Career Advice Archives » Engineering for Humans

What makes a good human factors engineer? Five critical skills

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 24 February 2024

Recently, the head of a college human factors program asked for my perspective on the human factors (and user experience) skills valued in industry. Here are five critical qualities that emerged from our discussion, in no particular order:

Systems thinking

Making sense of complexity requires identifying relationships, patterns, feedback loops, and causality. Systems thinkers excel at identifying emergent properties of systems and are thus suited to analyses such as safety, cybersecurity, and process, where outcomes may not be obvious from simply looking at sum of the parts.

College interviewing tips

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 29 October 2022

For several years I’ve been volunteering as an alumni interviewer for my alma mater. It’s enjoyable to spend a bit of time interacting with a younger generation and exploring their interests; my optimism is buoyed by their potential.

“Diversity of thought” is the “all lives matter” of corporate inclusion efforts

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 9 June 2021

For at least the last decade, engineering companies have talked a great deal about “diversity and inclusion”. Inevitably, many people¹ have the takeaway that this means “diversity of thought”. This is like telling a Black Lives Matter supporter that “all lives matter”; of course all lives matter, but that’s completely missing the point². Diversity of thought is important to avoid groupthink and promote innovation; but that’s not the point of diversity and inclusion efforts³.

Diversity and inclusion means making sure that teams are actually diverse, across a range of visible and not-visible features. Why does that matter?

Learn from the mistakes of others

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 16 September 2020

The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience… i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business…
General James Mattis

The most successful people in any profession learn from the experiences of others. You can learn from their successes, sure. But don’t focus on doing things exactly they way they did, you’ll stifle your own innovation. Instead, understand their successes, extract relevant lessons, and forge your own path.

More importantly, learn from others’ failures and mistakes.

That’s why I publish a Reading / Listening List. As of the publishing of this article, 5 of the 6 recommendations are about poor engineering and design⁴. I find these stories fascinating, enlightening, and valuable. By avoiding the pitfalls of the past, we improve the likelihood of success in our own projects.

It’s okay to make mistakes, but strive to at least make original mistakes.

Board man gets paid

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 22 March 2020

For years I’ve been advocating for the effective inclusion of human systems integration (HSI) in the systems engineering (SE) process. I had to address a persistent misunderstanding of what HSI is and how it relates to human factors; while that can be frustrating, I recognized that it wasn’t going to change overnight. Instead, I worked diligently to share my message with anyone who would listen.

Recently, my diligence paid off. I was contacted by a group putting together a proposal for a defense contract. The government’s request outlined their expectations for HSI as part of the systems engineering effort in a way that the proposal team hadn’t seen before. Someone on the team had heard me speak before, knew I had the right expertise they needed, and reached out to request my support.

Thoughts on “A Message to Garcia”

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 17 June 2019

“A Message to Garcia” is a brief essay on the value of initiative and hard work written by Elbert Hubbard in 1898. It is often assigned in leadership courses, particularly in the military. Less often assigned but providing essential context is Col. Andrew Rowan’s first-person account of the mission, “How I Carried the Message to Garcia”.

There are also a number of opinion pieces archived in newspapers and posted on the internet both heralding and decrying the essay. There are a number of interpretations and potential lessons to be extracted from this story. It’s important that developing leaders find the valuable ideas.

Why you should use a writing coach (even if you’re already a good writer)

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 13 January 2019

My first grad school paper was a pretty straightforward assignment with a three-page limit. There was so much to the topic⁵ that I wrote five pages without even thinking about it. I thought it would be easy to pare down but, try as I might, I could not get it below the limit without removing key points. I was a decent writer and had even worked professionally as a technical author, but I was really struggling.