There is a whirlwind of news that we are bombarded with each day, and it can be difficult to find any grasp of what is happening in our country. There is a piece that I want to emphasize as especially important to us as engineers though: The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the head of DOGE, Elon Musk is employing an intentional strategy: choosing to have most of its members, lieutenants, and grunts be engineers, especially young engineers. As young engineers ourselves, I ask everyone to reflect on why that is.
My theory is this: as engineers, we’re trained to dive headfirst into things we don’t know about and work our way out to understand, change, and optimize. Yet we are primarily—if not solely—trained to see through a technical lens. I see it manifest in countless ways in myself and at Olin. There’s a problem: Let me try to fix it! Something is inefficient: Let me optimize it! Build this thing: Learn enough about it to experiment with! There’s a constant desire to dive right into solving the problem before we step back and look at the pool: is it worth diving in? And how far might our ripples flow? It limits our awareness of the world and our perception of the impact we have on it. I reflect on CD, the class that encourages us most to engage with non-technical concepts of impact. For all of the care and understanding we were taught to search for, how many concluded that society itself had a fundamental necessity for change? Our designs were limited by the implicit conception of what we could offer as engineers—what products we could create within established systems, not what larger change or impact we could dwell upon. And CD is the core class that most centers a non-technical impact approach to our education! Our other engineering experiences are about finely polishing our technical lenses. Any larger evaluation of non-technical impacts are briefly tacked onto a class or two, if addressed at all. Intentional or not, and no matter what values we state, those experiences train us to not dwell long upon the larger societal impact of our work.
Many DOGE engineers did not shape their lives around the larger societal impact they would have, but on doing the technical work that was best for themselves. I know this because they didn’t go to create non-profits or change policy or improve public interest technologies after college. They went to study engineering, then they went to intern or work at Tesla and SpaceX, likely because it would pay them the most or give them the best technical experience or was simply just cool engineering work. They shaped their lives around honing their technical, problem-solving abilities, then choosing the work that was most personally profitable. When they were offered a spot in DOGE, it made sense economically to bind themselves to Musk and if nothing else, they got a new exciting optimization problem: the government.
In the face of a dauntingly complex and competitive world, we all have been conditioned to look after ourselves: it is the very foundation of our economic system. Especially as engineers, we’re told, implicitly or explicitly, that we are justified in finding what will be the most profitable for us, the impact is for others to decide. I understand there are financial realities, and I acknowledge that I speak from a place of privilege, but an awareness of impact is something that constitutes the very foundation of what makes any person a responsible member of society—a respect and acknowledgement that your choices will unavoidably impact others. In the absence of that awareness of broader perspectives arises an absence of empathy, humility, and understanding.
And that is why I am afraid of DOGE.
The invocation of Nazism is a heavy, overused trope which risks diminishing its true horror. But in observing DOGE, I see a clear parallel of how engineers become the mechanisms of hate, of how an indifferent and banal evil arises when technical education is divorced from broader perspectives.
The parallel is of Albert Speer.1 Young and ambitious, he graduated in architecture from the Technical University of Berlin but lacked any real political fervor. He aligned himself with the Nazi Party in the 30’s largely because their promise to reinvent German culture would afford him more opportunities to do the grand architecture he envisioned creating. By 1933, he was lucratively involved in designing pageantry and building plans, and when war broke out, Speer was chosen as the Minister of Armaments and War Production. In 1943, the London Observer examined him:
“Speer is, in a sense, more important for Germany today than Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels or the generals. Speer is not one of the flamboyant and picturesque Nazis. Whether he has any other than conventional political opinions is unknown. He might have joined any other political party that gave him a job and a career. He is very much the average man, well dressed, civil, non-corrupt, very middle class in his style of life, with a wife and six children. Much less than any of the other German leaders does he stand for anything particularly German or particularly Nazi. He rather symbolizes a type which has become increasingly important in all belligerent countries; the pure technician, the classless, bright young man, without background, with no other original aim than to make his way in the world, and no other means than his technical and managerial ability. It is the lack of psychological and spiritual balast and the ease with which he handles the terrifying technical and organizational machinery of our age which makes this slight type go extremely far nowadays … This is their age; the Hitlers and the Himmlers we may get rid of, but the Speers, whatever happens to this particular man, will be long with us.”
This quote serves as a constant, shuddering reminder of what a technical education can mean, and is what we have a responsibility to reckon with as engineers. The employment of technically focused, ambitious youth is the strategy that Elon Musk and the Trump Administration are employing with DOGE members. They were given a directive to make huge cuts, to root out DEI, and to report back. They excel at it. This is not a random coincidence, but an intentional tactic. We’ve seen it used before, and we have to ask ourselves what we must do as we see it now.
I am not saying to eschew engineering as an evil, but know that engineers who do not actively grapple with and work to change their impact are engineers that function as tools, and there will always be those that will seek to use us as such. This can be for good, sure, but more often it is used for extraction, exploitation, and oppression. No movement, no organization, no company, and no regime is possible without the support or, more pertinently, the complicity of its engineers.
We cannot run behind the justification of a non-partisan and impartial self-interest. We cannot hide behind the thought that someone else would do it anyways. We more than anyone have an obligation to systems-level understanding, knowing what we are building and for whom we are building it. Creating an electric car to learn in college is different from creating an electric car that profits a white supremacist. Optimizing a drone to evaluate infrastructure health is different from optimizing a drone that is going to be used for urban warfare. Building trains is different if you know what, or who, those trains will hold. Your work will not result in the creation of apolitical technologies—it will be placed in the hands of people and organizations that will seek to use them for their own purposes.
