<p>Does any engineer out there wish they could, or is trying to, switch into the financial consulting sector?</p>
<p>Has any engineer become dissatisfied with the average pay?</p>
<p>I see many people on the engineering forums heavily engaged on the financial consulting forums.</p>
<p>Check out this thread:
[Prestige</a> of Engineers](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/430390-prestige-engineers.html"]Prestige”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/430390-prestige-engineers.html)</p>
<p>I, for one, do not regret getting an engineering degree. I do, however, regret chasing after being an engineer. Were I to do it over I would have gotten my degree and after a couple of years in industry would have gone to business school. I am getting my MBA now, after 8 years. So, apart from the 6 years I spent working my butt off for a future of mediocre career satisfaction, I am right on track. Still, many engineers find greater success and job satisfation than I have.</p>
<p>I’m sure plenty of engineers become dissatisfied with their work and pay. I imagine many of them are people that became engineers in school because they figured they’d get a stable career with good income and not because they had a true passion for what they were doing (not that there’s anything wrong with that).</p>
<p>Many of my friends in undergrad did engineering just for the reason that financial companies liked technical majors and would often see that as a bigger bonus than a non-technical degree.</p>
<p>Well, sure. It makes me a little irritated when I see my lawyer friends starting out at three times my salary, with a three-year post-grad degree that earns them doctoral stripes. It irks me.</p>
<p>I regret that I tried to go for prestige. I went to Illinois, wooed by their number-one ranking, for two years and got my masters, but it nearly killed my will to continue in engineering… Way too little interaction between grad students, way too much middle-of-a-cornfield. I went to California to be a structural failure analyst with my dream firm, only to get stuck working under a completely demoralizing boss, who also nearly killed my will to continue in engineering. I regret that, too… the office is tanking at 40% turnover in the past year and no new hires.</p>
<p>I finally decided it would be a good idea to go for happiness and moved back to Texas to work for the firm that’s put most of the recently-built NFL stadia on the map, and am currently working on a massive expansion for one of the hospitals in the Texas Med Center. The best thing about this place is that there’s a lot of teamwork here, and a lot of emphasis on learning. We just moved into a beautiful new office downtown, and my coworkers are all really close. The hours are a LOT longer than they were at my old firm, but nobody really minds.</p>
<p>The pay… It’s a lot better than most engineers get. One year out of grad school and I’m making mid-sixties… Not bad. I’m never going to make millions and millions of dollars, but that’s not what I want. Sometimes the work gets boring (beam after beam after beam after beam for a few months…) but it’s such a rush to be working on the coolest buildings going up, and to be one of <em>six</em> working on a project… My project manager was one of a team of five or six who designed the University of Phoenix Stadium, where the Superbowl was held on Sunday. <em>That</em> is <em>cool</em>.</p>
<p>It took me a while to figure out what I wanted… I want a steady stream of amazing projects that are really exciting and complicated to work on. I want a bunch of positive, upbeat coworkers who are just as excited to work on the projects we get as I am. I want a supportive learning environment, where everyone recognizes that we are <em>all</em> still learning new things, every day. I want adequate compensation (I won’t have a mansion, but I will have a very nice house some day… which is fine, because I don’t want a house where you can’t yell at one end of the house and not have someone on the other end hear you. Not big on intercom systems…!).</p>
<p>I’ll continue to wonder what it’d be like to make a pile of money. I’ll continue to wonder whether I’d rather be in aerospace engineering, like I nearly went into this last time around (got an offer from Boeing to work on manned spacecraft… and turned it down. I still think I made the right decision, for me), and I’ll continue to wonder whether or not I’d like to just chuck the whole thing and go for something entirely different from engineering, but that’s all just life.</p>
<p>I work with a really exciting team. I know I have passion for this. I don’t have passion for shuffling money from column A to column B… I find building stadiums and skyscrapers to be much more real to me, and much more enjoyable in the long run. Ultimately, now that I’ve ended up where I am now, no regrets. Some musings, some wonderings about whether or not there’s anything else out there that might provide more flexibility, or more income, or more excitement, but I always tend to land on structural design or forensics. It’s a great field, and most importantly, I really like it.</p>
<p>Do whatever it is that <em>you</em> feel is right for <em>you</em>.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I suspect that as well. I’d be interested in knowing if there’s ever been a study done about why students chose to major in engineering. Quite a few of my friends who were majoring in engineering wanted a high salary. Engineer’s salaries <em>are</em> high, but it’s not on the same level as doctors and lawyers.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To be honest, it only bothers me a little. I have a friend who was working at a big New York law firm as a summer associate and he was living in a $4000 per month apartment with a roommate. The flip side is that he never got to enjoy it since he went to work early everyday and came home late every night. It’s the same in the financial consulting and investment banking field as well, though if you do well, you can have a very early retirement. </p>
