<p>oldfort, I really hope medicine never becomes “all about money.” My husband’s grandfather was a physician in the first half of the 20th century. Lots of tales from MIL of her dad accepting food or whatever a family could afford,house calls, getting extra gas during the war even though there was rationing so he could visit patients. We’re a long way from that kind of medicine but I really hope that kids going into medicine these days are not going to base things only on money. As cobrat said, it would be very difficult for any premed or engineer to get through if the only motivation was money.</p>
<p>Many engineering majors start their careers in engineering then go back to get their MBAs and/or move into upper management where the real money is to be had. That is what many of our friends have done. My dh is an engineer and owns a successful design/manufacturing firm. My son is planning on majoring in engineering at Cornell and eventually plans on getting his MBA.</p>
<p>There’s other things about engineering that somehow never make it to the news…</p>
<ul>
<li>serious ageism in most companies; the moment one approaches the ‘wrong’ age, one might as well be wearing a target</li>
<li>equally serious family-ism, that is, companies frowning upon any resemblance of family life outside work; kids sick? too bad…</li>
<li>outsourcing (self explanatory)</li>
<li>lack of respect to individual contributions; aka LEGO teams where everyone is believed to be interchangeable</li>
<li>lack of training and development funding and time</li>
<li>serious lack of rewarding career paths for practicing engineers</li>
<li>cut-throat competition instead of cooperation</li>
</ul>
<p>I somehow doubt Introduction to Engineering 101 teaches any of the above…</p>
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<p>This has my niece rethinking her career in engineering. She has UG and Masters from top 20 schools and has worked 5 yrs. for large company in silicon valley. She has been team leader on several projects and more than once had to seek advice from upper management due to insubordination and exclusion by male “team” members. Her impression and ours too is that much of this resulted from a cultural aversion to accepting a woman as the leader of the group.</p>
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<p>Before 2008…as long as one attended schools in the first tier or a lower-tiered school that’s strongly recruited in the local geographic region…unless that region happens to be NYC or other places where there’s an avalanche of T-14 grads clamoring to work there. </p>
<p>Friend attended what was a respectable regional school…except that region happened to be NYC and he graduated in 2008…right into the downturn.</p>
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<p>The ugly office political stuff is unlikely to be unique to engineering. Of course, it is probably worse where the choice of employers is few and declining due to decline of the local industry or economy.</p>
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<p>Your D’s are off, the list.</p>
<p>I come from family with 4 generations of engineers. Not one of these people stayed a “practicing” engineer for very long. They’re all in upper management after quickly discovering that despite their years of very hard work in college, they were still making less than the finance guys. MAKING widgets wasn’t what was driving companies - it was how to make those widgets PROFITABLE that was driving companies. Just a few years out of college, they were studying (at night or on their own) business, finance, administration. My brother grumbled that in retrospect, he should have gone into business as an undergraduate - played more and studied less - because that’s what propelled him into making real money. Yes, he started out with an OK salary, but he was quickly outearned by his business/finance buddies who barely passed calculus in college. (Or so he says.) Maybe this is something peculiar to our country, but it does seem that engineers – who work so hard in college – aren’t awarded much in the way of glory or lucre in the overall scheme of the American corporation.</p>
<p>MD=memorization of a lot of facts.
With computerization, MD=an access-er of data
A specialist=an accsess-er with a memory stick.
