<p>Alright so I'm extremely gifted in math/science, I'm an EECS major here in cal, and I currently (after 2 years) have a 3.97 technical GPA, w/ a 3.67 cumulative (includes humanities). I don't really see myself as much of a creative person, but I do learn technical subjects extremely well, and pretty fast, Do you think I will get stuck in a dead end engineering job?</p>
<p>Sakky,</p>
<p>I was referring to a specific question in which I was asked what should a match oriented person major in. I answered that question.</p>
<p>Honestly, these arguments against engineering only hold if you're at a top school or Ivy, which are the only schools that can access the more elite business jobs. If you aren't, engineering is probably a good bet.</p>
<p>I would think that attending UCB would imbue one with entrepreneurial spirit. So in that regard, being stuck in a dead end engineering job seems more like a self-inflicted condition.</p>
<p>why does one need to be stuck in a "dead end engineering job" just because one majored in engineering? i think that's one of the points Sakky was trying to make - i.e. just because you major in engineering doesn't mean you have to become an engineer - history has proven that engineering grads go on to pursue a versatile number of careers.</p>
<p>There's no dead end in engineering jobs, let's be positive. My guidance has it that a well rounded engineering combined with humanity education will position me well for elite job landing. That's said in top elite schools and Ivy's prospectus web pages. Of course I must work harder than people in economics and business in view of the material contents, but still the bottom line would be my GPA and activity record: resume. </p>
<p>I take up Slipper1234's view that acceding elite business jobs would require education at top schools or Ivy, but as a point of interest; would opportunity in elite business jobs be similar between inherently lower GPA engineering graduates and relatively higher econ and business grads? Assuming top schools and Ivy, and students work meaningfully hard, and mindful school job placement service in the picture. What's the evidence?</p>
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"Wrong again. You know nothing about today's salary structures and the demand for experienced engineers."</p>
<p>Anything to support your statement?
[/quote]
My salary. I work for a major US defense contractor. We don't hire foreign engineers much at all.</p>
<p>I think there is a lot of truth in the OP. I would not recommend engineering to my children. Some of the OPs bitterness may come from the profession not meeting expectations. Growing up, I knew families with a father that was an engineer. The mother stayed home. They had 5-8 kids, lived in a nice home, took nice vacations, etc. Think the Brady Bunch except Mike being an engineer rather than an architect. Today, unless the engineer is one of the few in management (most management jobs have been cut - except at defense contractors) that is not a tenured engineer's lifestyle.
But it is more a reflection of corporate America than the engineering profession. There are fewer management jobs. The few that exist are great. Their pay has grown tremendously, but not so for the individual contributor. Most corporations don't give pensions and benfits overall have been cut. Hours are longer because the same work is being done by fewer people. It is a result of international competition. </p>
<p>I am encouraging my kids to pursue something outside of Corporate America. Something where they have more control over their careers even if the pay is lower. I don't want them to pursue anything for the money, because there are no guarantees the money will be there and they could end up disappointed like the OP.</p>
<p>Certaintly that's the right message for your kids: not to pursue anything for the money but perhaps more noble intentions such as harnessing the forces of nature for the betterment of humanity, which is the analogous Hippocratic Oath for the engineering profession.</p>
<p>Then they could end up like me and myriad others who have found engineering to be a rewarding career.</p>
<p>wuut do u mean?</p>
<p>there r tons of industial eng. who go into Business Management....</p>
<p>ur theories apply mostly w/ Software eng.</p>
<p>I wish I could be an engineer, but I don't think my stale/uncreative mind can handle creating for the world..</p>
<p>"perhaps more noble intentions such as harnessing the forces of nature for the betterment of humanity"</p>
<p>Let's be realistic about the percent of engineering jobs that better humanity. Most engineers are in the corporate world - of course you can spin it that missles and bombs advance peace...etc. but the bottom line is that engineers work to increase the profits of the companies that employ them. On the other hand, consider teaching. A teacher 's primary focus is to educate. That is truly improving humanity.</p>
<p>This thread is valuable and timely for me personally because I am a HS senior thinking of applying for engineering major. I am a female and I know that my CR+W skills are far, far outweigh M skills (based on SAT), so I should be thinking of liberal arts major. But my dad is an engineer and he loves it. That had biased my decision, now I am having serious doubts.
