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To be fair, a startup itself is a gamble. The owners are willing to cut corners because otherwise there would be no real profit.
Whether or not new elite engineers deserve this authority is arguable. But it’s pretty clear why less-stable startups are more willing to risk it than the more stable corporations.</p>
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And this is essentially the same with engineering - completion of the degree indicates that you are prepared to start a period of practical education leading to the point where you can actually be considered competent. In those areas where your mistakes could have catastrophic consequences (as with medicine) this is often formalized via the FE/PE process, whereas less dangerous fields this remains an informal but widely valued practice.</p>
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And an engineer with a PE and a degree from a good school can hang out their shingle and do quite well… once he has completed those years of experience. And if that degree is from MIT or Stanford he will probably see more business than he would otherwise. And the PE is only required in a few fields - we have a few components (some of them quite large and/or expensive) that we farm out to a couple of cottage-shops started by guys with a decade of experience in established companies who now run their own shops - not because we have to, but because they do better work!</p>
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Sure - doing their own projects. They (as others have noted) have not had to learn someone else’s systems or in most cases deal with any regulatory issues or even do anything other than work on their pet project for the last few years. And all they have to do is find one starry-eyed optimist out there that they can convince their project (almost always software) will work and generate Google-esque profits some day. And most of the few success stories would have (and in many cases DID) executed their projects without relevent coursework or collegiate support - they could have done this in their garages, because of the work, their talent, and their passion.</p>
<p>Conversely, an engineer coming into my company needs to learn a variety of tremendously complicated issues that were never covered in class and that the individual could not reasonably execute in their dorm. I suspect most other companies have similar issues - engineering educations are foundational, not complete.</p>
<p>
Engineering startups have a lot less to lose, and are often started by people who are not necessarily as good at evaluating risk in the first place.</p>
<p>As cosmicfish noted, it essentially depends on how much experience the employee needs to succeed in that particular company. Some require little to no experience or additional training, while others value experience over everything else.</p>
<p>I’ve worked in the construction field for five years now and I feel that I still wouldn’t be able to take the lead on a medium sized building project… let’s say 10+ stories. It’s not like they teach you how to actually put a building up in school, nor do they teach you how to deal with situations when things don’t go your way. Engineering education is mainly more theoretical than practical. Sure you might be able to come up with ideas on your own, but chances are people have encountered these situations before and a more refined and proven solution already exists. That’s where the experience comes into play.</p>
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<p>And how is that relevant to this topic? If you were trying to inform the OP of the benefits of changing to a finance or IB career, then I would understand, however you’re not doing so. Like I said, different industry, different way of business. I don’t disagree with many of your viewpoints (from this thread or others), however you have an unusually bad habit of turning topics like this into a finance/IB vs. engineering battle… which I don’t think the OP is wanting.</p>
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<p>Sure, they sell products… but many of these new/in-development products are paid for (in-part) by large upfront payments/“contracts” (see 787). Also, financial profits for many of the new products from these industry giants are often not seen for a number of years (yes I’m not accounting for already developed products). Regardless, I was really only speaking in reference to the OP’s prior experience in the defense industry, which works primarily on development contracts. As I emphasized before and as you know, IB and engineering companies operate on a completely different financial basis… which was my point, even if my application of it was specific and misleading.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, this happens everywhere. My first internship experience was very similar to yours from the sound of it, and I’ve encountered some instances in my professional career that aren’t too different. Don’t get your head down… there are jobs out there that this is not the case.</p>
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<p>Who said you need to settle? Set yourself apart from others, and many companies will compensate you above your peers. I did so, and I make more than many of my peers that are of a higher labor grade. It’s not impossible.</p>
<p>Like I said before, look into some smaller companies… maybe even try doing an internship with them. Just remember: not all positions at large companies are bad, and the opposite goes for small companies.</p>
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<p>The OP (along with you) is perfectly free not to read my posts if he finds them irrelevant.</p>
<p>More importantly, the OP did specifically ask exactly in his original post how (some) engineers are able to obtain positions in finance, so it would seem to me that he would indeed find my discussion relevant. </p>
