Because it's far easier for a smart person to get a business degree that pays just as well, if not better?
Because a degree in engineering is a fast-track to career marginalization by the frat-boy MBAs who see technical workers as interchangeable cogs?
Because engineering virtually guarantees you a minimum of social interaction in college, when your peers are actually enjoying their lives?
Because you'll run smack into the wall of age (and possibly sex) discrimination, right when you should be entering your prime earning years?
Because you've got to eternally compete in the job market with 20-year-olds who will always be more proficient with new technologies, and willing to work at lower wages?
Let's be real: as a career, engineering sucks. We shouldn't scratch our heads and act totally shocked when young people turn their noses up at the prospect of working like a dog until they turn 40, only to be laid off by the guys who played frisbee golf and drank their way through school.
Because you'll run smack into the wall of age (and possibly sex) discrimination, right when you should be entering your prime earning years?
Because you've got to eternally compete in the job market with 20-year-olds who will always be more proficient with new technologies, and willing to work at lower wages?
Come on, that's not the typical experience of most engineers outside the IT/software sector, and as far as I'm aware, most engineers don't work in IT. I'm an EE in oil and gas and it's definitely a "pay your dues" industry where often, the young people are the ones that are marginalised. Believe me, a guy with 30 years of experience isn't competing with 20 year olds, and their payscales are astronomically different (obviously in favour of the experienced). Furthermore, most of the middle managers and top level executives are engineers (eg. Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon is a civil engineer, van der Veer, CEO of Shell is a mechanical engineer, etc).
I'm told it's a similar story in the mining and manufacturing sectors also.
I think that engineering disciplines where professional certification are required tend to do a better job of rewarding experience. So do most professional degrees.
(That said, my father's an EE, and I know that age discrimination is a problem in his industry, too...it's just posed as a question of salary discrimination.)
Not quite. My father was an aeronautical engineer. He hit his 40s and.. that was it. He was, thankfully, offered voluntary redundancy and they replaced him with someone half his age.
Thankfully, he had it in him to go back to college and retrain. He's now an analytical chemist, making far more and doing less work ;)
I am about to graduate(heh I hope) this year with an ECE degree. Few of the points made here and by Don Dodge hold true.
Engineering is a tough degree, I have seen quite a few people drop out of CS and EE degrees in the last 4 years.
- Honestly the initial years of the program are quite boring, this is a huge de-motivator. People seem to get burnt early during the degree.
- Most teachers don't seem to give a shit. Not all, but many. Young people need motivation not everyone is driven, even as an engineering student. Especially with the content being tough, the faculty needs to show a little more enthusiasm through programs, events and 1-1 with the student.
- Its definitely true that I could have spent more time on working on my startup and other activities in college. Although I have managed to create balance between school and life. I party, I am not an A student. Although, I really don't aspire to be either. I could be more happy getting those As and Bs on all my classes but I will live with A/Bs and Cs. It does take a decent amount of effort to get a low B in an engineering class. Business and liberal arts classes are much much easier. I get a little annoyed when people whine about their silly little stats and writing classes.
There's always hope that the complete collapse of the Wall Street institutions build by those "frat-boy MBAs" will change things. Probably not though. They'll get bailed out by that other frat-boy MBA institution, the government.
Of course the fact that Philip Greenspun walked away from Ars Digita with ~ $8 million proves there are some opportunities.
The folks that took down Wall Street were mostly physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. MBAs have been largely marginalized in many hedge funds and proprietary trading desks (unless you have both an MBA and a quantitative degree, in which case you're golden), in favor of people that can value (or not, I guess) esoteric securities with sophisticated mathematical models.
Kinda an interesting change, to see lots of innocent MBAs lose their jobs because of the fuckups of a bunch of egotistical math geeks. Normally it's the other way around.
No to what? I guess my point is that the best background to have is one that's interdisciplinary. Philip did a lot of stuff at aD that wasn't engineering, but really sort of like sales - evangelism, recruiting, etc.
The fact that I have a B.A., B. Sc., MBA and ABD have nothing to do with my contention. Of course, it's also better not to be old ;-)
The no was just to get confirmation of what I said. I read about it somewhere a while back but wasn't too sure if it was biased. My point was that it wasn't just walking away with the 8M and that he had to fight tooth and nail for it.