A surgeon=an athlete with extremely fine eye-hand coordination and quick access to 3D memory.</p>
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<p>There is probably observational bias here. Only a few people (of whatever background, engineering, business, or otherwise) make it into upper management.</p>
<p>I imagine that public schools offer the engineering opportunity to all that make first admissions. </p>
<p>DS’s engineering school started with ~100 freshman and ended with ~90 graduating.</p>
<p>People, people, will make more money than those who they manage.</p>
<p>LongPrime - need to watch what I post here, or Ds will be off everyone’s list.</p>
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<p>I am not so sure - from my experience, of course, in a large fishbowl, hanky-panky can be tolerated because someone will leave the company without having to deal with the problem. In a smaller fishbowl, there’s no anonymity even between companies, and hanky-panky is less likely to be tolerated. </p>
<p>The part about competition is also along the same lines - in a large fishbowl, when someone gets fed up, they pack up and leave for the company across the street - in a small fishbowl, if the flexibility is not there, and careers are at stake, people learn to cooperate more. </p>
<p>I’ve seen my company versus the likes of Intel (where nearly all my graduating class ended up). No comparison. My boss expects me to spend time helping someone else. I’m not so sure my friends in Beaverton would have the same expectation.</p>
<p>My wife has changed jobs more times than I can remember, and eventually, it’s a musical chairs game. She has run into people from previous jobs, as have I. People even come back. People talk…</p>
<p>We’re talking million people cities here, with a decent technology industry base, not one-company-towns with no choice whatsoever. It would be unthinkable for today’s engineers to expect 20-30 year careers in the same company, but we’ve done it and are quite successful…</p>
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<p>Living as an embedded working stiff among the elite, I am not quite pleased to report that while few in numbers, upper management people earn serious money with their dinky MBA’s. It is very hard to accept the fact that my wife and I spent 25+ years in college earning a total of 7 STEM degrees and are handily out-earned by (I kid you not) the “regional sales manager for the company that makes the little plastic cups that you put condiments in at restaurants”. We are outright eclipsed by regional or district managers at places like Sears or JC Penney (I’ve had both as neighbors). </p>
<p>Larger companies create incredible amounts of ‘upper management’ and when layoffs happen, these layers are largely immune. Observational bias or not, a sales director for a local pharma company with a dinky MBA from the local flagship should not be earning the same as a senior discovery pharma chemist with a post-doc or two and twice the years of service. Both are neighbors…</p>
<p>Maybe I should offer a room or two for rent to engineering students to demotivate them from anything other than sales, lawyering, and orthodontics…</p>
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<p>Some people love the math, science and the idea of building things.
Engineering pay is decent and work conditions are often quite good.
Some also have the chance to strike it rich on stock options or in
starting their own companies.</p>
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<p>It is nice to have a CEO and management chain that are all engineers.</p>
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<p>Definitely agree - why spend the rest of your life doing something
that you don’t love? I suppose at some level of money, people do that
but I don’t think that engineering salaries are that level of money.
Outside of the tech bubble that is.</p>
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<p>Yes, it’s really nice when your boss to your CEO has an idea of what
you actually do. My manager’s manager told me that our VP reads our
status reports and appreciates the work that we do.</p>
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<p>My manager is around 63. His manager looks to be in his late 50s
or early 60s. I work with people that are past retirement age. You
don’t have to retire here when you reach that age.</p>
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<p>We have incredibly flexible schedules. Some people work in other
states and countries. Many employees come into the office once a week
or once a month. They work from home or local cafes. My manager was a
workaholic and missed a lot of time with his son growing up and now
encourages us to take care of our family stuff.</p>
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<p>Yup, some of our new hires are in other countries.</p>
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<p>That’s up to your management chain and comes down to people. Does
your manager value you? It’s different from manager to manager.</p>
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<p>In general, the model is learn it on your own. Kids coming out of
college understand that. They use cheap or free tools and
documentation and support are often awful and there are bugs and
design issues that you have to figure out and work around. My son has
complained about these issues and I’ve just told him that free
products often don’t have a lot of money available for the niceties
that we used to get from supported products that used to cost five and
six figures. But you adapt.</p>
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<p>I think that’s something that you have to work out with your manager.
I’ve seen many engineers work the promotion path and many that we’re
happy with just doing what they were doing. It helps to pick a company
or organization with good growth potential, the best being at
startups where there are always jobs that are going left undone.</p>
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<p>Nature of man stuff. You have to be able to navigate the politics of
any organiation.</p>
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<p>Mom or dad talking about it at the dinner table for 15 years might
be a better teacher.</p>
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<p>Not every kid has that advantage.</p>
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<p>That’s why engineering can often run in families.</p>
<p>If you can’t get it from mom or dad, then you should find others that can talk to you about it.</p>
<p>My civil engineering professor told us senior year (1978), “You are engineers, you will make a comfortable living, but you will not be rich. However, there is a way if you follow my advice; Marry Money.”</p>
<p>Based on table discussions with two engineer parents neither of my kids wanted to touch engineering with a 20 foot pole, even though I bring home all kinds of cool gadgets and Tiger mom gets to work for a worldwide renowned company doing equally cool stuff. Interestingly enough, I have lots of dual engineer friends and few of their kids end up in engineering… Most go for medicine etc…</p>
<p>The other thing is that the environment where an engineer practices varies wildly from company to company - stuff that BCEagle’s company accepts for normal would not fly where I am (use of open software tools with bugs… tho our products are Linux-based :-)). This wild variation causes the merry-go-round musical chair syndrome whereas everyone quits every couple years for trivial things, works another place for 2-3, then repeat as needed. Works great as long as you make money yet don’t get to build a career.</p>