<p>As for me, I’ll be finishing up grad school this May and starting work soon after, and I have absolutely no regrets. For my position, the salary is typically in the high 50s, lower 60s to start off, which is plenty, even in a high cost of living area like NYC. One of my friends (also in NYC) has a similar salary and he considers himself rich, so it all depends on your expectations and lifestyle really. If you want three sports cars, then it’s probably not going to be enough, but if you don’t spend money frivolously, then you’ll be just fine.</p>
<p>I’m just curious, what engineering field are you in that a Ph.D. is around $60k a year? That seems a bit on the low side compared to most. =/</p>
<p>I’m doing a one year MS program in civil engineering (no thesis), specifically construction management. Even if I were to pursue a PhD, the difference wouldn’t be significant though, since this field is very practical, and what you gain in a doctorate program will never see the light of day once you start working.</p>
<p>Isn’t engineering suppose to be more fun than most other majors? I don’t get it. I thought that was one of the draws in majoring in one.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, actually, no, it’s not fun, relative to many other majors. Not at all. In fact, it’s quite painful and the pain serves to drive many people away from engineering.</p>
<p>This actually gets to what I see as one of the core problems of the engineering major. Generally speaking, while the material taught in an engineering curriculum can indeed be very fun to learn, the fact is, there is too much of it and you are forced to learn it whether you want to or not. It’s that relentless pressure that makes it so painful. </p>
<p>Contrast that with other majors where the workload is relatively mellow and where you don’t really have to work hard throughout the entire semester (i.e. in which you really can catch up by just working very hard at the end), and hence you have large amounts of flexible free time to enjoy life. In engineering, not so much. You are forced to learn the material at a steady pace whether you want to or not. Whether you’re sick, whether you’ve find other things that you want to spend time on (i.e. a part-time job, an extracurricular, whatever), it doesn’t matter: you still have to keep pace. If you don’t, engineering has no compunction about flunking you out. </p>
<p>I think that many engineering students find that the most difficult part of their studies is to be stuck studying and knowing that their non-engineering friends are enjoying life. </p>
<p>But that’s not necessarily to say that studying engineering is bad. See below. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This I agree with completely. The studying of engineering, for all its pain, still has its virtues. You do learn a highly disciplined and rigorous method of thinking and that is valuable whatever it is you eventually decide to pursue in a career. The method is painful to learn, but you do learn it. Hence, despite its caveats, I still support the choice of engineering as a college major. </p>
<p>However, the choice of engineering as a career is a different question. That, frankly, I am far less enthusiastic about, particularly if we’re talking about working as an engineer at a large and traditional tech firm. Simply put, I believe engineers at those firms are not being paid commensurately for the value that they produce. Aibarr alluded to one such feature: why exactly are top lawyers paid so much more than are top engineers, when the fact is, lawyers don’t create economic value but engineers do? (Lawyers serve to divvy up value that others create, but I doubt that lawyers actually *create *value by themselves). </p>
<p>But what I would say is this. I am far far more optimistic about the notion of working as an engineer for a startup, or even founding your own. Rare indeed do I find an engineer who worked at a startup - even if it failed - and who regretted the experience and wished he had instead worked at a large firm. Startup firms seem to offer significantly greater control and dignity over your work for engineers than do most traditional large firms. The possibility of an immense payoff also exists. What’s fair is fair: if you build a project that generates immense economic value, then you deserve to capture some of that value. The original engineering teams at Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Intel, Yahoo, etc. who stuck around to the IPO all got filthy rich, and that’s exactly the way it ought to be. They generated immense economic value, and so it’s entirely fair that they become rich.</p>
<p>1) I don’t regret engineering in the slightest. It’s one of the few majors that is a true accomplishment. Simply put, I don’t have nearly the same level of respect for other majors as I do engineering.
2) I don’t regret being an engineer. It’s a job that has fully met my initial expectations. Above average pay, and I’m only 22. My options for grad school (law, mba, engineering) are all still open.</p>
<p>Engineering was <em>difficult</em>, but the fact that you consider it to be <em>painful</em> is probably why you didn’t stay in engineering… Many of us find engineering to be a ridiculous amount of fun, and the theory that we have to learn to support our knowledge of engineering is one of the things that we just have to do in order to get to what we love. Same thing as music majors having to take theory courses in order to get to be a freelance violinist when they go out into the real world.</p>
<p>It does irk me that as engineers, we aren’t paid what we’re worth. (And I’d like to say that the fact that lawyers and bankers work ridiculous hours and don’t have time to spend their money makes me feel better, but I put in 60 hours this week and don’t particularly feel like I’m in any better boat than they are! And honestly, I begrudge them the doctoral stripes far more than the pay. 