I printed out OP's article and showed it to my dad for his opinion. He pretty much agreed with those points in a general sense, but he said for him it was worth getting into engineering because he truly enjoys technical work.<br>
Of course, I am really confused about what I should do. Time to read books on decision-making, I guess. :-)</p>
<p>@collegebound: your first two years of college you don't have to have a set path of study. In fact, mostly people change their major at least twice before they graduate. Engineering is somewhat difficult to transfer into, but you can still explore your options.</p>
<p>RockyRoad, thanks. My understanding is that one could transfer out of engineering more easily than transfer into it. If I am an undecided major, for instance, I may not be allowed to get into engineering after the sophomore year. Am I safe if I begin the journey with engineering but try to take other courses keeping an eye on the exit?</p>
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Assuming top schools and Ivy, and students work meaningfully hard, and mindful school job placement service in the picture. What's the evidence?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I suppose that the most compelling evidence is the sheer number of former engineering students at the top B-schools. Engineering degrees comprise only about 5% of all bachelor's degrees conferred in the US. However, people with engineering bachelor's degrees comprise about 20-40% of the incoming classes at the top business schools. </p>
<p>There are obviously many possible explanations for this. For example, engineering students may simply be harder working, on average, than non-engineering students. Or they get better jobs, which tends to lead to higher quality work experience. But this reasoning is irrelevant, as it doesn't matter why. The takehome point is that studying engineering does not seem to hurt you in terms of getting into the top B-schools. </p>
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I think there is a lot of truth in the OP. I would not recommend engineering to my children. Some of the OPs bitterness may come from the profession not meeting expectations.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think that is the real source of the bitterness - that expectations were just too high. But that's not really the fault of engineering. As a contrasting point, hardly anybody who gets a degree in Art History or Film Studies or some other relatively unmarketable humanities degree really expects to get a high-paying job right out of school. In fact, most people that I know who are majoring in these fields expects to end up with a low-paying, crappy job. So when they do get that low-paying, crappy job, they're not disappointed. Heck, I know quite a few of them who've found nothing better than working at the mall or working at Target or Walmart. Many of them, in fact, have told me that they wished they had gotten engineering degrees so that they could make an engineering salary. An engineering career may not be the greatest thing, but it's better than what they have right now. Their main saving grace is that they had years to prepare themselves psychologically for working a crappy job, as they knew full well that when they chose their major, they probably weren't going to get good jobs. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, apart from this psychological quirk of unrealistic expectations, I still say that the bachelor's degree in engineering is still a more useful and safer choice than the bachelor's degree in most other fields. Sure, you might get an engineering degree and still end up in a crappy job. But there are other fields in which you are PRACTICALLY GUARANTEED to end up in a crappy job. </p>
<p>
[quote]
But it is more a reflection of corporate America than the engineering profession. There are fewer management jobs. The few that exist are great. Their pay has grown tremendously, but not so for the individual contributor. Most corporations don't give pensions and benfits overall have been cut. Hours are longer because the same work is being done by fewer people. It is a result of international competition.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>But this part, I disagree with. There are probably actually MORE management jobs in the US, and that is actually a DIRECT consequence of outsourcing and international competition. After all, with outsourcing and international competition, you need managers to manage the outsourcing and to deal with the international competition. It is precisely the individual contributors who get hurt the most by international competition, because the truth is, the international workforce has more individual skills to contribute relative to management skills. Let's face it. There isn't much difference in productivity between an American factory worker and a foreign factory worker. But the US still tends to produce significantly better managers than foreign countries do. That's why most of the best business schools in the world are located in the US, and those that aren't American are mostly European (i.e. LBS, INSEAD, IMD). </p>