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<p>Well, then by that argument, the same would seem to hold for financial ‘products’ that are also heavily backed by multi-year supplier contracts. After all, a bank can’t realistically launch and trade a synthetic security or even a relatively basic equity/debt offering without a top-tier information technology system along with extensive and deep client relationship - all of which surely involved immense upfront costs and years to develop. {The finance industry, for all its shortcomings, indisputably runs some of the most sophisticated infotech systems in the world.} </p>
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<p>Fair enough. I would then simply reiterate that the OP also expressed interest in taking his talents out of the defense industry.</p>
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<p>Well, it certainly seemed to me that the evidence of the last few years has emphatically and painfully demonstrated the catastrophic damage that can be wreaked by mistakes in the the finance industry. Yet their practice of handsomely paying fresh college graduates with zero experience (and, in many cases, not even a relevant college major) continues unabated. </p>
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<p>As well as that guy in finance or consulting? </p>
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<p>And yet why do I strongly suspect that an engineer at your company - even after accumulating those many years of experience that you say is necessary to learn all of the tremendously complicated and intricate regulatory details and systemic issues that were never covered in coursework - may still end up being paid less than an investment banker fresh out of undergrad. </p>
<p>And that’s where the analogical difference between a career in engineering vs. the aforementioned alternative in medicine is the most stark. Sure, you might argue that a newly minted MD is still unready to truly practice medicine and therefore requires additional years of training. Fair enough. But the key difference is that after eventually completing those years of training, the physician will be paid very well. The engineer has no such comparable post-training outcome. </p>
<p>And the same contrast holds for other alternative careers. Some of the longer-term CC participants may remember ariesathena, a former poster who worked as a chemical engineer for a few years before opting for law school. When the older engineers at her chemical plant found out about her plans, they half-joked that she was likely to make more immediately out of law school than the engineers at that plant with decades of experience. She conspicuously did not disagree with that assessment. {To be clear, she did go to a top-ranked law school.} </p>
<p>That is the crux of the issue that speaks to the OP’s concerns regarding where he should optimally ‘take his talents’ to an industry that will appreciate and compensate him. Apparently, large engineering companies want engineers who have accumulated years of experience in learning specialized complex systems…but even after they’ve done so, still don’t want to pay them well. Surely all engineers have encountered the stiff salary ceiling that constricts engineering salaries from rising above a certain level. </p>
<p>On the other hand, many of those very same engineering firms that curtail the salaries of their highly experienced engineers ironically feel little compunction in paying eye-popping clientele fees to consulting and banking firms who then turn around and pay brand-new college graduates salaries that often times exceed the salaries of the experienced engineers of their clients. Is it really then any wonder that many of the students at the best engineering schools do not really want to work as engineers?</p>
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<p>The startups may be started by people who are not savvy at evaluating risk. But the funders - that is to say, the angels and especially the venture capitalists - are supposed to be competent risk managers. If they’re not, then that immediately raises the question of why institutional investors continue to provide capital to VC firms that are staffed by incompetent risk managers. And even if you believe that the entire startup funding chain is irrational and/or incompetent, well, that only seems to be a terrific reason to choose to found a startup over working at an established engineering firm. {I certainly wouldn’t mind receiving some irrational/incompetent startup funding right now.}</p>
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[quote]
Well, it certainly seemed to me that the evidence of the last few years has emphatically and painfully demonstrated the catastrophic damage that can be wreaked by mistakes in the the finance industry. Yet their practice of handsomely paying fresh college graduates with zero experience (and, in many cases, not even a relevant college major) continues unabated. <a href=“1”>/quote</a> Do you really think that the “catastrophic damage” was wreaked by “fresh college graduates with zero experience”? I am sure that there are many senior partners who are happy that you think that, but I don’t buy it. The purpose of new hires in these industries is to serve as unthinking extensions of their superiors, and they are paid well for the exact same reason that engineering firms spend money on expensive tools and computers.
(2) If the major players are still making money hand over fist, do they consider their system to have failed? And regardless of how the last game ended, a new game starts right now and they are still going to play it the best they know. Besides, if there were no losers, why would you spend money to hire winners?
