Prestige of Engineers

Los
Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:36:48 +0000

Quick note about engineering as job insurance, I’m not convinced that that’s so easy. Hiring managers have told me that even ex-engineers have a hard time going back, ie one who has turned to management and wants to return after a few years. They company has moved on, hiring and grooming new grads and they’re not limited to the rusty or the degree holders with no related experience.

I disagree with the idea that engineering offers limited career growth. I think the term “engineer” is being used here as “entry-level engineer”. Engineers who go onto management should also be counted because it is often a natural progression that requires no further education. The google/ms early employees could have easily gotten non-engineering finance/consulting job and that would have been much safer for them. Instead, they staked everything on their engineering product and won the gamble. Every Intel CEO since its birth has been a PHD engineer. We should not compare the lower end of engineering jobs to high end non-engineering jobs like consulting/finance. Can you crack the top 100 wealthiest in the world in your 30s doing consulting?

Look at the management teams of tech companies. Many will be dominated by engineers. In many of these places, it is a natural progression to go from engineering to management, as in often times “management” is simply a promoted engineer who needs to factor in business decisions. Hence, these “managers” should also be linked with “entry-level engineers” when referring to an “engineering career path”. This isn’t to say that “managing” is necessarily higher-paying; upper level engineers, whatever new technical titles they’re given, get paid more than managers. Point being, in those years post-graduation, “entry level engineering” is no disadvantage as a work experience. Sure, some folks still do entry level work after 30 years. From my experience, those cases are, more often than not, personal choices.

You might call my examples entrepreneurs/managers/businessmen instead of engineers, and the lines certainly do start to blur, but engineering is the background and core of their work. Sure, there are exceptions like Carly Fiorina but these are exceptions.

Salary wise, since the discussion seems targed at upper-echelon positions, I’d say it’s hard to discern who does better. An engineering student could easily get through undergrad debt-free with internships. Do a simple numerical comparison between that and a 3-4 year mega-loan for medical or law school, paired with undergrad loans at expensive colleges. Do we want to compare a 50-60 hour work week to an 80-100 hour workweek?

Prestige… prestige is about generalizations/stereotypes. Engineers do suffer in that dept because the job itself may not require any social grace. Doctors have to converse/console. Lawyers must be well spoken, quick witted. So their jobs inherently develop prestige-related factors. I think that is the brunt of the original topic. I stopped reading at page 6 so please excuse any redundancies.