People don't generally use optimized workflows for each thing they want to do. They use a subset of all well known and understood tools combined in obvious ways to construct their own workflows, and because they are built out of things they understand they are robust and flexible.

A workflow designed by an engineer optimizes for some combination of time, resources, cost, etc. Most people don't want something that optimized as it is very brittle to change, so their own ad-hoc workflows are "better". At least for general users that don't have a very small selective set of tasks.

As I understand it, they point out that Levy-Strauss discovered two kinds of approach to solve problems, engineering and bricolage. The former is careful planning and solving the task by building an exact tool that resolves the problem, the latter is putting together whatever you have available in an approximate solution and moving on.

In software, we would probably call them "software engineering" and "hacking" approaches. For example, in the Linux Kernel init discussion, systemd is an engineering solution, while traditional init system is a bricolage solution.

Also, as someone else noted in a comment to the sane article months ago (yep, it’s a dupe) the Unix set of single-task CLI utilities (sed, grep etc.) encourage a bricoleur approach at solving problems without having to write a throwaway application (or extend an existing one) every time.

This is only if you hold them as individual items outside the context of the system. These utilities are an engineered solution as a whole. Look how they work together and interact with one another.

If you break an engineered system down into its components and never consider all the ideas and fabric that link them together in an engineered system, you could reduce anything to bricoleur.

> If you break an engineered system down into its components..

I disagree. Yes, Unix is deliberately engineered to allow for bricolage. But many (most) things aren't. Take for example classic PC and the iPhone. You cannot break down iPhone to it's components and remix them. You could do that with a PC, to some extent.

I suppose that the idea is that a bricoleur jury-riggs solution with whatever is at hand while an engineer specializes in “the design and manufacture of complex products.”

McGyver is a bricoleur - same goes for the vehicle building parts of an A-Team episode. Tony Stark is an Engineer.

Of course an Engineer can probably also work with make-shift conponents in an emergency, but it is not their preferred situation.

When faced with a problem, we use the tools we already have and know to deal with it, this is Bricolage. Engineering then (when seen as anything not-bricolage) is the creation (or modification) of new tools to solve a problem.

Bricoler is improvisation, adaptation, and creativity with a constricted set of materials and methods. Engineering is changing the set itself.

When you're on your back in the data-center in a tight spot trying to unscrew something but you don't happen to have a screwdriver, bricolage would be to use a knife-tip instead because that's just what you happen to have and can make do with. Engineering would be to crawl back out, head out to the store, find the proper screwdriver, buy it, come back, and crawl back down to unscrew it.

In a software sense: most people solve their problem of the moment (extracting data from a bunch of files) using bash, cat, grep, sed, and some quick regex editing in their favorite editor, copy-pasting as they go, etc. They're going to write a specific program for just this one particular problem. (This is related to whether it's worth the time [https://xkcd.com/1205/ ]). Or the stereotypical Grandma who sends a favorite picture by downloading it, inserting it into a Word document, printing that, scanning it, and then clicking on the "send via e-mail" button in the program, and looking up your e-mail address in her (physical) notebook.