<p>I'll give you an example. I know a guy who got hired by Apple as an Operations Manager, to manage the Ipod component supply chain. The fact is, the Ipod is manufactured almost exclusively in Asia, particularly China. No Americans participate in the actual manufacturing and assembly-work in building Ipods. His job is to coordinate the entire sourcing, production and assembly process within Asia, and then to optimize the transportation and distribution of Ipods from Asia to retail outlets in the US (i.e. the Apple stores). If Apple didn't outsource Ipod production to Asia, then he wouldn't have a job. It should also be noted that this is a white guy who speaks nothing but English. Yet, he's flying to China this week in order to meet the current suppliers and tour their factories, and he'll be flying to Asia all the time. That's a pretty cool management job that he has. I wish I had a job that would constantly fly me to Asia.</p>
<p>But the point is, international competition doesn't destroy management jobs - if anything, it actually CREATES them, at least, relative to the number of individual contributor jobs out there. </p>
<p>Besides, international competition actually creates jobs overall through Schumpeterian economic growth. While I don't want to write a treatise on economic growth, the basic idea is that people always tend to find things to do with their money and time, and that act creates jobs. </p>
<p>For example, one of my friends is a highly successful aerobics/fitness instructor. She co-owns her own fitness center and I think she EASILY nets over 250k a year. But think about it - this job didn't even exist 50 years ago. You couldn't make a living, and you certainly couldn't get rich, teaching aerobics back in the early 20th century. The reason why this job can even exist in the first place is because of greater economic growth and wealth in the country, combined with lots of leisure time. As Americans became rich, they started to care about their health. You never see poor people in the Third World doing aerobics. They're more concerned with just surviving - they don't have time to be working out. By the same token, her friend is a glamour hairstylist in a tony part of Seattle who charges $200 a cut and has a LONG clientele list. That just goes to show you that when people have money, they're going to find something to spend it on. Poor people in the Third World would never dream of spending $200 on a haircut. But rich people certainly will.</p>
<p>FWIW, I personally doubt that all this will work out for citizens of the US as favorably as theory might suggest. Economic theory makes many assumptions (eg free markets) that don't always fully exist in practice.</p>
<p>IMO, by the time residents of the third world are wealthy enough to import tons of US goods, there won't be any US goods anymore for them to import. All factories will be in their own countries. All knowhow will come to be in their own countries (thanks partly to H1-B, and the fact that they've got the factories there). Theft of US intellectual property will continue, successfully. They will continue to protect their own industries from US encroachment, until their own products are actually better. The increasingly multi-national companies will let this happen to maximize their own agenda. While the US government watches as our domestic capability vanishes.</p>
<p>The foreign workers can come here, the melting pot, but there are cultural and ethnic barriers that will limit the flow of people in the other direction. So when all the tech jobs are in Asia, the Americans who want to do this work over there won't have much of a shot. They're needed now, but later they won't be.</p>
<p>If the wrong war comes around, the US may lose because they don't fully control their own means of industrial production anymore. Factories can be "nationalized" by the countries in which they reside. This national security aspect might prove critical.</p>
<p>Right now, the US sends mostly raw materials to China, and they send us back mostly finished goods. And China owns a ton of US debt. (Ownership of corporate america will follow suit, if it's indeed lagging now). This is pretty much the relationship profile of colonist vs colonizer.</p>
<p>It's pretty clear where the action is, globally. And where it isn't. I don't see this stopping at any time. Ever. We had a good thing going, for a long time, only because we were protecting it from the economists' so-called "perfect competition". But we let the cat out of the bag. For the benefit of multinational corporations, and the rest of the world. I have my doubts about the ultimate benefits to workers in the US.</p>
<p>
[quote]
FWIW, I personally doubt that all this will work out for citizens of the US as favorably as theory might suggest. Economic theory makes many assumptions (eg free markets) that don't always fully exist in practice.</p>