I agree that the interdisciplinary background is best to have but it's even more important to go out into the real world and use those skills. Philip was able to learn how to deal with MBAs by dealing with MBAs - might have been even better than getting an MBA.
Maybe the purpose of the MBA is to just get you accepted by the other MBA types which are in the higher level positions.
Should be formed into a bronze plaque and put at the entry of every cs/engineering campus building.
10 years in, I'm near maxed out at what an EE can make in my geographic region. That salary happens to be about 75 percent of what the average law student in my area makes right after graduation.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, majoring in engineering is a BBB (Bad Bayesian Bet) from an economic and even intellectual stimulation point of view.
Man, if it's so easy to just go get an MBA and make awesome money, why don't all us engineers just go do it then?
The belief there's some kind of massive inefficiency in the market that disproportionally rewards a bunch of frat-boy do-nothings at the expensive of us geeks reeks of a little sour grapes.
Well, no, because everyone's motivations are different. Some people want money and power more than they want to work on interesting technical problems. And that's fine It's the second-order effects that are suboptimal for the latter group, and for the economy as a whole.
If engineers were willing to move into management (that group is who MBA educations were originally intended for) then the problem would self-correct, but too few engineers are.
I'll actually be graduating soon from an engineering program, and myself and all of my classmates face the same issues. Some have been offered lucrative careers in tech, some in consulting, some in management, and some are considering MBAs.
The answer? Because some of us actually like tech. There are two types of people who join engineering: those who have been doing it in some amateur form or another for years, and those who are in it because they had nothing else better to do, and it seemed like an ok bet.
The former won't be attracted by an MBA, because they enjoy being in the trenches, working out the difficult technical problems. They derive thrill out of the act of engineering, and that's why they are there.
The latter will inevitably go for an MBA, or go work at some bank in the vain hope that someone will notice him and promote him to day trader status (believe me, many engineering grads work at banks precisely for this reason). They have no real interest nor attachment to engineering, and will simply go for whatever pays the most.
I think the belief that all MBAs are just frat-boy do-nothing is sour grapes. That being said, I do believe that the industry and investors in general have altogether too much faith in MBAs and pure-management types. The company my father works for had its engineer-CEO retire a couple of years ago, and investors replaced him with a pure manager - someone with no engineering expertise, and is a "pure" business type. The company is floundering, selling off assets, and generally in a miserable state. To me the concept of letting non-experts in the company's field manage the company is downright insane, but yet people do it on a daily basis. If you run an engineering company, for God's sake hire a CEO who's an engineer.
"The answer? Because some of us actually like tech." - Yep.
It's true that it's much more difficult to evaluate MBA competency than engineering competency, but I do think the market is some what efficient. I've worked some pretty idiot MBAs (Harvard no less) and they haven't really gone anywhere too far.
Also, at least here in San Francisco, I've met more MBAs than I can count wishing they were engineers so they could build their ideas themselves. Consider yourself incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to take your idea from pure thought stuff to reality.
The answer? Because some of us actually like tech.
More than a wage commensurate with your intelligence? So much that you are willing to not only explore it on your own but solve any problem, no matter how mundane, that anyone places in front of you just because it's tech? For decades on end?
Yeah. For real engineers, and not just computer programmers, I would say none of those are true. Unless we're reading Wired during the dot.com era, where any yuppie anywhere could do anything via laptop and internet.
Seriously tho:
-Real Engineers are often professionally licensed. Sometimes they have to get certified in every state they operate in. Some require a minimum of 5 years of experience before you can even apply for them.
--Real Engineers use software that often doesn't play well with laptops. VLSI/VHDL apps come to mind at first. Huge PSpice sims come next. AutoCAD and all that come next. Run into issues like needing to have a license server, or hardware dongle. And some of those special engineering programs cost $25,000/license. Not free in any sense of the word.
--Real engineers -- civil engineers I'm looking at you -- are not extremely active and passionate. They are punch clock engineers. Even in undergrad civil engineers are known as 9 to 5 engineers. Being home every night to kiss your wife is apparently one of those awesome job perks in a field that's barely changed in 30 years (i'm specifically singling out highway development in civil engineering here. This isn't meant to be flamebait.)
--Real engineers often need real budgets. Which is why governments or large corporations pay for us. With government, there's a chance you might need a security clearance. No more international travel unless its cleared with the state department.
