<p>I’m sure there are many people who enjoy their jobs, to some degree. I don’t really know of many who like their jobs THAT much that they wake up in the morning and cannot wait to go into work. Also, I was not talking about all engineering jobs, I was talking about the ones that are bad.</p>
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Yes, but accounting seems like a secure route to a management or at least a high position with 10-15 years of experience.</p>
<p>^ Can I get a confirmation on that?</p>
<p>With many years of experience. The best most successful business people/managers for tech companies are engineers who’ve grown into the position.</p>
<p>EDIT:
From my very limited experience/observation, accounting seems to be a highly vocational major. The most serious business-people seem to be math majors, engineers, physicists, etc. Or at least the ones that most quickly move up the business hierarchy. </p>
<p>Anybody have an opinion in the {new?} field of Financial Engineering?</p>
<p><quote>Anybody have an opinion in the {new?} field of Financial Engineering?</quote></p>
<p>Financial engineers usually work as Quants and are recruited for trading desks and hedge funds. Think of it as a mix of Applied Math (probability/statistics/stochastic calculus) with Finance and Computer Science. Needless to say the market is rough.</p>
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<p>Well, let’s see. Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen never even graduated from college at all. Current CEO Steve Ballmer has a degree in applied math. </p>
<p>Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison never graduated from college at all. Oracle co-President Safra Catz earned in bachelor’s from Wharton, a law degree from UPenn, and all of her work experience prior to Oracle was in investment banking. Oracle’s other co-President, Charles Phillips, does have a bachelor’s in CS, but then joined the Marine Corps, then earned graduate law and business degrees, and then became an investment banker, rising to Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. </p>
<p>IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano has a bachelor’s degree in history. </p>
<p>HP CEO Mark Hurd has a bachelor’s in business. </p>
<p>Michael Dell and Steve Jobs never even graduated from college at all. Steve Wozniak did, but only years into a comfortable retirement after founding Apple. </p>
<p>Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskowitz never graduated from Harvard at all. The other co-founder, Chris Hughes, did graduate from Harvard, but with a concentration in history and literature. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s in economics and an MBA and spent a year at Mckinsey. Former Facebook VP of Product Management and current GP at Benchmark Capital Matt Cohler, has a BA in (I think) interdisciplinary studies from Yale. </p>
<p>Intel CEO Paul Otellini has a bachelor’s degree in economics and an MBA from Berkeley Haas. </p>
<p>Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone all dropped out of college. </p>
<p>Now, don’t get me wrong. An engineering degree is a solid pathway towards garnering a decent and relatively high paying technical job right after college. The problem is that most engineers will not enjoy high-quality and fast-paced opportunities for advancement into management. I wish they did. Sad but true.</p>
<p>Is comparing the job paths of CEOs from companies with (tens) of thousands of employees really the best way to talk about the typical career path for an engineer?</p>
<p>As of August, Facebook had less than 1000 employees. Twitter had less than 100.</p>
<p>But to your point, the real question then is, what is the career path of an engineer relative to the career path available otherwise? Put another way, if engineering was such a strong path into management, why do so many former engineers leave their jobs to earn full-time MBA’s? Seems to me that that’s because the MBA degree offers career opportunities that they would not enjoy had they just remained working as engineers. But that then begs the question: why didn’t their engineering employers offer those opportunities directly?</p>
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<p>I don’t know about that, although I suppose it depends on what each of us considers ‘cool’. Startup tech innovation, I would argue, is very cool, yet much of it is conducted by people who lack graduate degrees in engineering. Janus Friis, inventor of Skype, didn’t even graduate from high school. </p>
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<p>Well, to be fair, there are plenty of boring engineering jobs that consist of little more than recycling old solutions. The Cisco 2600XM router series is clearly obsolete; Cisco stopped selling that router series in June 2007. Yet Cisco is still obligated to provide engineering service and maintenance support to the existing installed base until 2012. Who really wants to support hardware that is so obsolete that the company hasn’t even been selling it for more than 2 years now?</p>
<p>Engineering firms should be providing interesting and innovative career opportunities for their engineers. Yet the fact is, many (probably most) don’t.</p>
<p>Sure an MBA offers job opportunities that a a BS in engineering does not, but a BS in engineering with an MBA gives you opportunities that a BS in business with an MBA does not. Of course, a business with MBA gives you advantages over engineering with MBA. It is all just dependent on the personal preferences of the person getting the degree. If you want to be in management in a technical company like Boeing or Ford or IBM, the best way is to have an engineering undergrad with and MBA. That doesn’t really include CEO positions, because those come from all over the place and involve almost as much luck as anything else.</p>
<p>Yet that still leaves open the question of why is the MBA so important? Why can’t the engineering degree/career provide the same opportunities as the MBA does?</p>
<p>I’m coming around to the idea that the true value of the MBA comes not from the curriculum - which is, frankly, relatively worthless - but from the branding and the networking. Many observers, myself included, see the MBA as little more than a 2-year social excursion attached to a mighty recruitment engine. Yet that begs the question why an engineering career can’t provide equivalent career options. Star engineers could and should be provided with the same fast track into top management as the MBA graduates.</p>
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<p>Agreed x100000</p>
<p>"Star engineers could and should be provided with the same fast track into top management as the MBA graduates. "</p>
<p>Unless they’re “triple integral gearheads”.</p>
<p>It sounds like some of you people need to learn how to be more easily entertained.</p>
<p>You know, there are lots of things a job can be, and boring probably isn’t the worst…</p>