I do not say this to exclude any companies from your job search, but none of us are exempt from confronting the deeper impacts of the work that we do, because that is how we are used. If you plan to work for an organization that you know is not doing good, then actively reflect on the power that you have to change that work from within and strive to do so. Theories of change differ from outside change to inside change and from issue to issue, but no matter what your theory is, you cannot bury your head from your impact for your own self interest. Complicity is exactly what they desire of you.
When I look at DOGE, I don’t see a group of conniving masterminds. I see a group of engineers who I am familiar with: who when they get their directive, see it only as the problem they’ve been given. And the tool gets to work.
The reason I am afraid of DOGE is not because it is a group of intentionally evil or malicious people, it’s because I see a clear parallel to the worst of history: a clear warning of how technically focused, ambitious people are used. It reminds me of lessons from the past, and it gives me shudders of the future.
I am afraid of DOGE because it is a group of people that I know well, and who have been trained in the same way that I have been. I am afraid because they demonstrate clearly what can happen if I stop striving to grapple with the complexity of the world and the impact that I am having on it. I urge you to heed the same warning.
Summarizing a person’s life and motivations is hard to do briefly. I do not claim this is a definitive account of Albert Speer, but is what I have found as the impression from the account of a Nuremberg Prosecutor (King) who wrote a book on him and the below quote, as well as other online sources. ↩︎
Matt Colyer has been in startups for his entire working career. That’s five years now; he graduated Olin class of ’07, and immediately started his own business. That particular startup didn’t pan out, but he’s remained a staunch startup developer ever since. He has recently launched a new company, Easel, cofounded with Ben Ogle.
Matt and Ben rolled into Yerba Buena gardens, downtown San Francisco, on bicycles. Over a chess table in the shade, Matt and Ben told me about Easel and what it’s like to live and breathe startups. Matt explained his love for working through ever-changing problems and learning on the fly.
The careers of many successful individuals are represented in some regard by the following paradigm: Go to high school. Work hard in high school to get into a most respectable college. Work hard in college to land esteemed internships. Using well-built resume, land esteemed job or entrance into esteemed graduate school. If job, work. If graduate school, graduate, then work. This pattern succeeds in that with the proper inputs of ambition, work ethic, and luck, it outputs a well-rounded engineer with a respectable salary and a bright future.
This paradigm is deeply flawed. Students in this system waste their time always pushing towards future, socially mainstream goals rather than pursuing their own dreams. Striving for distant plans often requires us to meet others’ expectations rather than our own. Though often the path of least resistance, appeasing others produces unsatisfied individuals who make tangible sacrifices for little gain in areas they find meaningful.
I can’t criticize others without first acknowledging my own guilt. My high school branch of National Honor Society could have been named “Volunteer or your resume won’t look good enough to get into college”. I volunteered, and here I am, but the resume-building didn’t stop there.
Last summer, I was offered an internship position at an esteemed company. The only caveats were that I’d have to program computer graphics in a language nobody uses, and I’d have to turn down a position at a summer camp that I was excited about.
At the time, the decision was obvious: I worked for Westinghouse Electric, the largest technical employer in the United States.
Nobody would care if I worked at a summer camp for two years in a row, but if I had a manager that could say I was a respectable worker, I’d be worth something. I valued my resume and recommendations over my own interests, passions, and desires. This is fundamentally wrong. This flawed reasoning, and the realization that I never wanted to repeat it, is the most valuable bit of knowledge I’ve taken from my experience as an intern.
Searching for jobs this summer, I took an entirely different approach. I first pointed myself in a direction that excited me, then picked a subset that I thought had worth to society: the sustainable agriculture movement.
Next came the hard part, finding a job. Internships are most often sought through supply side economics, which play out as follows in students’ heads. “It’s time to find a job. Let me see what is available and apply to the most interesting options. I’ll accept the offer that excites me most.” At times, interests align and happy employees result. Alternatively, applicants will take an undesired position “because it is a job”, setting the stage for minimal satisfaction.
Finding work on a farm was fundamentally different. Because no farms came to me actively seeking help, and because there were no social expectations in this field of work, I had the freedom to find my ideal position.
It was far simpler to let someone come to me offering employment. However, working harder to find a job that excited me has been well worth the effort.
I will be working as a farmer in the mountains of Colorado this summer. I couldn’t be more thrilled, and I’d love to tell you about it.
And what’s more, I’d love to tell future employers of how my experiences give me insight that sets me apart from all other applicants.
Aligning my work with my passions seems to be the ultimate resume-builder for employment down the road after all. And even if I’m wrong, even if it doesn’t land me a dream job later on, I will have spent three months passionately working towards admirable goals in an exciting field.
Reading the front-page article in the most recent issue of Frankly Speaking, this reader became very perplexed. The article used phrases like “military-industrial complex” and “ultimate institution of disempowerment, of aggression, domination, and death” to describe the U.S. Armed Forces. The article included radical implications – that a nonlethal defense-sponsored project, or even a project sponsored by a company whose customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, is undeserving of Olin students’ time and effort and just plain immoral.
Four SCOPE projects this year (Lincoln Labs, Raytheon, Draper Labs, Parietal Systems) are directly related to the military. Another project (Adsys Controls) is the creation of an advertising tool for a company that sells some of its products to the military. Not to mention the October press release on Olin’s website declaring that our College has been named a subcontractor in two “government-funded defense contracts,” one for the Navy and one for the Air Force (which is now a SCOPE project, as well).
