student01

Why do many engineering employers choose the cheap, fresh grad whereas experienced accountants don't have to worry about this as much?

Calcozzo

Because an accountant's hard skills aren't rendered useless in a few years the way a software engineer's may be. And even then, it's not like every CS grad is jobless once they hit 30. Far from it, actually, assuming they enjoy CS and the theory they learned and keep themselves updated.

student01

even though the accountant's hard skills aren't rendered useless over time, wouldn't it still make more sense to hire a young grad for less?

Corbett

One major difference between professional accounting practice and professional engineering practice is the role of state licensing.

The practice of accounting, unlike most branches of engineering (civil excepted) is heavily regulated by state government. To perform high-level accounting work, you must hold a government license as a CPA, which requires years of work experience. A fresh young accounting grad cannot -- by law -- perform the same tasks as an experienced CPA.

And the licensing laws require continuing education. Every CPA is required to attend classes every year to keep up with the latest legal and regulatory issues. So their skills stay sharp -- by law. Again, there is no comparable requirement for most engineers. Some manage to stay sharp regardless, but others do not.

Another difference is that accountants often deal directly with their clients. If you were consulting with a financial firm about the investment of your life savings, who would you prefer to meet with: the gray-haired, distinguished-looking CPA who owns a home and a business himself, or some kid just out of college who is still paying off his student loans?

The closest engineering equivalent is in civil engineering. Most civils do pursue a Professional Engineering license after they get sufficient work experience. A fresh college grad cannot sign reports or plans; the law requires a PE for that. And civils often deal directly with clients who are contracting their services. Clients want to work with senior, experienced people, not fresh college grads.

jay001

and why are apples red?

why no one has ever seen god?

why are we here/ what the purpose of life ?

who am I ?

and why do I keep talking (actually typing) to myself?

toblin

Forty-two.

sakky

Yet it baffles me as to why the same logic doesn't seem to apply to management consulting or investment banking.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.


The End Of Wall Streets Boom - News Markets - Portfolio.com

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

The Management Myth - The Atlantic (June 2006)

Calcozzo

...okay sakky

TomServo

Frankly I need more empirical evidence (i.e. not anecdotal) before I buy this ageism story. It doesn't make economic sense. Engineers tend to earn more for every additional year they are in the workforce, look at the figures. This goes for all areas of engineering. If ageism were rampant, the reverse would be true, pay would go down over time for engineers.

Corbett

You got me. I admit that my post was based on experiences with financial professionals on "Main Street", not on "Wall Street".

If you are a bright and personable Ivy League grad with a philosophy degree and the right connections, it may well be easier (and much more finanically rewarding) to become a management consultant on Wall Street than it is to become a staff accountant for a CPA firm on Main Street in your home town.

MaineLonghorn

My husband is definitely more in demand as he gets older. He is 55 right now. He consulted for a large engineering firm in Dallas that liked him so much they are hiring him part-time as an employee, but at his full consulting rate. I think what they liked was that he was able to direct their admittedly bright, but inexperienced PhD guys when they got a little off track. He could quickly spot flaws in their sophisticated computer analysis that they would have missed entirely.

DocT

MaineLonghorn: This is not what I see around me. I suspect however that consulting may be a bit different than working as a regular employee. As an example, a manager was telling us what the average raise was going to be. When he was pressed on the issue, he said that typically the older workers will get smaller raises than the younger engineers. This is because, older workers are less likely to leave with only a few years left until retirement regardless of their raise. Also the feeling is that they are less productive since they are basically just hanging on until retirement.

rheidzan

I always wonder how they come up with this claim. From what I've seen, what the older engineers can finish in a week could take 3 weeks for the younger ones to complete....

DocT

They come up with it because they can. They know with only a few years left, older engineers aren't going to start again with another job or move.

ken285

I've actually worked with two people who had retired but came back to work afterwards.