(3) If everything you say is accurate and correct, why would anyone want to follow their practices anyway?</p>
<p>
Perhaps not, but better than most of the guys who tried to get into finance or consulting and could not get those few overpaid yet useless positions. And much better than the vast majority of college graduates, much less people in general.</p>
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Wait - you mean the world isn’t fair? I am shocked, SHOCKED at this allegation! And there are salary ceilings in engineering? I am stunned at this, since I know so many half-million a year teachers, and archaeologists, and chemists, and just assumed that EVERY profession had limitless earning potential!</p>
<p>Here are a few sad truths:</p>
<p>(1) Most lawyers, and doctors, and financiers are either making a mediocre net pay or else are making sacrifices that I would never choose. A doctor may be making $300k eventually, but is probably paying $80-100k of that in insurance and earned a net $50-200k in their first decade of 80-hour weeks after their undergrad (counting med school debt and residency pay). A lawyer in the right field can make millions, but many more are scraping by with whatever they can get, and likewise have law school debt and insane work weeks to deal with. Finance and consulting pays well out of school for the lucky few who can get it, but demand every second of your life for a tiny probability of advancement.</p>
<p>(2) One factor in salary calculations and negotiations is the estimate of how much an individual will bring in net revenue, and the simpler and more accurate this estimate is, the easier it is for the individual to demand high wages. As an engineer, it can be quite difficult to compute the exact contributions of a given individual - how much of the revenues from that plane were due to the technical specifications overall, much less the contribution of any particular engineer? As a lawyer or financier, these calculations are in many cases trivially easy - their impacts are easily parsed and directly correspond to specific gains and losses. This in turn makes it a lot easier to negotiate salaries for people whose jobs are so easily linked to revenues, and why people in jobs without that link can struggle so much in salary. This is also why athletes and entertainers make so much - it is simple to link their salaries to ticket sales.</p>
<p>(3) Industries with single-profession pipelines to management have higher average incomes than those with multiple pipelines. A manager at an engineering firm is often no longer performing an engineering role and may never have been an engineer to begin with - this decouples their salary and benefits from those they manage. A manager at a financial firm or law firm or hospital often holds the same base qualifications as their entire “primary” work force, and are often doing the same basic job at least half their time - this means that their own salaries are coupled to their subordinates, and that by raising subordinate salaries they make an inherent argument for raising their own.</p>
<p>
A great deal of venture capitalists are not especially professional, they are simply people who have (one way or another) found themselves in possession of a relatively large sum of money and a desire to gamble. I know the financial backers of several start-ups and many of them have very modest backgrounds and little or no professional training outside (perhaps) an MBA.</p>
<p>
The easy answer for larger VC firms is that they do not care if any particular investment succeeds or fails, noting instead the overall rate of return. The guys who backed Facebook and Google were success stories even if 99% of their other investments crapped out. And there are a lot of VC managers who ARE incompetent, but it essentially takes a few years of trying out the job before you really know if they are any good.</p>
<p>
Even stupid start-ups are predicated on certain essentials that not all engineers can meet, and although a venture capitalist can lose 80% of their projects and still come out on top, as an engineer you are less able to distribute your risk - all your eggs are in one basket, and if the company fails you are often burned. That some small percentage will profit immensely from this route does not mean that everyone should pursue it, any more than every high school football player should bank their futures on being a first round NFL draft pick.</p>
<p>
On this note, I think plasma televisions are far superior to LCD TV’s in many ways, and think it is a shame that they are disappearing from the market. The tragically amusing thing is that much of this is due to the perception that LCD’s are newer and therefore better, when they are in fact newer ONLY in large sizes. While I appreciate that this competition has reduced plasma prices by a factor of ten over the last decade, it is also forcing companies to cease productions, and that is a big shame - the image on my astonishingly cheap plasma outstrips every LCD I’ve seen.</p>
<p>I realize that this was not relevant to the thread, but you can just ignore it. That might have been harder if I included it as part of a massive post that actually started relevant, but I’m too lazy for that.</p>
<p><a href=“1”>quote=cosmicfish</a> Do you really think that the “catastrophic damage” was wreaked by “fresh college graduates with zero experience”? I am sure that there are many senior partners who are happy that you think that, but I don’t buy it. The purpose of new hires in these industries is to serve as unthinking extensions of their superiors, and they are paid well for the exact same reason that engineering firms spend money on expensive tools and computers.
(2) If the major players are still making money hand over fist, do they consider their system to have failed? And regardless of how the last game ended, a new game starts right now and they are still going to play it the best they know. Besides, if there were no losers, why would you spend money to hire winners?
(3) If everything you say is accurate and correct, why would anyone want to follow their practices anyway?