The real truth is you become an engineer to solve the really hard problems that nobody else thinks about. Like how man will colonize Mars. Or what we're going to do with all these mountains of garbage piling up. Or what's the cheapest way we can deal with nuclear waste that doesn't involve dumping it into the ocean. Or how do we effectively managing the supply chain of a nuclear power plant so it can turn a profit (this is one I'm proud to say I've tackled.). How do we get military goods from one side of the world to another on a daily basis?
While 'Engineer' is a set that may overlap 'Open Source Programmer' (what you described), it's definitely not an equivalent set, and I wouldn't even say it's a superset.
Clean Room Technician: You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty?
[to Aaron, who shakes his head]
Clean Room Technician: They take them out and shoot them.
The only self-employed engineer I know is a mechanical engineer who's living on food stamps, trying to get enough interest in converting vehicles to passive cooling, which seems to be her personal calling, to pay the bills.
The only self-employed engineer I know is actually not an engineering grad, but a high school dropout who has an unusually keen skill in network security, and is rolling in massive amounts of money consulting for small-to-mid-sized traditional businesses, a one man shop.
Justin.tv is great...but it's not your typical engineering job.
I think that a lot of the appeal of startups to young engineers is that they represent the opportunity to do things differently. Rather than tethering your future to the MBA bean-counter at corporate, you can have the chance to be corporate. That's a critical difference.
You make a pretty broad generalization that programming sucks as a career. I think you need to compare the best engineering jobs to the best MBA jobs, and the average engineering job to the average MBA job. So compare working at justin.tv to working as a Bain consultant. And compare being a typical big company engineer to being a middle manager. Does engineering still come out poorly as a career choice? Being an MBA middle manager's not exactly a load of fun, and you have student loans to pay off.
The average case is effectively the only one that matters, since that's where most people will end up.
The fundamental difference between your average MBA and your average engineer, in my opinion, is that engineers are viewed as tactical assets by the business people, whereas business people view themselves as strategic assets. Only in small tech companies are the technical problems so important that the engineers become strategic advantages. That kind of thinking is still pretty rare.
(But for what it's worth, your hypothetical Bain consultant is earning a six-figure salary, traveling around the world and developing hugely important business experience and professional contacts that will serve him well when he leaves consulting. Even the best engineering jobs have limited expanse and authority -- you interact with techies, focus on the details of implementing someone else's vision, and rarely rise to a level where strategic thinking is required.)
this also means that if you're going into it, you have to really like it (in addition to being relatively intelligent), which is why the article talks about the "surprising" statistic that mit et al have very high retention rates (though I think caltech is a counterexample)
There are many aspects to consider in the differences in drop-out rates. One is that not all engineering programs are the same. MIT's education is very different than RPI's or Georgia Tech's (I'm went to GT). The RPI or GT style is more like 5 years of boot camp (yes, its really a 5 years program, another problem to consider when comparing against a management degree). Its a non-stop grind of 6 classes at a time with tests every week. MIT's is fewer classes with higher student:teacher ratio. The MIT program is structured to guide students to the finish line. The GT or RPI approach is very clear that they are trying to cull students.
I don't think either approach is wrong. They are just different. Do they produce different types of engineers? maybe. There are many other aspects to consider as well.
what types of students would you consider better suited to each type of environment?
[edit] Also, what manner of 6 classes every semester courseloads are we talking about? Because some 6 course combos are easily manageable whereas I've seen other combos only a person who can score a perfect on the putnam exam while drunk could manage comfortably.
I went to Georgia Tech because I lived in Georgia and if was going to college at all it had to be in state at a public school. I think cost factors trump most other considerations for the bulk of people making college decisions.
When I was at GT (late 80s) we were on the quarter system, they've since changed to semesters. If you wanted to finish a BSEE in 4 years, you needed to take 7 or 8 classes a quarter. 6 was a common load and hence the average time to graduate was 5 years. There were no "crib" courses. Every class made you work for your grade; every one. If you had a bad week, your grades would suffer as there were tests and graded assignments every single week. I was told when I was there that there had not been an EE student in anyone's memory that finished with a 4.0 GPA. Even the most gifted student with perfect study skills would eventually get taken down a notch.
Most all classes were graded on a bell curve. Even in your junior or senior year, you were reminded by professors that 40% of the class would repeat the course.
