Shocking: More MIT engineering students now actually want to work as engineers

sakky · October 30, 2009, 2:47am

I’m afraid that not only do I have to strongly disagree, the empirical evidence is such that the proliferation of highly successful startup ‘engineers’ who lack PhD degrees - or in many cases, lack even a bachelor’s degree at all (and in a few cases, never even graduated from high school) - is so profuse as to be a cliche. For example, so many of the high-tech titans that have revolutionized the computer/electronics/Internet space - men like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, & Mark Zuckerberg never even graduated from college. Janus Friis of Skype and Kazaa never even graduated from high school. The cliche has become so powerful that some pundits come close to actually recommending that people should drop out of college to found startups. {To be sure, I am making no such recommendation; I simply am pointing out what the general notion is.}

*And yet, when I think about it, I can’t imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He’d have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he’d been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.

And yes, while it is probably true that you’ll learn some valuable things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years before starting your own, you’d learn a thing or two running your own company during that time too.

The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I’m supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I’m 23? That’s four years. That’s more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.

And he’d be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we’re suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn’t have been better for him.*

[Hiring</a> is Obsolete](<a href=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html]Hiring”>Hiring is Obsolete)

Nor were all highly successful startups replete with PhD-level engineers - in fact, most had next to none. The original Apple engineering team had few - probably zero - PhD level engineers. Similarly, the original engineering teams of Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo, and Google had few engineers with PhD’s. Wayne Rosing, legendary engineering director at Apple and later Google, doesn’t even hold a bachelor’s degree. All of those engineers who stayed with the companies until their Earth-shattering IPO’s became fabulously wealthy. Microsoft has dotted the landscape of the Pacific Northwest with thousands of ‘Microsoft Millionaires’ who have showered the region with wealth, ostentatiously for some. Google is doing the same within Silicon Valley. I certainly wouldn’t mind being Ron Garret who became filthy rich after working for just a year at Google. I doubt that he has a PhD.

*FIVE years ago, Chris Peters was a former programmer who had made a fortune from his Microsoft stock options. Then he learned that the Professional Bowlers Association was for sale.Undeterred by his lack of experience in sports, broadcasting or any other directly relevant business, he recruited some friends as investors and bought the league.

…If the stock price hit a new high, for example, five new sports cars might drive into Microsoft’s parking lot in Redmond, Wash., the next day. Big-screen video projection theaters and indoor pools built to resemble the rocky caves of Hawaii appeared in employees’ homes. One employee treated 30 family members to a weeklong vacation at a five-star resort. Another endowed a professorship in his name at Oxford University.*

<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/business/yourmoney/29millionaire.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/business/yourmoney/29millionaire.html</a>

*Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Ms. Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value.

“I’m happy I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” said Ms. Brown, 52, who now lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Nevada, gets her own massages at least once a week and has a private Pilates instructor. She has traveled the world to oversee a charitable foundation she started with her Google wealth and has written a book, still unpublished, “Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google.”

…Ron Garret, an engineer who was Google’s 104th employee, worked there for a little more than a year, leaving in 2001. When he eventually sold all his stock, he became a venture capitalist and a philanthropist. He has also become a documentary filmmaker and is currently chronicling homelessness in Santa Monica, Calif.*

<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html?pagewanted=1&dlbk[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html?pagewanted=1&dlbk</a>

I never restricted myself to talking about only the ‘more desirable’ engineering programs, nor should you. While I can agree with you that getting into a top grad EE/CS program can be very difficult, there are plenty of other grad engineering disciplines that are relatively uncompetitive. MIT’s overall grad engineering admissions rate (both MS & PhD) is something around * 30-40%*, far higher than that of the MBA program at the MIT Sloan School. I don’t think it’s particularly difficult to be admitted to, say, the MIT Engineering Systems Division master’s program. But that’s still a grad engineering program.

Again, see above. I never said anything about ‘the most popular’ engineering programs. I was simply talking about engineering in general. It is almost certainly easier to get into some master’s engineering program at MIT - although perhaps not the master’s program that you really want - than to get into the Sloan MBA program.

I think our basic dispute is whether we agree on what ‘basic opportunities’ are available. The truth of the matter is that the unemployment rate of engineers is lower than the national average. Engineering students from even no-name schools are still able to readily find employment, at least, far more so than can the average person. And as others have pointed out, engineering does indeed pay the highest, on average, of any bachelor’s degree. Clearly there are plenty of opportunities in engineering exist, relative to that of the average college graduate.

