There is a perception in the general public about engineers…solid, grounded in facts, serious, cautious. They work logically, methodically, are disciplined by their profession into taking one step at a time. I used to have that perception myself, until I started working in high tech. At first, as a marketing professional, I was looking at the engineers I worked with from the outside in, and the assumptions held reasonably well. There’s no question that they were far more practical and pragmatic than I and my fellow marketeers. But when I moved from Marketing into Program Management, and began dealing with the development process at close range, my assumptions began to change.