Schools like GT have a social obligation to take on more than they can handle. That means doing more (more students) with less (less faculty, less support structure). That said, I think they do a great job.
If they had more funds to provide students with more tutors and more private scholarship money to allow students forgiveness if they needed to take a quarter off to rest, the graduation rates might improve. Keep in mind that most students at a school like GT are at least half operating off state and federal support funds. These systems do what they can, but are unforgiving if you need to take a break or require some other support like a tutor.
I'm a proud alum. I support my school scholarship funds through alumni channels. I think if people want to see things improve, look at schools that are working hard and doing things right and throw more money at them; they always need it.
I should note that things at Georgia Tech today are not quite so dire as jhancock describes them being. Yes, classes are still quite hard and you still have to take a lot of painful ones to get through (often simultaneously, especially if you want to pursue other opportunities like research, internships and co-op).
But in my 5+ years at GT I've never felt a lack of support made available to me. TAs, professors, tutors (in some cases) and other resources have always been pretty readily available. Most of all, the "fight the shaft" perspective means students are generally willing to help eachother out and work together.
Far fewer classes are graded on a bell curve, too, though the average GPA at Tech remains around a 2.7 or 2.8 and it really is uncommon for people in the harder majors to graduate with a 4.0.
That's not to say that the Institute can't use more resources to do a better job than it is currently doing. But for better or worse, GT is no longer the throw you in the pool and see if you manage to swim school it once was.
Very happy to hear your report. I was told that switching to semesters was an attempt to deal with the fast pace we always felt under the quarter system.
It really was a great education and the pains we experienced did bond the students in natural support groups. I have several life long friends from that journey. Other than going to UGA and having more access to women, I wouldn't have done it any other way ;).
Correlation != causation, hmm? Even when we're talking about anecdotal evidence. Come on, as an engineer or programmer you should be more logical than that.
Maybe the engineers you describe tend to roll with the kicks and take pretty much anything that's given to them as long as they're more or less left alone to work on something interesting, while the frat-boy MBAs are more the type to drift through life on other people's backs and make enough noise to get what they want? Maybe there are engineers who had a blast in college (I know I did), and there are business types who spend all their time studying?
It's easy to just blame it on the degree, but it's never ACTUALLY that simple, is it?
Apparently you've identified a major inefficiency in the labor market. You ought to be able to make a killing by founding a company to compete against those run by frat-boy MBAs and employing the talented engineers your competitors have discarded.
Because there are better opportunities on Wall Str... oh wait.
Your second point is key. Corporate society is structured so terribly that the big-box companies pretty much can't get top talent (and fire what little they can get for various forms of "insubordination"). No one with any talent is going to answer to a frat boy.
There are two somewhat parallel (but unequally situated) trees within the modern workplace, the old-style management tree ("visionaries" at the apex, implementers at the bottom) and the technology tree (of which technologists occupy the middle-upper levels and the lower ranks are filled entirely by machines). The tech tree has historically been mounted to a middling position on the management tree, resulting in a scenario where technology people become peons. The world's learning that this arrangement is a fistful of fail, and the mount point is moving up in the structure... but this is a discrete sort of transition, and traditional managers have to be brought kicking and screaming to it, so it usually happens through the destruction of old and creation of new companies, rather than within existing ones. This is one major reason why big-box companies have been slowly melting down, while the bulk of the nation's private sector talent was rather uselessly employed in an abstruse game called "finance".
In finance, technical people ("quants") were often given a designation one-half level above their seniority-based position, e.g. an entry-level quantitative analyst was between the "analyst" and "associate" levels. Finance is old-style corporate compared to cutting-edge startups, but Wall Street has (had?) a better grasp of how to capture talent than most F-500s.
Comments
Because it's far easier for a smart person to get a business degree that pays just as well, if not better?
Because a degree in engineering is a fast-track to career marginalization by the frat-boy MBAs who see technical workers as interchangeable cogs?
Because engineering virtually guarantees you a minimum of social interaction in college, when your peers are actually enjoying their lives?
Because you'll run smack into the wall of age (and possibly sex) discrimination, right when you should be entering your prime earning years?
Because you've got to eternally compete in the job market with 20-year-olds who will always be more proficient with new technologies, and willing to work at lower wages?