Which harkens back to what I previously said: engineering is indeed an excellent career choice for the average American. If you’re just an average student at an average college, then completing an engineering major and landing that $50-60k starting salary is a sweet deal. After al, what else were you going to do? McKinsey and Goldman won’t be beating down your path.

But if you’re one of the best students at one of the very best schools, you do have other opportunities available to you. Many of those students, including (especially?) the engineering students, conclude - sadly - that those other opportunities are superior.

sakky · October 30, 2009, 3:20am

Obviously it is the latter. But what that means is that companies can pay engineers millions. In the case of internal hires, they don’t have to, so they won’t. But the point is, they could.

And in some cases, they do pay internal employees millions, but simply through the mechanism of their own IPO. Google spawned hundreds, probably thousands, of homegrown millionaires within its own employee base when Google launched its own IPO in 2004.

Regardless of whether he pursued passion or wealth, nobody can dispute that his passion resulted in tremendous wealth. Yet at the same time, surely we can all agree that most engineers who follow their passion will not become wealthy.

Which is precisely my point I seriously have to consider whether or not any of the very best engineers are actually going into banking/consulting or engineering (in the typical sense). If Im one of the very best engineers, it seems pretty obvious to me that I should have a passion for engineering otherwise I seriously doubt that anyone will consider me one of the very best. In order to realize my potential and satisfy my interest, the likely place for me to be is either in R&D (regardless of the money) or a start-up (regardless of the money). Any sports analogy will suffice here, any musical genius analogy, and I would argue any engineering example as well. To be considered the best in any field, you seriously have to eat, sleep, and breathe it nobody can pay you to do this. Sure, they can pay you for your time and I would argue that this is primarily what happens on Wall Street - a great number of people who have no interest (or very little at best) in finance, all scurrying around trying to produce enough to get the next promotion. This, simply is not greatness. The very best financiers are the ones who are there for more than the money, and my bet is that they would be there even if the megamoney was elsewhere. They simply love what they do.

Then we have to consider a different definition of what the ‘very best’ is. What I was discussing were those engineering students at top-ranked programs such as MIT & Stanford and who earned sufficiently high grades to warrant being hired at top consulting or banking firms.

Now, if we follow your definition of the ‘very best’ engineers, which seems to hinge on passion, we then have to agree that most engineering students - whether at MIT/Stanford or at the average school - are not highly passionate. We’ve talked about those engineers on this thread. Let’s face it. Many - probably most - engineers in the workforce don’t really care that much about engineering. To them, it’s just something that puts food on the table. Heck, some people on this thread have brought up the issue of senior BigOil engineers who don’t really care about the job and just want to cash a steady paycheck without having to exert themselves too strenuously. Dilbert’s Wally was based on a real-life engineer at PacBell.

We also have to investigate exactly where passion comes from, which I would argue is not purely endogenous but rather is sociologically moderated. Kobe Bryant, as a child growing up in Italy, was passionate about soccer, and he’s freely admitted that he would have probably tried to become a professional soccer player had he stayed there. However, upon moving to the United States, he became so passionate about basketball that he’s now arguably the best basketball player in the world (sorry LeBron). His interest in basketball and resulting loss of interest in soccer was socially driven. Similarly, why do so many of the world’s best baseball players originate from the tiny nation of the Dominican Republic? It is because Dominicans are inherently born with passion for baseball, or is it because baseball is played extensively within the island and is widely viewed as a means to escape a life of harsh poverty in the sugarcane fields? Why do Europe and South America produce so many star pro soccer players, yet the US, China and India produce so few? Is it because Americans, Chinese, and Indians are simply less athletic and/or less inherently passionate about soccer, or is it because soccer is not seen as a lucrative or prestigious activity in those countries? I strongly recall my high school days when the star football players ruled the social dynamic, and the star soccer players garnered relatively little attention, despite the fact that my high school was actually better at soccer than at football.

