<p>Save your time to do what? Skip out on an education to play Madden? Why do I want you to be an engineer? I am glad you push paper, and don’t design anything I use on a regular basis.</p>
<p>If you are looking for ways to cut out on learning, you are probably in the wrong field. That is just my opinion.</p>
<p>foobarbaz, you make some great points about society needing everyone, but I will say that our society does not value engineers as much as they should. The narrow scope of a lot of engineering jobs is the reason i decided to not be an engineer. a friend of mine who graduated with me, like a lot of Michigan engineers, actually wanted a very technical job, so he took a job with Boeing in california, getting paid 80k a year to start, what happened to him, was that his job was so specialized, that it’s not really a career. so now he wants to get into business school and do something else, but those years of working as an engineer will be useless in the business world. </p>
<p>A friend of mine who’s now working at Mckinsey also commented how in engineering, an MIT grad can end up with the same job, same pay as a Ball State engineering grad, at Lockheed Martin, Boeing, GE, Ford, etc. Obviously we are in college to get an education that will serve us for the rest of our lives , but doesn’t that seem unfair? Engineering is not a prestige driven field.</p>
<p>So, from bearcats a few pages ago…</p>
<p>“They’d rather toss a lot of really hard brainteasers and olympiad math problems at you and know that you are genuinely smart, train you, than to have an ordinary hardworking CS major with limited upside.”</p>
<p>Does practicing these actually make you better at them? </p>
<p>And you also said that you were hired as a programmer (or something like that) without being a CS major (presumably with no programming experience beyond 101, possibly EECS 280), how did that work out? What did you actually do that you didn’t need to know how to program for it?</p>
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<p>I’ll try. What is the highest offer someone has made to you? I seem to remember you stating that your starting comp <em>MIGHT</em> be 125k, which is lower than what this “software engineering geek” will make. Have you been offered more than that? Guaranteed, not potential money. I’m not bragging. I really don’t care about the money. You do, though, so I’m curious to see if you will make more than I will. If so, cool.</p>
<p>Also, very well said, foobarbaz. I’d like to see bearcats try to respond to your posts. I’d like to see intelligent responses from him, though, rather than insults. One can hope.</p>
<p>In before “I’m flattered you still think about me” and the like…</p>
<p>(Shameless 8 month bump because I posted in this thread before)</p>
<p>dude don’t necro dead threads omg…you learn this in online thread etiquette 101</p>
<p>but now that im posting this I’ll just say that people who use bill gates as an example to say that you don’t need a college degree to be successful are a bunch of dumb****s. We might as well all drop out of college and all try to start the next microsoft. Seriously, college degrees have their benefits, obama and the BLS aren’t spewing BS at americans when they emphasize the employment and salary comparison between degree holders and high school grads. This isn’t even something worth discussing.</p>