Engineers essentially solve problems, but we deal with issues as well. I once worked for a medical electronics business designing medical devices where the CEO said to me "To you, everything is a problem.", to which I replied, "Yep, that's my job. As an engineer my role is to solve problems." He said we should never write the word "problem" on any documentation, but use the word "issue", else it will raise the eyebrows of the regulatory auditors. When I studied mathematics, the textbooks all said "Solve the following problems." Never, ever did I ever see a textbook stating "Solve the following issues."
The overuse of the latest political correct buzzword word "issues" reached a new peak today. One of our biggest banks (NAB) went down for half a day this morning throughout Australia, and many small retailers and their customers could not do business. NAB never called it a problem in their media releases, only "issues". No, the outage was &@$%# problem which they had to fix. An issue would be that the bank crash highlights why a cashless society is risky.
This sounds trivial maybe, but I think political correctness has gone haywire, even in the ranks of engineering. Fundamentally, we are problem solvers. Filtering out conductive noise on the mains from a switch mode power supply design is a problem to be solved, not an issue. Am I right, wrong, or just old?