The point is, engineering is seen as a relatively unprestigious and unlucrative career, relative to consulting and banking, and many students passions are going to be ignited by wherever the prestige and money lie. Right now, some Americans kids who might become passionately interested in engineering will never know that because they don’t even bother to try engineering in the first place, because they’re drawn by the magnetic power of other careers. Again, if Kobe Bryant had stayed in Italy, he might never have found any passion for basketball.

sakky · October 30, 2009, 3:46am

1.) We are asked to take [at face value] that a school such as MIT actually produces better engineers in the first place. While at first glance this would seem obvious given the prestige of the institution, quite a few engineers in the field probably wouldnt agree. There is no doubt that some of the best students go to MIT, but just how well this correlates into productivity is quite hard to prove and while Im sure there is some correlation, just how much can only be speculated. Given the ratio of student bodies at prestigious schools to non-prestigious schools, there is no doubt in my mind that the marketplace gives respect for the name. However, there is a very real possibility that what the marketplace is really paying for is in fact the name itself. You have said this before in your very own posts. There is also no doubt in my mind that many promotions go hand in hand [in some cases] with the institution that one graduates from, however, this says nothing about the productivity of an individual [especially for technical engineers] as even in your last post you have cited that many promotions are given to poor engineers. Thus, what we are asked to take at face value is actually highly questionable and very hard to prove given that we might have to search the ranks of industrys technical roles not management roles.

Not only am I asking you to take it at face value, you have done so. You said it yourself - some positive correlation exists. That correlation does not have to be perfect, nor have I ever argued that it was. There only has to be some correlation.

To the extent that the name of the school helps you, I would argue that that only increases the salience of my argument. I have never disputed that some excellent engineers come from average, no-name schools. However, if those engineers tend to be stuck with mediocre jobs - and their lack of school brand cachet seems to indicate that they will - then that only reinforces what I said before: that many engineering firms don’t provide strong opportunities for their engineers, including their best engineers, which only reinforces the overall lack of interest in working as an engineer in the first place.

Regarding the opportunities to be quickly promoted to technical management, while I can agree that some engineers will not find them interesting, I think we can all agree that many do. Hence, if the MIT brand name is correlated with the ranks of technical management, then that only serves to reinforce the power of the MIT brand to provide opportunities that many engineers actually want. Put another way, if a company said that the engineers do not have opportunities to be quickly promoted to tech management, many (probably most) engineering students would find that to be a major detraction.

See my previous post. Again, I would argue that passion is largely socially constructed, as are the skills necessary to succeed in any field. I find it extremely difficult to believe that Dominicans are all preternaturally passionate and gifted in baseball, such that even if Major League Baseball and its million-dollar contracts did not exist at all, Dominicans would all be passing their leisure time hitting balls with sticks. I also find it interesting that any supposed inherent Dominican passion for baseball was not ignited until the sport was brought by foreign businessmen and US soldiers. {If they were really so inherently passionate about the sport, shouldn’t they have invented the sport indigenously and spontaneously?}

Or put another way, Larry Ellison has freely admitted that he never really cared that much about engineering per se, but started a tech company simply because he wanted to be rich and powerful. His pre-Oracle working days can be charitably be described as ‘itinerent and free-spirited’. Oracle co-founders Ed Oates and Bob Minor, who used to work with Ellison as engineers at Ampex, would cheerfully recall days on end when Ellison would just come to the office and chat them up, but never do any actual work. Ellison himself freely admits that his passion for Oracle waxes and wanes (Ellison: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again”), and he has often times chosen at the expense of his company to concentrate on other interests such as yacht racing and aircraft flying. Yet it’s hard to argue with $23 billion of success.

sakky · October 30, 2009, 3:58am

I never said anything about the the government was preventing engineering firms from rewarding top engineers.

My point simply is that if the investment banks can pay upwards of 50% of their revenue to their employees in the form of giant bonuses - despite the fact that the those employees vitiated not only the bank shareholders, but also the economy writ large - then surely engineering firms can afford to pay more to their employees. The fact that they don’t speaks to differential internal power dynamics within each industry: it’s clearly far better to be a investment bank employee than an investment bank shareholder, but the reverse seems to be true in the case of engineering. Investment bankers also enjoy tremendous benefits from their external political power in demanding a host of government bailouts whenever they encounter turbulence while leaving their compensation untouched. {For example, despite the bailouts, Ibankers have argued that guaranteed retention bonuses should be paid as a matter of respect for the sanctity of contracts, yet the government encountered little difficulty abrogating the employment contracts of GM and Chrysler once they were bailed out.}

What that means is that as long as the Ibankers wield such strong political sway relative to the engineers, most people will continue to prefer to be Ibankers rather than engineers.

