The act of designing a system is different than the act of manufacturing it. Engineering design, being an activity obviously linked to fabrication and production, is dragged into management methods similar to those used on the factory floor. The ghost of Frederick Taylor hovers in design tables, dashboards, and Gantt charts, where it has no business chasing outputs with meaningless metrics. This residual Taylorism, born in the domain of conveyor belts and stopwatches, treats engineering creative work as deterministic and linear, when in reality it is messy, iterative, and full of uncertainty. From this logic springs pseudo-scientific indicators such as “efficiency” or the more obscure “productivity”, at times used interchangeably, that create the illusion of control while measuring nothing in reality.