The Engineer's Social Hierarchy

Most engineers have a subtly different view of the social hierarchy than other workers. This comes primarily from being the smart geeky kids at school. Engineers or your other tech guys will have their own internal hierarchy, which might not match your pay scales or titles. To engineers, technical competency is substantially more important than other items. Other items can be important too, but a Senior Design Engineering Manager making twice the money but who only knows management and struggles with the technical aspects is not going to be respected and so will struggle to manage them effectively. The marketing guys who have great people skills and are making the sales will be looked down upon. As an engineering manager, you need to be respected by your team, but you might not actually have the background. How can you do this?

1. Cultivate a technical background. This won't happen overnight, but if you are to manage these guys effectively, you need to know how they work. Once you've got the basics, feel free to lean on your team's expertise to build your knowledge, they'll respect that you are learning.
2. Become a subject expert in a specific area or two, where you can demonstrate your usefulness to them. A great option is the Codes and Standards which apply to your work, your engineers will need to interact with these all the time but you won't need to do the heavy maths and physics lifting. 
3. Show them the results of your management. This is going to be hard one, but if you can show your team that you are actively making life easier for them, then they may come to respect your non-technical abilities. 
4. Work to their hierarchy. Don't be afraid of asking the new guy your important questions, if the rest of the team looks to him for advice then you should too. 
5. Don't try and placate an engineer who is looking to leave with a promotion and a title. Titles mean very little to most engineers, because they already have the most important job in the world (to them). More money might be appreciated, but really if money was their prime focus they would have taken their maths skills into finance rather than engineering.  

There is also a bit of a technical hierarchy between STEM fields. This does vary by field and country, but should be some handy shorthand. This generally ties in with the engineer's respect for the person actually doing the technical work, rather than the facilitators. So if you are coming from another field high on the list then you'll get respect for that. Typically on this blog I've used engineer as shorthand for 'employee in a technical role in a STEM field', but here I mean actual degree qualified engineers.

1. Rocket Scientists
2. Physicists
3. Engineers (non Software)
4. Engineers (Software)
5. Scientists (non Physics)
6. Computer Scientists
7. Pure Mathematicians
8. Engineering Techs (machinists, draftsmen, etc)
9. Applied Mathematicians (statisticians, actuarys, etc)
10. Line of Average Respect - below here you'll be naturally disrespected unless you show otherwise
11. Management
12. Accountants (the maths is too easy)
13. Businessmen
14. People skills based careers (marketing, sales, etc)
15. Arts graduates