Techy233 · October 30, 2009, 4:47am

{on the bright side you are officially a “Senoir Member” of CC, nshah9617"}

I’ve just finished reading sakky’s massive posts, and think he should go get a column in the NY Times.

My two cents here: I am Dominican. I never thought myself naturally good at baseball, but as a kid in the Dominican Republic, there was nothing else to do. So I played a lot of baseball. I did Little League, and played it throughout middle school {until I realised I wanted to be an engineer} Needless to say, I got really good at the sport, and for a while dreamt of going into MLB, but I do agree in your analysis; it is a cultural, societal skill I developed, and if it wasn’t for the social stigma, {or living in a poor, rural island} I may have spent my childhood going to math/engineering camps and building robots out of Lego pieces.

sakky · October 30, 2009, 1:32pm

One can also ask why China - with a population larger than Europe and South America combined - can’t produce a single superstar professional soccer player, but somehow can produce the bulk of the world’s top weightlifters, winning more weightlifting gold medals in the 2008 Olympics than the rest of the world combined. Are the Chinese really just naturally ‘passionate’ about Olympic weightlifting? Or does it have something to do with the deliberate strategy enacted by the Chinese political leadership to foster a rigorous youth sports system designed to win as many gold medals as possible as a matter of national pride and hence target sports such as weightlifting that offer numerous chances for medals? Weightlifting offers an escape from poverty for rural Chinese.

*For Chen, who became world champion last year and who broke the Olympic record in winning the 48kg class in Beijing, the road ahead is paved with gold.

In a country where the average annual rural income is just 3,600 Yuan (£280), the 25 year-old Chen’s gold medal will guarantee her millions of Yuan in cash bonuses, as well as potential advertising contracts, and enable her and her family to live in comfort for the rest of their lives.

Since 1984, every Chinese gold medal winner has received one kilo of gold, worth £14,300 at current prices, and the sum of £42,000 from a foundation established by the late Hong Kong tycoon Henry Fok Ying-tung.

But that’s just the start of the riches that await the star athletes from supposedly communist China. There are tax free bonuses from the state general administration of sport worth £27,000 for gold medal winners, as well as bonuses and gifts from local governments.

Chen’s home province of Guangdong handed out nearly £20,000 to its winners at the 2004 Athens Games. She has already received £4,000 from Panyu district and has been offered a new car, while a local real estate developer has promised her a villa. And along with every gold medal winner, she will receive 1 million Yuan (£78,000) from the Chinese brewing giant Yanjing.

Like all of China’s women weightlifters, Chen comes from a farming family.

“The training is so tough and boring that they always pick girls from the country because city girls can’t cope with it,” said Ai Baoguo, an editor at the Chinese edition of Sports Illustrated. “Weightlifting is a way for the successful ones to earn money for the whole family.”

That’s precisely what Chen Yanqing, no relation, has done. The third daughter of a farmer from the village of Tongli in eastern Jiangsu Province, her father was so poor he had to borrow money to send her to school and used to wish she had been born a boy.

But after being picked to attend a local sports school, Chen went onto win a gold medal in the 58kg weightlifting class at Athens, earning herself £31,000 in bonuses.

She repeated the feat in Beijing. Her delighted father told local media that she is “better than any son”. *

[China’s</a> sports stars add riches, roads and contracts to their Olympic gold - Telegraph](<a href=“China's sports stars add riches, roads and contracts to their Olympic gold”>China's sports stars add riches, roads and contracts to their Olympic gold)

jma · October 30, 2009, 1:47pm

Schumpeter
Fish out of water
Oct 29th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Policymakers are turning their minds to the tricky subject of promoting entrepreneurship

[Schumpeter:</a> Fish out of water | The Economist](<a href=“http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14743944]Schumpeter:”>Fish out of water)

jma · November 4, 2009, 7:55pm

Though the U.S. has certainly put money into the financial world, does anyone know how the numbers compare with the amount spent on research and development?

I mean, if you think about it, wasn’t the internet essentially created with government dollars? Obviously we put tremendous amounts of money into the NIH. A lot of the defense money goes into science/engineering related endeavors. At the end of the day, I’d still have to assume that we put quite a bit of money in those areas. Not to say that this implies we should put less money, in fact, if anything, it probably suggests that more should be invested as the money spent on getting the internet has been quite an investment.

Shocking: More MIT engineering students now actually want to work as engineers

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