Is harvard engineering (Biomedical especially) famous?

sakky
Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:13:12 +0000

As I said, engineering jobs include a huge variety. It ranges from the most elite design engineer to the mediocre testing engineer. Engineering is a large sector where you could see the not so small chasm between the elite and mediocre on the bell curve. Accordingly, the number elite engineering jobs would be only a small percentage of those engineering job figures, which, taking an absolute number, may not be less than ibanking/consulting jobs. If you ask why the whole engineering curve couldn’t shift to the right direction, the answer lies on the strength of the economy it supports. Ibanking/consulting pays better on the average because it has small curve distribution, has better employee on the average, similar to professions in law and medicine. It is illogical to ask why can’t engineering jobs be made better while it has a large and wide distribution of bell curve. What we can see is that there’re numerous engineering jobs at the right tail of this curve that would be at least as good as ibanking jobs.



Oh come now. You’re going to retreat to classic laissez-faire economics when we both know that labor markets are among the most distorted of all the markets precisely because of the presence of strong information assymetries? Classical economics presupposes that all market players know the precise value of the goods that are being traded. In other words, information is perfect. This practically never happens in labor markets, because nobody really knows how productive a worker is going to be until he’s hired. And the worker himself has the power to choose to be more or less productive depending on how well he thinks he’s being treated. In fact the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to researchers, especially Michael Spence, who characterized all these assertions. Strong behavorial and psychological factors also play a strong role in labor markets, something demonstrated by the 2002 Nobel Prize winners. Certainly you’re not going to say that you know more than a Nobel Prize winner does, are you, rtkysg?

I’ll give you a simple illustration. If labor markets really followed classical free market principles, then there should never be such a thing as unemployment, and companies should never have to lay anybody off. Instead, what would happen is that companies should simply lower their worker’s wages whenever things turned bad. But you’d never need to get rid of any workers. No matter how bad the economy is and how bad a worker is, there is some wage at which marginal revenue will exceed marginal cost. So all you would have to do is decrease wages to that point, and nobody would ever have to be unemployed and companies would never have to announce layoffs.

But you have to admit that that seldom happens. For example, when IBM ran into serious problems in the early 90’s, IBM announced they would lay off over 100,000 employees - over a 1/3 of their workforce. But why? If IBM wanted to follow free market principles, then IBM could have kept all its employees, but decrease everybody’s salaries, and then it would be up to the individual IBM worker to decide whether he wanted to stay at that reduced salary or quit. But IBM would not have had to lay anybody off. As it stood, lots of IBM workers lost their jobs, INCLUDING many people who probably would have stayed at that reduced salary. Hence, instead of having people who would still be working at IBM where marginal revenue would exceed marginal cost, you ended up with lots of people on the street generating no revenue for anybody. ** This makes no sense according to free-market economics, because it is extremely economically inefficient to have workers on the street who could be generating revenue instead doing nothing at all **, but it makes COMPLETE sense when you take into account all the information assymetries and psychological factors involved in labor markets.

In essence, it is often times better to have wages that are higher than the market-clearing price (and have consequent unemployment), and to lay people off rather than reduce their salaries. Basically, high wages induces workers to work harder, and also introduces a strong fear component of layoffs. If somebody isn’t making very much money anyway, then he probably doesn’t really fear getting fired. And from a psychological standpoint, people tend to get demoralized when they make less money than they did in the past, so it may be better just to lay people off rather than try to reduce their wages.

But anyway, that’s my exegesis on modern labor economics. The point is that engineering companies, yes, even the mediocre ones, could increase their wages if they wanted to get more people and better people. Every time a company or industry decides that they want more and better workers, that’s what they do. For example, I see that many school districts around the country want better teachers. So what are they doing? They are raising teacher salaries. I see that a lot of oil companies are trying to increase their offshore exploration. So what are they doing? They are raising the wages for their offshore roughnecks and roustabouts. When the late 90’s dotcom boom hit and Internet companies needed people, they raised the salaries for their positions.

The point is that labor economics do not follow free-market principles, except in a highly distorted fashion. It never has and it never will. Hence, there are tremendous opportunities for players to adjust wages accordingly. The more you pay, the more and better people you will get. So the real question is, do you really want to get more and better people? In many cases, the answer is no. So if that’s the case, then why are their companies complaining?



Managers from consulting? they’re only placed in some certain non-tech depts whereas by large the technical departments’ managers are all the people from tech companies.



Is that so? Tell that to Kevin Rollins of Dell. What position does he hold at Dell now? Oh, that’s right, he’s CEO.

And what about Jonathan Schwartz of Sun? What position does he have?



LOL, what it means is that he is more concerned with his money than the future of American engineers. In fact this should be able to show you that Microsoft has enough engineers despite the fact that many of its employees are Internationals. Therefore he only gives suggestion to Americans to have more engineers but not action.



Exactly, so you admit that he’s lying and that he really ought to keep his mouth shut. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. Bill Gates has enough personal wealth to make a significant change, by just starting some highly funded engineering research lab, like another Xerox PARC or a Bell Labs. He chooses not to do it. That means that he doesn’t really care about the problem that much. If he did, he would do that.



Not everyone wants to be Gandhi or Lincoln, you can accomplish so much being conservative and ordinary. In fact, taking measure from your environment and being afraid of the people perception may give flexibility and strength of being highly adaptive. You don’t need to be extreme to have high accomplishment. Over self-confidence and defiance against the norms may harm you in the end.



Yeah, but think about what you’re talking about. We’re talking about choosing Harvard over an engineering school like Purdue. I’m not even talking about a superelite engineering school like MIT or Stanford, but just one like Purdue. Is that really an ‘extreme’ choice?

To put it in perspective, I know plenty of people who voluntarily chose to join the military to fight in various wars like Vietnam, or the Gulf War, or the current war in Iraq. I would argue that THAT is a more ‘extreme’ choice than choosing Harvard over Purdue. After all, you could get killed. They’re not just risking getting laughed at, they’re risking their whole lives. Yet these people are brave enough to do it. I think we should admire people who are willing to be that brave.

After meeting some of these war veterans who risked their whole lives to do what they thought was right, you know and I know that any concerns about getting laughed at for choosing a supposedly ‘wrong’ school just falls by the wayside. You’re worried about getting laughed at by some jerks, whereas those guys are risking life and death.