Let's be real: as a career, engineering sucks. We shouldn't scratch our heads and act totally shocked when young people turn their noses up at the prospect of working like a dog until they turn 40, only to be laid off by the guys who played frisbee golf and drank their way through school.
Because you'll run smack into the wall of age (and possibly sex) discrimination, right when you should be entering your prime earning years?
Because you've got to eternally compete in the job market with 20-year-olds who will always be more proficient with new technologies, and willing to work at lower wages?
Come on, that's not the typical experience of most engineers outside the IT/software sector, and as far as I'm aware, most engineers don't work in IT. I'm an EE in oil and gas and it's definitely a "pay your dues" industry where often, the young people are the ones that are marginalised. Believe me, a guy with 30 years of experience isn't competing with 20 year olds, and their payscales are astronomically different (obviously in favour of the experienced). Furthermore, most of the middle managers and top level executives are engineers (eg. Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon is a civil engineer, van der Veer, CEO of Shell is a mechanical engineer, etc).
I'm told it's a similar story in the mining and manufacturing sectors also.
I think that engineering disciplines where professional certification are required tend to do a better job of rewarding experience. So do most professional degrees.
(That said, my father's an EE, and I know that age discrimination is a problem in his industry, too...it's just posed as a question of salary discrimination.)
Not quite. My father was an aeronautical engineer. He hit his 40s and.. that was it. He was, thankfully, offered voluntary redundancy and they replaced him with someone half his age.
Thankfully, he had it in him to go back to college and retrain. He's now an analytical chemist, making far more and doing less work ;)
I am about to graduate(heh I hope) this year with an ECE degree. Few of the points made here and by Don Dodge hold true.
Engineering is a tough degree, I have seen quite a few people drop out of CS and EE degrees in the last 4 years.
- Honestly the initial years of the program are quite boring, this is a huge de-motivator. People seem to get burnt early during the degree.
- Most teachers don't seem to give a shit. Not all, but many. Young people need motivation not everyone is driven, even as an engineering student. Especially with the content being tough, the faculty needs to show a little more enthusiasm through programs, events and 1-1 with the student.
- Its definitely true that I could have spent more time on working on my startup and other activities in college. Although I have managed to create balance between school and life. I party, I am not an A student. Although, I really don't aspire to be either. I could be more happy getting those As and Bs on all my classes but I will live with A/Bs and Cs. It does take a decent amount of effort to get a low B in an engineering class. Business and liberal arts classes are much much easier. I get a little annoyed when people whine about their silly little stats and writing classes.
Yep. http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
There's always hope that the complete collapse of the Wall Street institutions build by those "frat-boy MBAs" will change things. Probably not though. They'll get bailed out by that other frat-boy MBA institution, the government.
Of course the fact that Philip Greenspun walked away from Ars Digita with ~ $8 million proves there are some opportunities.
The folks that took down Wall Street were mostly physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. MBAs have been largely marginalized in many hedge funds and proprietary trading desks (unless you have both an MBA and a quantitative degree, in which case you're golden), in favor of people that can value (or not, I guess) esoteric securities with sophisticated mathematical models.
Kinda an interesting change, to see lots of innocent MBAs lose their jobs because of the fuckups of a bunch of egotistical math geeks. Normally it's the other way around.
After having to deal with the MBAs that nearly took his company from him, no?
No to what? I guess my point is that the best background to have is one that's interdisciplinary. Philip did a lot of stuff at aD that wasn't engineering, but really sort of like sales - evangelism, recruiting, etc.
The fact that I have a B.A., B. Sc., MBA and ABD have nothing to do with my contention. Of course, it's also better not to be old ;-)
The no was just to get confirmation of what I said. I read about it somewhere a while back but wasn't too sure if it was biased. My point was that it wasn't just walking away with the 8M and that he had to fight tooth and nail for it.
I agree that the interdisciplinary background is best to have but it's even more important to go out into the real world and use those skills. Philip was able to learn how to deal with MBAs by dealing with MBAs - might have been even better than getting an MBA.
Maybe the purpose of the MBA is to just get you accepted by the other MBA types which are in the higher level positions.
Should be formed into a bronze plaque and put at the entry of every cs/engineering campus building.
10 years in, I'm near maxed out at what an EE can make in my geographic region. That salary happens to be about 75 percent of what the average law student in my area makes right after graduation.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, majoring in engineering is a BBB (Bad Bayesian Bet) from an economic and even intellectual stimulation point of view.
