TIME magazine's cover article "Is America flunking science?"

vampiro
Tue, 14 Feb 2006 03:00:39 +0000

“However, to summarize, I think what is really going on is a strange artifact in the way that engineers in the US are paid. Why is it that these companies are not willing to pay top dollar for engineers, but are willing to splurge for consulting services and financial services? If the companies wanted to save money, wouldn’t they be interested in saving money EVERYWHERE? If these companies wanted to outsource to take advantage of labor arbitrage, then why hasn’t an outsourced management consulting or an outsourced investment banking industry been created?”

here u are right sakky…in a way the lure of the management companies which has struck the engineers is becasue of the tech companies…coz see as i am about to begin college i can say one thing…ever since i was a kid i wanted to be a computer scientist and work in labs on Artificial Intelligence (i still want to) but basically when i came in contact of all the professions and all i was sort of surprised to hear that even an MIT engineer gets only like $60000 starting salary and that does not go up a lot. I mean i thought what is this…these people in my school who have commerce aren’t even making anything new…and frankly speaking working half as hard as us science guys(for instance the blokes never work till a week before an exam…and we’d die if we did that) and getting salaries which are like insane…so that made me think…and it makes lot of other engineers think…guys who go to IIT, MIT,Stanford…these are people who can change the world if all of them join technology and scientific research…but this makes them think that they should also join these manangement companies…coz after all money is also something if not everything…and it really is because of the tech companies (thats one of the reasons people from good colleges aren’t joining microsoft and going to google…google gives them benefits like a management company unlike msoft)…
i totally agree with you coz like…if the comopanies pay the engg like 6 figures or 7 figures they wont have to spend like 8 or 9 figures on Mckinsey and the likes…and the pace of the tech world will also increase coz after all it doesnt matter where engineers do their jobs they still love math and science at heart…and being in their own profession would be the best option for everyone if we just got more money…Becausee the irony is that from say MIT( the worlds best TECH school) a management grad might start at 100k but the actual engg still starts at 50-55k which is sad…