[/quote]
Yeah, I’m leaning towards believing that the problems that the finance industry causes aren’t made by the errors of new members but rather by deliberate disregard of proper practice on the part of the firm itself in pursuit of short-term profits.</p>
<p>Hell, they still do this during the middle of an economic downturn caused directly by their mismanagement. Citi, for example, was sued in 2011 by employers responsible for filtering out substandard loans who were told by their superiors that “the number of loans declared substandard must go down.” Back to business as usual, I see.</p>
<p>The blatant disregard for the long-term isn’t just limited to finance, sadly. Engineering companies, for example, lay off older workers who have worked long enough to receive benefits because a newly minted graduate could do the work for pennies. In the short term, this looks wonderful in the accounting, since they pay out less. In the long term, they suffer because a good engineer who earned their long stay was certainly worth the premium the company has to pay. But who cares about that, really?</p>
<p>The whole point is that this attitude is pushing potentially valuable engineers into fields in which their engineering talent is wasted for the simple reason that companies are too concerned with how much penny-pinching they can do to compensate them for the work they do. That’s why they take their talents into bubble-blowing, where they get paid a higher salary. </p>
<p>PS: If you think that these engineers aren’t really worth what they cost, why are companies at the top of the tech world (Apple, Google, to some extent Microsoft) willing to pay top dollar to have them? Certainly they must have good reason to pay one worker the salary of multiple candidates obtained through penny-pinching.</p>
<p>Bear in mind your experience is based on working for a government contractor, which is next to working for the government, a place where productivity, skills, etc. mean nothing and seniority and politics and who knows who mean everything. The computer/software industry is much more of a meritocracy (probably because the government doesn’t have much to do with it and it’s very lightly regulated, meaning it’s a true free market industry), where bloated inefficient companies actually go out of business instead of being bailed out by the government, and I like it more for that reason.</p>
<p>Why the political rant? I’m saying that there may be other employers of top mechanical engineers where things are different, more like the computing industry. I’d just steer clear of government jobs and government contractors.</p>
<p>OP, if you’re so talented, go start your own company. you don’t have to follow other people’s recipes. just make your own. top engineering talent don’t necessarily end up on Wall Street doing finance. look at all those young brilliant entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. fyi, if big company culture does not fit your lifestyle and make use of your talent, go work for a start up company where all the action is and will certainly make great use of your intelligence. plus, if you hate the slowness that is characteristic of the aerospace industry (avg product life cycle of a decade), then look for mechanical engineering work with the consumer electronics sector where much shorter product life cycle equals faster and more exciting culture</p>
<p>Startups are nice, but Silicon Valley is a software/digital tech hub. Not sure it’s really the right place for selling more physical products.</p>
<p><a href=“1”>quote</a> Do you really think that the “catastrophic damage” was wreaked by “fresh college graduates with zero experience”? I am sure that there are many senior partners who are happy that you think that, but I don’t buy it. The purpose of new hires in these industries is to serve as unthinking extensions of their superiors, and they are paid well for the exact same reason that engineering firms spend money on expensive tools and computers.
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<p>The catastrophic damage was indeed wreaked by senior partners who (mostly) themselves started in the industry as new analysts with zero experience. And similarly many of the newly minted college graduates who are now joining the finance industry this year will themselves become senior partners in the future. They therefore represent the root of the problem. </p>
<p><a href=“2”>quote</a> If the major players are still making money hand over fist, do they consider their system to have failed? And regardless of how the last game ended, a new game starts right now and they are still going to play it the best they know. Besides, if there were no losers, why would you spend money to hire winners?
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<p>And yet why are the major players still making money? Could it perhaps be because clients - including surely your company - continue to willingly pay large fees to the finance industry? Put another way, if your company and the rest of their clients, or heck if even just all *engineering companies * were to simply stop using expensive financial services - or simply refuse to pay more than a modicum of fees - then that industry would be unable to pay such high salaries.</p>
<p>Is that really so absurd? Client firms refuse to pay high salaries to their employees, including engineers, even those with extensive and precious experience and knowledge. So why not apply that same frugal mentality to financial services? Why do they always seem to conveniently lose all of their rugged cost discipline whenever the bankers come calling? </p>
<p><a href=“3”>quote</a> If everything you say is accurate and correct, why would anyone want to follow their practices anyway?