Man, if it's so easy to just go get an MBA and make awesome money, why don't all us engineers just go do it then?
The belief there's some kind of massive inefficiency in the market that disproportionally rewards a bunch of frat-boy do-nothings at the expensive of us geeks reeks of a little sour grapes.
Well, no, because everyone's motivations are different. Some people want money and power more than they want to work on interesting technical problems. And that's fine It's the second-order effects that are suboptimal for the latter group, and for the economy as a whole.
If engineers were willing to move into management (that group is who MBA educations were originally intended for) then the problem would self-correct, but too few engineers are.
I'll actually be graduating soon from an engineering program, and myself and all of my classmates face the same issues. Some have been offered lucrative careers in tech, some in consulting, some in management, and some are considering MBAs.
The answer? Because some of us actually like tech. There are two types of people who join engineering: those who have been doing it in some amateur form or another for years, and those who are in it because they had nothing else better to do, and it seemed like an ok bet.
The former won't be attracted by an MBA, because they enjoy being in the trenches, working out the difficult technical problems. They derive thrill out of the act of engineering, and that's why they are there.
The latter will inevitably go for an MBA, or go work at some bank in the vain hope that someone will notice him and promote him to day trader status (believe me, many engineering grads work at banks precisely for this reason). They have no real interest nor attachment to engineering, and will simply go for whatever pays the most.
I think the belief that all MBAs are just frat-boy do-nothing is sour grapes. That being said, I do believe that the industry and investors in general have altogether too much faith in MBAs and pure-management types. The company my father works for had its engineer-CEO retire a couple of years ago, and investors replaced him with a pure manager - someone with no engineering expertise, and is a "pure" business type. The company is floundering, selling off assets, and generally in a miserable state. To me the concept of letting non-experts in the company's field manage the company is downright insane, but yet people do it on a daily basis. If you run an engineering company, for God's sake hire a CEO who's an engineer.
"The answer? Because some of us actually like tech." - Yep.
It's true that it's much more difficult to evaluate MBA competency than engineering competency, but I do think the market is some what efficient. I've worked some pretty idiot MBAs (Harvard no less) and they haven't really gone anywhere too far.
Also, at least here in San Francisco, I've met more MBAs than I can count wishing they were engineers so they could build their ideas themselves. Consider yourself incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to take your idea from pure thought stuff to reality.
The market might be efficient at something, but that doesn't mean that it's efficient at rewarding engineers.
It is almost certainly efficient at rewarding engineers enough, but perhaps not enough to make engineers happy.
The answer? Because some of us actually like tech.
More than a wage commensurate with your intelligence? So much that you are willing to not only explore it on your own but solve any problem, no matter how mundane, that anyone places in front of you just because it's tech? For decades on end?
Rock on.
On the other hand, as an engineer you can:
-Work for a big company, a small company or just work for yourself.
-Work from anywhere in the world you can take a laptop and an internet connection
-Use free tools to create a product you can duplicate (and sell) infinitely
-Be a part of an extremely active and passionate community that is on the cutting edge of the industry that is driving the global economy
Where else are you going to find that much flexibility and potential?
Wait here, we know that "engineer" is not a euphemism for "computer programmer", right?
Yeah. For real engineers, and not just computer programmers, I would say none of those are true. Unless we're reading Wired during the dot.com era, where any yuppie anywhere could do anything via laptop and internet.
Seriously tho:
-Real Engineers are often professionally licensed. Sometimes they have to get certified in every state they operate in. Some require a minimum of 5 years of experience before you can even apply for them.
--Real Engineers use software that often doesn't play well with laptops. VLSI/VHDL apps come to mind at first. Huge PSpice sims come next. AutoCAD and all that come next. Run into issues like needing to have a license server, or hardware dongle. And some of those special engineering programs cost $25,000/license. Not free in any sense of the word.
--Real engineers -- civil engineers I'm looking at you -- are not extremely active and passionate. They are punch clock engineers. Even in undergrad civil engineers are known as 9 to 5 engineers. Being home every night to kiss your wife is apparently one of those awesome job perks in a field that's barely changed in 30 years (i'm specifically singling out highway development in civil engineering here. This isn't meant to be flamebait.)
--Real engineers often need real budgets. Which is why governments or large corporations pay for us. With government, there's a chance you might need a security clearance. No more international travel unless its cleared with the state department.
