Is harvard engineering (Biomedical especially) famous?

sakky
Sun, 06 Nov 2005 14:03:59 +0000

It’s a matter of demand and supply, the supply for engineering jobs is huge as the production that depends on engineering jobs is huge as well. Since the supply is huge, we couldn’t afford to have the best engineers for all those engineering jobs for three reasons:

1. The number of good engineers are limited and hence the ‘not so good’ engineers are also vital components in engineering industry.

2. The competition for engineering sector is highly competitive that it couldn’t afford all the best engineers as employees.

3. Many functions in engineering jobs don’t require high qualifications/skill to operate, hence those ‘mediocre’ engineers who work in this operation would be paid much less.



I’m afraid I have to dispute each of these 3 points in turn.

1) There’s your first mistake right there. The number of good engineers is NOT limited, not in any absolute way. Rather, it is limited only to the extend that the laws of economics limits them. The more that engineering jobs pay, the more top people will want to study engineering, and hence, the more good engineers that will be produced.

Think of it this way. If the top engineering jobs paid better, than fewer of the top MIT and Stanford engineers would leave engineering for other fields. Furthermore, even more people at MIT and Stanford would choose to major in engineering (as opposed to a science or math or whatever). Hence, the number of good engineers produced is NOT a constant, but rather is a function of the quality of the job.

2)I don’t see engineering as being any more competitive than any other function within a company. Sure, engineering is competitive. But so is finance. So is marketing. So is business development. So is general management. Every business function is competitive.

I’ll put it to you this way. Take an very large engineering company that shall remain unnamed. It pays its engineers poorly. At the same time, it is also a well-known McKinsey client, and pays hundreds of millions of dollars to McKinsey to help it improve its internal business processes. Well, think about what that means. It means that the company has enough money to afford very expensive consulting services. So instead of paying McKinsey, why doesn’t the company simply pay its own employees to do the same kind of consulting that it is paying to McKinsey? Specifically, why not set up an internal consulting division within the company that will provide the same services as McKinsey? This internal consulting division can hire the same sort of high-quality people (including star engineers from MIT and Stanford) and pay them something equivalent to McKinsey.

The point is, the company obviously has the money. Yet it would rather choose to spend the money on outside consulting services rather than on its own employees. Is it really that surprising that people will see that and decide that they are better off going to consulting? People see that and realize that if they just work for that company, they will end up in a powerless low-level job but if they go to McKinsey, they might actually be able to make things happen, and get paid better too.

So the question is, if all these companies have so much money to pay for consulting services (and banking services and everything else), how is it that they don’t have money to make their own internal jobs better?

3) That still doesn’t answer the question of why can’t the very best engineers be provided with very good jobs to keep them in engineering. I harken back to my memories of some very good engineers coming out of MIT who ended up taking jobs in consulting and banking because they said that they felt they could make more money and advance more quickly by doing that than they could as engineers. So the question is, why can’t more engineering companies offer a faster track to star engineers that is equivalent to what is available at consulting/banking?

And again, I would refer back to my point #2 above. Many of these engineering companies hire consulting companies for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars every year. So it’s not like they don’t have the money. They have the money. They just choose to spend it on outside consulting firms. Instead of that, why not just create your own in-house consulting division and pay those employees the kind of money that the consulting firms pay their employees? Or do something else to attract and retain top talent. You have the money, it’s a question of how you want to use it.



When has Bill Gates been honest?? But when he said US need more [American] engineers, I agree with him, as I said before, most top engineers in those top engineering companies are Indians and Chinese, while top US students are going to consulting/banking which is regarded locally as more prestigious jobs.



And if the US wants more engineers, then the US will have to pay them better. That’s my point. You can’t get one without the other.



The campaign Bill Gates proposed is not for the sake of Microsoft, but he is perhaps worried about the trend where the Asians take over Americans in engineering and computer science.



And again, if he was really so worried about this, he could simply pay American engineers more. So I guess he isn’t THAT worried about it.