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<p>Um, why not? Seems elementary - because you’re paid well to do so. To paraphrase several engineering grads who took finance/consulting jobs: “Sakky, I’d love to work in engineering, but I want to throw the giant student-loan monkey off my back, and engineering doesn’t allow me to do that.” </p>
<p>The bottom line is that while we may agree that the system may be flawed, that’s, frankly, not something that’s relevant to a new graduate that the OP will shortly become. He has to worry about what is the optimal path to improve his life. If other industries offer a superior way to do that, then he will surely rationally choose those other industries.</p>
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<p>So it seems to me that you are conceding that those engineers who do have the option of joining finance/consulting should probably do so. Granted, most engineers don’t have that choice, but if you do?</p>
<p>Similarly, if I had to choose between dating a sweet, wonderful intelligent woman who happens to also look like Charlize Theron, or a woman who has none of those characteristics, what would you do? Granted, most guys don’t have that choice, but what if you did? </p>
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<p>Wait - I am shocked, SHOCKED at the implication that just because other professions suffer from salary ceilings, that engineering should do the same. Didn’t your mother ever advise you what to do if you see all your friends jump off a bridge?</p>
<p>At the end of the day, engineering firms are competing for top talent (from the top engineering schools) with other professions that don’t have salary ceilings and that will pay them highly right out of undergrad. The question then is, do engineering firms want to seriously compete to employ that top engineering talent or not ?</p>
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<p>Over the long-term, I think that nobody seriously disputes that, on average physicians as a class occupy a significantly higher economic station than do the engineers. </p>
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<p>Remember, we’re not talking about mediocre lawyers or which there are plenty. We’re talking about the best lawyers, that is, those who went to strong law schools. I would never recommend that a regular engineering student take on debt to attend some no-name law school. </p>
<p>But if one were ariesathena - a former engineer who was admitted to a top-ranked law school - I think it’s a hard case to make that she should have stayed as an engineer. Like I said, when the grizzled engineering veterans at her company found out that she was admitted to law school, they joked, probably bittersweetly, that she would make more when she graduated than even those engineers at her company with many decades of experience, and even after subtracting law-school debt payments, she would still be coming out substantially ahead. Ariesathena notably did not disagree with them. </p>
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<p>And it seems to me that, patent/IP law would be one of those “right fields”, particularly given the IP machinations and transacations that happen seemingly every day. Heck, just today, the business press announced that Thomson had lost its patent case against AU Electronics, the #4 flat-panel manufacturer in the world. And it seems to me that engineering graduates are highly qualified to become patent attorneys - in stark contrast to the vast majority of law school students who were trained in humanities or social sciences. Indeed, the USPTO specifically states that only those with a sufficient engineering (or natural science) education is allowed to take the USPTO Bar. </p>
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<p>I’m afraid that that’s almost surely false, at least with regard to new finance/law hires. Indeed, it’s become a well-worn trope - and a well-hashed subject on the law school section of CC- that newly hired “Biglaw” associates are highly unprofitable for their firm at least for the first few years of their career. So why do brand-new Biglaw associate salaries continue to occupy such nosebleed levels? The same also seems to be true of new finance and consulting hires, especially those who lack any corresponding undergraduate background (i.e. the boatloads of Ivy-League humanities graduates who are hired into finance/consulting). Either they don’t generate much value during their short 2-3 year stints as analysts (and most analysts will leave after those 2-3 years), or they have the most efficient training in the entire world such that they can immediately take brand new hires from irrelevant majors and quickly convert them into highly profitable employees that allows them to support such high salaries. {And if that is the case, then perhaps engineering firms ought to learn how to train their new hires as efficiently.} </p>
<p><a href=“3”>quote</a> Industries with single-profession pipelines to management have higher average incomes than those with multiple pipelines. A manager at an engineering firm is often no longer performing an engineering role and may never have been an engineer to begin with - this decouples their salary and benefits from those they manage. A manager at a financial firm or law firm or hospital often holds the same base qualifications as their entire “primary” work force, and are often doing the same basic job at least half their time - this means that their own salaries are coupled to their subordinates, and that by raising subordinate salaries they make an inherent argument for raising their own.