The real truth is you become an engineer to solve the really hard problems that nobody else thinks about. Like how man will colonize Mars. Or what we're going to do with all these mountains of garbage piling up. Or what's the cheapest way we can deal with nuclear waste that doesn't involve dumping it into the ocean. Or how do we effectively managing the supply chain of a nuclear power plant so it can turn a profit (this is one I'm proud to say I've tackled.). How do we get military goods from one side of the world to another on a daily basis?
You have to want it.
You don't need a degree for any of those things.
While 'Engineer' is a set that may overlap 'Open Source Programmer' (what you described), it's definitely not an equivalent set, and I wouldn't even say it's a superset.
The only self-employed engineer I know is a mechanical engineer who's living on food stamps, trying to get enough interest in converting vehicles to passive cooling, which seems to be her personal calling, to pay the bills.
The only self-employed engineer I know is actually not an engineering grad, but a high school dropout who has an unusually keen skill in network security, and is rolling in massive amounts of money consulting for small-to-mid-sized traditional businesses, a one man shop.
Anecdotes can always be countered by anecdotes.
You are what you make of yourself.
That's a lot of upvotes for a rant. Is this your experience personally? Do you not like working for justin.tv?
Justin.tv is great...but it's not your typical engineering job.
I think that a lot of the appeal of startups to young engineers is that they represent the opportunity to do things differently. Rather than tethering your future to the MBA bean-counter at corporate, you can have the chance to be corporate. That's a critical difference.
You make a pretty broad generalization that programming sucks as a career. I think you need to compare the best engineering jobs to the best MBA jobs, and the average engineering job to the average MBA job. So compare working at justin.tv to working as a Bain consultant. And compare being a typical big company engineer to being a middle manager. Does engineering still come out poorly as a career choice? Being an MBA middle manager's not exactly a load of fun, and you have student loans to pay off.
The average case is effectively the only one that matters, since that's where most people will end up.
The fundamental difference between your average MBA and your average engineer, in my opinion, is that engineers are viewed as tactical assets by the business people, whereas business people view themselves as strategic assets. Only in small tech companies are the technical problems so important that the engineers become strategic advantages. That kind of thinking is still pretty rare.
(But for what it's worth, your hypothetical Bain consultant is earning a six-figure salary, traveling around the world and developing hugely important business experience and professional contacts that will serve him well when he leaves consulting. Even the best engineering jobs have limited expanse and authority -- you interact with techies, focus on the details of implementing someone else's vision, and rarely rise to a level where strategic thinking is required.)
this also means that if you're going into it, you have to really like it (in addition to being relatively intelligent), which is why the article talks about the "surprising" statistic that mit et al have very high retention rates (though I think caltech is a counterexample)
There are many aspects to consider in the differences in drop-out rates. One is that not all engineering programs are the same. MIT's education is very different than RPI's or Georgia Tech's (I'm went to GT). The RPI or GT style is more like 5 years of boot camp (yes, its really a 5 years program, another problem to consider when comparing against a management degree). Its a non-stop grind of 6 classes at a time with tests every week. MIT's is fewer classes with higher student:teacher ratio. The MIT program is structured to guide students to the finish line. The GT or RPI approach is very clear that they are trying to cull students.
I don't think either approach is wrong. They are just different. Do they produce different types of engineers? maybe. There are many other aspects to consider as well.
what types of students would you consider better suited to each type of environment? [edit] Also, what manner of 6 classes every semester courseloads are we talking about? Because some 6 course combos are easily manageable whereas I've seen other combos only a person who can score a perfect on the putnam exam while drunk could manage comfortably.
I went to Georgia Tech because I lived in Georgia and if was going to college at all it had to be in state at a public school. I think cost factors trump most other considerations for the bulk of people making college decisions.
When I was at GT (late 80s) we were on the quarter system, they've since changed to semesters. If you wanted to finish a BSEE in 4 years, you needed to take 7 or 8 classes a quarter. 6 was a common load and hence the average time to graduate was 5 years. There were no "crib" courses. Every class made you work for your grade; every one. If you had a bad week, your grades would suffer as there were tests and graded assignments every single week. I was told when I was there that there had not been an EE student in anyone's memory that finished with a 4.0 GPA. Even the most gifted student with perfect study skills would eventually get taken down a notch.