<p>IMO, by the time residents of the third world are wealthy enough to import tons of US goods, there won't be any US goods anymore for them to import. All factories will be in their own countries. All knowhow will come to be in their own countries (thanks partly to H1-B, and the fact that they've got the factories there). Theft of US intellectual property will continue, successfully. They will continue to protect their own industries from US encroachment, until their own products are actually better. The increasingly multi-national companies will let this happen to maximize their own agenda. While the US government watches as our domestic capability vanishes.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>First off, this is a highly nationalistic, almost mercantalistic view of international trade. The benefits of international trade do not necessarily require free trade or even fair trade, and certainly not trade of manufactured goods per se. All that is required to benefit from trade is that at least one side has free access to the other side's markets. Clearly, having free two-sided trade is even better, but even 'one-sided' trade is still beneficial on the aggregate.</p>
<p>I'll give you a purely domestic example. Think of, say, New York City. What tangible goods does NYC actually manufacture? Basically, nothing. Most of the factories that used to exist, even including the vaunted garment industry, moved out decades ago. Almost every single good that New Yorkers consume, whether it's food, consumer goods, electronics, cars, etc. - practically all of that is manufactured elsewhere. Manhattan in particular manufactures almost no goods at all. Everything that is in Manhattan is manufactured somewhere else. </p>
<p>But does that mean Manhattan is poor? Hardly. Heck, many parts of Manhattan are some of the richest places on Earth, despite the fact that if you performed a "trade deficit" analysis on Manhattan, you would come up with some huge negative figure. Heck, if you did a "trade deficit" analysis on any city in the world, you'd probably get a huge negative figure, as city dwellers tend to consume far more goods than they produce. </p>
<p>What cities tend to 'produce" are not manufactured goods, but rather are services. New York is king of financial services. New York is also strong in legal services, commerce/trade, high culture, media, tourism, advertising, etc. These are the economic "goods" that New York produces. These are high-value outputs, even though they aren't really "goods". Banks make more money than factories do, even though banks don't really produce any "goods". </p>
<p>Personally, I think that's the future of the US. More people will move into services. Like I said, the entire aerobics industry didn't even exist a few decades ago. Now, plenty of people make a living off teaching aerobics, and some entrepreneurial people can get rich from it. Or how about the whole industry of interior decorating - basically beautifying people's homes? This industry basically catered to only elite nobility back in the old days. Now, even middle-class people can hire their own interior decorator, and there are even college degree programs that teach interior decorating. </p>
<p>Look, I'm not trying to discount the pain that economic transitions may cause to individual people. What I am saying is that we shouldn't romanticize some golden era that never existed. Some of you seem to mythologize a time in years gone by when everybody supposedly had stable jobs with strong incomes. This is a myth. We should remember that those were also the days when discrimination against minorities and women in the workplace was still rampant. For example, it was only about 50 years ago when many banks, law firms, hospitals, and universities deliberately refused to hire Jews, when many labor unions deliberately refused to admit non-whites, and when most companies would never think of hiring women for any powerful role. I personally think that if anything is to blame for present-day economic dislocations, it's the job competition coming from minority gropus and women who were previously and deliberately excluded from most good jobs. </p>
<p>
[quote]
If the wrong war comes around, the US may lose because they don't fully control their own means of industrial production anymore. Factories can be "nationalized" by the countries in which they reside. This national security aspect might prove critical.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This is, to me, a HUGE red herring. In fact, US manufacturing, as calculated by output, has rarely if ever been stronger, both in terms of total manufactured goods GDP and in terms of the percentage of GDP output. Remember, this is GDP we're talking about here, which means production happening within the US by any firm (whether that firm is owned domestically or by foreigners). </p>
<p><a href="http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba456/%5B/url%5D">http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba456/</a></p>
<p>What has clearly happened is that manufacturing EMPLOYMENT has declined. But that's not the same thing as saying that manufacturing OUTPUT has declined. These are two entirely different things. Manufacturing output has increased even as employment has decreased because of ever-increasing levels of productivity, mostly from better technology. If a factory can produce the same output with fewer workers, isn't that better for the economy? Yet that is precisely what has happened.</p>