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<p>Yet one major difference is that managers in the finance space are paid far more than are managers in the engineering space. In other words, finance pays its subordinates better than does engineering, and also pays its managers better. Everybody is paid better. </p>
<p>But more importantly, even if what you are saying is correct, then that just raises the question of why it ought to be that way. Why exactly can engineering firms get away with employing engineering managers who - as you say - may never have even worked as engineers at all? </p>
<p>That would seem fatally demoralizing to me as an engineer, for it implies that even if I work long hours developing engineering experience, I might still be passed over for a managerial promotion to somebody who never worked as an engineer at all. At least in the finance space, you know that if you work very hard and succeed as an analyst, you will likely be promoted up the chain. Your managers elicit respect from you because, if nothing else, at least you know that they were in your position when they were young. An engineering manager who never worked as an engineer enjoys no such deference. But he’s nevertheless the manager anyway.</p>
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<p>I would argue that the same mentality ought to apply to engineering firms. After all, by comparison, let’s be honest, many engineering firms are not particularly professional either. They just happened to stumble upon a massively profitable technology opportunity. Microsoft’s fortunes stem from the fact that IBM needed an operating system for the new PC, and Microsoft just happened to know where to get one. Cisco Systems meteoric growth during the 1980’s and 1990’s was fueled by the fact that they just happened to be selling a reliable multi-protocol router at a time when companies realized that they had a litany of computing ‘islands’ that could be networked together either in intracampus LAN’s/ WAN’s, and then - most crucially of all - with all other companies together due to the mass commercialization of the Internet. Certainly, the managers of such firms were not highly ‘professionally trained’. {Steve Ballmer handled the business side of Microsoft in its early days, yet he never finished his MBA and his only business experience consisted of a few years right out of college at P&G.} It’s therefore not clear to me that VC’s are more likely to surreptitiously having unexpected large sums of money any more than an engineering firm would. </p>
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<p>And, um, the exact same logic ought to apply to engineering. This seems particularly clear in the engineering R&D or product design space - most such projects will fail. Cisco Systems, as an example, has researched plenty of cutting-edge router prototypes that never graduated to the commercialization stage at all. And even many products that Cisco has developed have failed. For example, Cisco has by now surely invested billions of dollars to breaking into the mobile-phone infrastructural space, and its initiatives have been nothing but unmitigated disasters. But those failures have been balanced by Cisco’s notable success in, say, storage-area networking. Even Apple, the reigning King of Innovation, suffered from a conspicuously notable share of failures, including the Lisa, Newton and the Bandai Pippin. </p>
<p>The upshot is that it’s not at all clear to me that the VC risk-diversification strategy of portfolio investment is substantially different than the strategies that engineering firms pursue right now within their own R&D and product design departments. Talk to any R&D engineer at even the most successful engineering firms, and he’ll surely tell you that many projects fail, but the cost of the failures are compensated for by the successes. The same can be said for, say, oil/gas E&P: the vast majority of wildcat exploration wells will be dry. </p>
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<p>How much am I really risking, if my firm is funded? Generally speaking, such funding would provide me with a modicum of salary, and if the entire company fails, oh well, I developed valuable entrepreneurial experience that can surely help me to obtain an excellent job.</p>
<p>*…I asked managers at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft how they’d feel about two candidates, both 24, with equal ability, one who’d tried to start a startup that tanked, and another who’d spent the two years since college working as a developer at a big company. Every one responded that they’d prefer the guy who’d tried to start his own company. Zod Nazem, who’s in charge of engineering at Yahoo, said:</p>
<pre><code>I actually put more value on the guy with the failed startup. And you can quote me! *
</code></pre>
<p>[Hiring</a> is Obsolete](<a href=“Paul Graham”>Hiring is Obsolete)</p>
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<p>In your case, you knew your post was not relevant to any part of the thread at all, and you posted it anyway. In contrast, everything that I have ever posted is something that I believed was relevant to some part of the thread. You may disagree with what we should believe to be relevant to the thread, but I can genuinely tell you that I believed it.</p>
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<p>To be clear, Silicon Valley also has plenty of physical-product innovation as well. As an example, a vast litany of advanced materials startups has been fostered, in conjunction with the renewable energy boom (photovoltaics, advanced batteries, fuel cells, and the like). Silicon Valley is a world-leading cluster for biotechnology and biochemical engineering. Tesla Motors, perhaps the most exciting automotive startup in decades, is headquartered in Palo Alto and the Tesla Factory is the old GM/Toyota NUMMI manufacturing plant in Fremont. </p>
<p>And besides, nobody said that you must go to SV, although it is the world’s leading innovation dynamo in the world. Plenty of tech startups are located in the Boston area, Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, Austin, and the WashingtonDC/Northern-Virginia. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also tend to be amongst the most desirable places to live.</p>
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<p>Yet interestingly, that very same unmeritocratic, seniority and politics-driven government that also managed to produce the Internet and the GPS system - meaning not just the basic research that produced the foundational knowledge necessary to create those systems, but the actual operational systems themselves. </p>
<p>The example of the Internet is especially instructive because the supposedly highly efficient private sector did produce numerous proprietary such as CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, and Playnet - all of which either failed utterly in the face of competition of the Internet, or survived only by interfacing and adapting to the Internet. {MSN quickly became a pure Web portal and then later a news site, while Q-Link changed its name to AOL, a key selling point of which was access to the Internet. </p>
<p>I think it’s safe to say that the Internet is perhaps the most important technology development in the world in our lifetimes and we have to give credit to the government for building it.</p>