Is harvard engineering (Biomedical especially) famous?

sakky
Tue, 08 Nov 2005 15:55:32 +0000

You seem to be purposely forgetting many reasons that I’ve mentioned earlier. As engineering is known to be a safe and marketable degree; many non-engineering aspirant would be happy to finish their engineering degree and see what are the options they have upon graduation. Everyone knows that you can go into finance/banking from engineering but not vice versa. It’s not surprising that some of the engineering grads go into i-banking after graduation. It doesn’t mean however that they were really interested in engineering during their college time.



And you are purposefully forgetting my basic premise which is to ask why can’t engineering jobs be made better? You still deliberately choose not to answer the question.

If engineering jobs are made better, then fewer people would leave behind their marketable engineering degree to do something else. Furthermore, more people would then want to get a marketable engineering degree. The US only grants about 60,000 bachelor’s degrees in engineering per year. You want more people to do engineering? You gotta make engineering a better profession.



Isn’t it a funny question you’re asking? Why wouldn’t McKinsey build their own computer software rather than leasing from Microsoft and other software companies since they have those MIT and Caltech engineers and scientists?



No, again, the real issue is, why are these engineering companies complaining that they can’t find engineers and yet refusing to improve their engineering jobs? Answer the question.



Not so, if an engineer has been promoted to manager or director position which is paid no less than those McKinsey’s consultant, he would hardly go to McKinsey and work as an ‘ordinary’ consultant.



An unfair comparison? A more fair comparison is to compare a manager/director at an engineering company vs. a McKinsey director. Who do you think gets paid more here?

And even that is missing the point. Most people go to McKinsey not to become director but in order to vault them into a top management position at a regular company. Plenty of top tech companies like Cisco draw their managers not from in-house engineers who climb the ladder, but from people jumping from consulting. Hence, once again, you have people seeing that it may be faster to get to the top of an engineering company by going through consulting first. Which leads to the question, why can’t these engineering companies make their inhouse engineering job tracks better and faster? When people see that you the best way to get to the top of Dell is not to actually start from Dell at the bottom and work your way up, but rather to go to Bain and then jump over later, then people are going to conclude that they’re better off turning down a Dell offer to go to Bain.



Well, it turns out that what these ‘very good’ engineers from MIT said does not constitute any authoritative view in terms of opportunity and rewards in consulting and banking. In fact many of these not-so-knowledgeable MIT engineers are driven by the hype of consulting/ibanking jobs without reading sufficient Wall Street Journal. The career path in ibanking is not fast, you may even be fired faster than being promoted.



Even if that’s true, then that’s a matter of poor perception. It’s up to the engineering companies to demonstrate that their jobs are better than consulting/banking. So why don’t these engineering companies do that? Answer the question.



Yes, he is basically promoting engineering to Americans who mostly adhered to non-tech occupations rooted in the East Coast since more than 300 years ago. Not to mention the illusion of being rich by getting ibanking jobs. He doesn’t convert his talk into money value because Microsoft does NOT need so many engineers after all. The fact that he just talked, not acted, would show that he is more concerned about the future American engineers prominence in the industry.



Do you really believe this? Come on. You know and I know that Gates has plenty of money to change things around if he wanted. Forget about Microsoft. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. So if Bill Gates was REALLY concerned about the future prominence of American engineering, he could simply take some of his own money and create some super-engineering research organization, something like Xerox Parc or Bell Labs, but where all engineers were paid super-salaries and got super-experience. By doing that, he would generate tremendous interest among people to become engineers. People would see the kinds of salaries those people are making and make the decision that they don’t really want to become lawyers or doctors or bankers or whatever, they’ll go work for this new engineering organization.

He doesn’t do that. He could do it. He doesn’t want to do it. That indicates that he doesn’t really care about the future prominence of American engineering. If he really did, he could and would do something about it. He is one of the few people in the world who has the power to change this. The fact that he doesn’t do it indicates that he doesn’t want to do it.



Ahh… so after a long debate, we finally arrive at the core of this problem. Well, eventhough I admit there are ‘jerks’ within our society, I would take those ‘jerks’’ view into parts of my consideration when I formulate my suggestion. This is because none other than the fact that we live in the society where jerks constitute a significant percentage in this world. We can then close this topic.



Let me close this subject this way. Think about the important political and social leaders of world history who created great change. They didn’t just have people laughing at them, they actually had people trying to kill them. People like Gandhi, Lincoln, Kennedy, Martin Luther King - all these people got killed for what they were trying to do. Or think about all the wartime soldiers in history. These people risk their lives, and many of them lose their lives. Being laughed at is not exactly their highest priority. Staying alive is.

These people are out their doing things that put their very lives at risk, and you won’t do something because you’re afraid some jerks might laugh at you? I was just talking to a soldiers who came back from Iraq seriously injured, and he might actually lose part of his leg. Do you think a guy like that is going to have much sympathy for somebody who is afraid of doing something just because some jerks might laugh at him?

Let me tell you. I don’t want to be harsh, if you’re so weak-willed that you won’t do something just because you’re afraid that some jerks might laugh at you, you’re not going to accomplish very much in your life anyway. You better develop some self-confidence.