear a suit now?

One of the most challenging experiences that’s come from starting a business—particularly one that makes software for the highly conservative advanced engineering sector—is realising how unbelievably fucking hard it is to engage with the market. Broadly speaking, (hardware) engineers don’t like being sold things, they don’t like being cold called, they’re not terminally online, and they don’t feel that they can openly talk about what they do at work.

This unreachability phenomenon does appear to have some significant regional variation; Americans are generally more open, British generally more conservative, and people in Northern Ireland just mouth-welded-shut unwilling to speak to anybody who isn’t already in their circle… which might have some correlation with NI’s abysmal productivity^{3 4}.

Having thought through a few possible workarounds for this, I’ve recently found myself attending more and more industry events, joining relevant trade bodies, and generally mixing with commercial and executive functions of companies operating in the advanced engineering sector. This has meant wearing a suit, mixing with other people wearing suits, and—despite having gone to a fancy selective school, having played rugby, having worked in high-performing engineering organisations, and at least theoretically ticking lots of boxes for being in the circle—generally finding I don’t know how to talk to these people.

Typically, I’ll see someone’s eyes flick from side to side then look me up and down, then they’ll lean back just a little, and I see their thinking be revealed to be some variant of: ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’

A sudden realisation

Despite the frequency of those sorts of encounters, these events still provide access to a vast repository of knowledge that you just can’t find anywhere else. At one I attended recently, aside from an aerospace executive openly and egregiously advocating for firms in the region to stop competing with one another for staff because it drives up costs, I discovered that the way in which engineering software is sold has been changing—even for the enormous legacy CAx firms.

Engineers and engineering leaders are being excluded from the process, with decisions made higher up, particularly where the firm collaborates with the aerospace primes. The primes choose their stack then dictate the rules of engagement to the supply chain, effectively reinforcing today’s CAx vendor oligopoly.

Conveniently enough, this event took place in a government building—and triggered the thought: we don’t need marketing, we need lobbying.

What I would change

Having left this event feeling like I held all the guile of a two month old Golden Retriever, I realised that what we needed early on was not engineer-targeted digital marketing or high-capability technical advisors, or even a good product. The engineers aren’t really the customer in bigger organisations, nor in the supply chain, so solving their problems doesn’t matter—they’re not the ones with the cheque book—plus they won’t speak to you anyway.

What we needed was lobbyists; insiders with the right shoes and the right contacts, who knew who to speak to and how. We needed people organising dinners and parties, draining a slush fund, and playing a game whose rules remain a mystery to me.

We needed a lobbying budget, not a marketing budget.

References