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<p>Well, to be fair, the truth is, most bachelor’s degree level engineering jobs in any engineering discipline will consist of little more than optimizing a small segment of a large-scale project. For example, if you’re working as an entry-level software developer at Microsoft, your responsibilities may entail little more than testing and patching the code of the pivot-table feature of MSExcel or some other boring task. Yet Microsoft is one of the most desirable employers of software developers: imagine being a developer at one of the numerous enterprise software firms or data processing firms. Necessary jobs to be sure, but not exactly jobs that most young people dream of obtaining. Similarly, many mechanical engineers that I know ended up working on the shop floor of factories producing intermediate mechanical goods. For example, I know a guy whose job is to optimize the production of a particular flange that is used in the construction of office plumbing systems. Note, he isn’t even optimizing the construction of complete plumbing systems, he’s just optimizing the manufacture of the flange that is then used as an intermediate product by other manufacturers to build a plumbing system.</p>