<p>As a historical example, in the mid 1800's, most Americans were farmers. Now, barely 2% of them are. Yet the US produces more food than ever. One could say that agricultural productivity has "destroyed" farming jobs. But in reality, what it really meant is that agricultural productivity freed up millions of people from the farms to work in factories, and that's what made the US the largest industrial power in the world, and that's what made the US a superpower. After all, where exactly were all these new US factories of the late 1800's going to find millions of workers, if not from the farms? They weren't going to appear out of thin air. In order for US manufacturing to rise, agricultural employment HAD to decline. If that didn't happen, then most Americans would still be farmers, and the US would be a poor, undeveloped country. </p>
<p>Which leads to another question - which is that why is it that so many people seem to care so much about foreign competition taking away jobs, but don't seem to mind when technology takes away jobs? Far far more jobs have been "destroyed" through technology than by foreign competition. How many travel agents have lost their jobs because of Expedia and Travelocity? How many flea markets and specialty collector's stores have gone bankrupt because of Ebay? How many encyclopedia salesmen have become unemployed because of Wikipedia? Heck, a few years ago, I had a job to install accounting and finance software for a company so that that company could lay off 75% of its accounting department. When the PC industry rose, everybody in the typewriter manufacturing business lost their jobs. Why is it OK for technology to "destroy" jobs, but not OK for foreign competition to "destroy" jobs? To me, that's just a form of downright bigotry. It's bad when a foreigner takes your job, but it's OK when a computer takes you job- why is that? At the end of the day, you still lost your job, so who cares who took it? But I guess it's easier to blame foreigners than to blame technology.</p>
<p>You talk about red herrings, then proceed to lob in the largest fish in the sea. Because problem #2 exists, we shouldn 't be concerned about., or discuss. problem #1? Please...</p>
<p>As for your red herring accusation, I sincerely hope you're right but my senses suggest otherwise. Everything I see these days says "made in China" on it.</p>
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[quote]
It's pretty clear where the action is, globally. And where it isn't. I don't see this stopping at any time. Ever. We had a good thing going, for a long time, only because we were protecting it from the economists' so-called "perfect competition". But we let the cat out of the bag. For the benefit of multinational corporations, and the rest of the world. I have my doubts about the ultimate benefits to workers in the US.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think it's fairly clear that the more protected industries in world history have done the least well. Mainland China for example, was extremely highly "protected" for many decades, and the net effect was to keep Chinese people in abject poverty. India had one of the most regulated economies on Earth until about a decade ago, and India also suffered from gut-wrenching poverty. </p>
<p>What often times tends to be forgotten is that foreign competition actually creates new markets through lower prices. Take my friend who has that job at Apple as an Operations Manager of the Ipod. Most (probably all) of the components of the Ipod are manufactured in Asia. But that serves to lower prices. If the Ipod was manufactured in the US, the cost of it would increase by several times, with the result that fewer people would buy it. Let's face it. If the Ipod cost $1000, very few people would buy it, and so it wouldn't be a successful product. But Apple would probably know that it wouldn't be a successful product at that price point, and so Apple probably wouldn't have launched it in the first place. But that would mean that all those Americans who are involved with the Ipod, including all the Ipod designers, marketers, and operations/supply-chain managers (like my friend) wouldn't have a job at all. Not only that, but Apple itself would be a far less successful company, which means that general employment at Apple (i.e. the finance department, HR, legal affairs, operations, sales, and so forth) would be lower. These people owe their jobs to the success of the Ipod, which in turn partly owes its success to the availability of cheap foreign labor. </p>
<p>The point is, while foreign competition may destroy some jobs, it also creates others through general market expansion. As another example, the reason why the Internet is so popular is because of the availability of cheap computer hardware, mostly manufactured in Asia. All the Americans who work at Internet companies basically owe their jobs to the fact that computers are cheap. All of the thousands of jobs at Google or Amazon or eBay or Yahoo (most of which are in the US) would not exist if PC's weren't cheap, because these companies themselves would not exist.</p>
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But I guess it's easier to blame foreigners than to blame technology.
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</p>
<p>That's exactly the reason.</p>
<p>When you only have a 10 second soundbite on CNN, you local or state legislator isn't going to blame an amorphous entity like the "Internet" as the enemy who stole local jobs when China and India are tangible poster children that people can readily identify.</p>