Most all classes were graded on a bell curve. Even in your junior or senior year, you were reminded by professors that 40% of the class would repeat the course.
Schools like GT have a social obligation to take on more than they can handle. That means doing more (more students) with less (less faculty, less support structure). That said, I think they do a great job.
If they had more funds to provide students with more tutors and more private scholarship money to allow students forgiveness if they needed to take a quarter off to rest, the graduation rates might improve. Keep in mind that most students at a school like GT are at least half operating off state and federal support funds. These systems do what they can, but are unforgiving if you need to take a break or require some other support like a tutor.
I'm a proud alum. I support my school scholarship funds through alumni channels. I think if people want to see things improve, look at schools that are working hard and doing things right and throw more money at them; they always need it.
I should note that things at Georgia Tech today are not quite so dire as jhancock describes them being. Yes, classes are still quite hard and you still have to take a lot of painful ones to get through (often simultaneously, especially if you want to pursue other opportunities like research, internships and co-op).
But in my 5+ years at GT I've never felt a lack of support made available to me. TAs, professors, tutors (in some cases) and other resources have always been pretty readily available. Most of all, the "fight the shaft" perspective means students are generally willing to help eachother out and work together.
Far fewer classes are graded on a bell curve, too, though the average GPA at Tech remains around a 2.7 or 2.8 and it really is uncommon for people in the harder majors to graduate with a 4.0.
That's not to say that the Institute can't use more resources to do a better job than it is currently doing. But for better or worse, GT is no longer the throw you in the pool and see if you manage to swim school it once was.
Very happy to hear your report. I was told that switching to semesters was an attempt to deal with the fast pace we always felt under the quarter system.
It really was a great education and the pains we experienced did bond the students in natural support groups. I have several life long friends from that journey. Other than going to UGA and having more access to women, I wouldn't have done it any other way ;).
Correlation != causation, hmm? Even when we're talking about anecdotal evidence. Come on, as an engineer or programmer you should be more logical than that.
Maybe the engineers you describe tend to roll with the kicks and take pretty much anything that's given to them as long as they're more or less left alone to work on something interesting, while the frat-boy MBAs are more the type to drift through life on other people's backs and make enough noise to get what they want? Maybe there are engineers who had a blast in college (I know I did), and there are business types who spend all their time studying?
It's easy to just blame it on the degree, but it's never ACTUALLY that simple, is it?
I love being a software engineer and I can't upvote timr's comment enough.
That's the hard truth folks, don't get into engineering if you don't love it.
Apparently you've identified a major inefficiency in the labor market. You ought to be able to make a killing by founding a company to compete against those run by frat-boy MBAs and employing the talented engineers your competitors have discarded.
Ermm, that is what most startups are intended to do.
Right on timr. I have an MS in engineering and it took me 17 years on the job to figure out what a joke my degree was.
Earning a degree in engineering is the functional equivalent of buying your way into slavery.
So if you could do it again, what degree/career path would you have chosen?
Because there are better opportunities on Wall Str... oh wait.
Your second point is key. Corporate society is structured so terribly that the big-box companies pretty much can't get top talent (and fire what little they can get for various forms of "insubordination"). No one with any talent is going to answer to a frat boy.
There are two somewhat parallel (but unequally situated) trees within the modern workplace, the old-style management tree ("visionaries" at the apex, implementers at the bottom) and the technology tree (of which technologists occupy the middle-upper levels and the lower ranks are filled entirely by machines). The tech tree has historically been mounted to a middling position on the management tree, resulting in a scenario where technology people become peons. The world's learning that this arrangement is a fistful of fail, and the mount point is moving up in the structure... but this is a discrete sort of transition, and traditional managers have to be brought kicking and screaming to it, so it usually happens through the destruction of old and creation of new companies, rather than within existing ones. This is one major reason why big-box companies have been slowly melting down, while the bulk of the nation's private sector talent was rather uselessly employed in an abstruse game called "finance".
In finance, technical people ("quants") were often given a designation one-half level above their seniority-based position, e.g. an entry-level quantitative analyst was between the "analyst" and "associate" levels. Finance is old-style corporate compared to cutting-edge startups, but Wall Street has (had?) a better grasp of how to capture talent than most F-500s.
I don't know that they had a better grasp, they just paid the highest.