) Just because I’m a little irked, though, doesn’t mean that I look out our window at work downtown, from the office space in the skyscraper that our firm designed, down at the two professional sports arenas that our firm designed, to my computer models of the most complex elevated pedestrian walkway in the <em>world</em>… that I’m designing… and think that it wasn’t for a moment worth it. I would never turn to another field. At the end of the day, I have something tangible that I can say <em>I</em> designed-- a place that will endure; that people will live in, work in, worship in, heal in, cheer in-- that will last far longer than my own personal compensation.</p>
<p>And at age 26, I still have money left over for a plasma TV and Lexus. My husband’s in our living room shooting terrorists on our Wii. It’s not like we’re hurting, here, and structurals are paid less than most engineers. It’s a good life! I get to do something I love, and I’m lucky enough to be able to make a pretty good living doing it. We’re never gonna have a mansion and a garage full of Bentleys, but it’s not what we want.</p>
<p>If you don’t love engineering, don’t do it. Do what you love. If you hate your very existence, money’s not going to make it all better…</p>
<p>Well in the end I guess it’s usually about money. And I’d say I would love to do what I love, and engineering is a more interesting subject to learn than say business or economics since you are learning about how materials work and how to use them am I right? But I hear lots of engineers have problems with some of the classes haha, I guess they seem to get through it together. I’m alright though, I don’t need to do something exciting in my life. But it’d be cool to get that kind of respect. There is doing something you love to do I guess, but that means I’ll have to spend another 3-4 years doing it, it’s basically like starting from scratch and being I don’t know, seeing younger kids passing me by haha.</p>
<p>There’ll always be younger kids passing by you, starting around college and going on for the rest of your life… It’s kind of one of those facts of life. Don’t give up on doing something you love just because you think you’ll get left behind! It’ll be periodically awkward for a couple of years, but those couple of years are a lot shorter than all those years that you’d be doing a job that you don’t like…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think you just actually inadvertently touched on one of the problems in engineering: that there is a rather large difference between an engineering curriculum and an engineering job, and that, simply put, there are many topics within an engineering curriculum that are not only painful to learn, but more importantly that you simply don’t need to know to just do the job. </p>
<p>Take the history of Apple. One might say that Steve Jobs isn’t a real engineer (although I believe he is). But I think nobody can accuse Steve Wozniak of not being a real engineer, for he personally designed the groundbreaking Apple I and the monster-selling Apple II. Yet neither of the 2 Steve’s had graduated from college at the time. But that didn’t stop them from developing some of the most important innovations in the history of the computer industry. Imagine how different the technology industry would be if the 2 Steve’s were required to take a bunch of theory courses before they were actually allowed to do real engineering work. </p>
<p>Or take Wayne Rosing. He was the Director of Engineering and Apple and then the long-time head of Engineering at Google. Yet he never graduated from college. </p>
<p>And of course you can talk about Mr. Gates himself. As Paul Graham put it:</p>
<p>*…I can’t imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He’d have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he’d been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.</p>
<p>And yes, while it is probably true that you’ll learn some valuable things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years before starting your own, you’d learn a thing or two running your own company during that time too.</p>
<p>The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I’m supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I’m 23? That’s four years. That’s more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.</p>
<p>And he’d be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we’re suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn’t have been better for him.*</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html[/url]”>Paul Graham;
<p>In fact, your discussion of music majors being forced to learn theory before they get to be real violinists precisely illustrates my point. Many of the most brilliant violinists in the world also never went to college at all. The violin genius prodigy Anne-Sophie Mutter never went to college. By age 13, she had been invited to the Berlin Philharmonic. Or, if you’re willing to look at the arts in general, the truth is, many leading artists (whether in music, visual arts, literature etc.) studied relatively little formal education in theory and certainly most of them never completed actual degrees in music, art, or literature. Stevie Wonder has been one of the most important musical innovators in recent history. He never went to college. Joseph Brodsky was a completely self-taught poet who eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature and became the US Poet Laureate. Similarly, Ernest Hemingway never went to college at all, and his theoretical writing education - such as it was - consisted of little more than his experience as a newspaper journalist. </p>
<p>What I am saying is that there is a lot of engineering theory that you are forced to learn within an engineering major that, frankly, you don’t really need to know, and important engineering innovations can and are made by people who don’t know this theory and don’t need to know it. Hence, much of that theory simply serves as an artificial obstacle that hinders people from being able to get to the interesting part of engineering.</p>
<p>Sakky, your post has two ideas.</p>
<p>1) Engineering curriculum should be more practical - Agreed.</p>
<p>2) That sometimes it’s better to drop out than get the degree - Disagree.
There are VERY few situations where it’s beneficial to drop out before getting the degree. No one records the losers, only the winners.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Uh, no, I believe you’ve drawn a dichotomy that doesn’t really exist. </p>
<p>You talk about losers and winners, implying that those who drop out of college to launch a new idea that fails are ‘losers’. But why so? If your idea fails, so what? Then you just go back to school. Sure, you probably lost some money and some time. Big deal. The experience that you got from trying a new idea, even it fails, is almost certainly worth it because now you know what doesn’t work, and that will make you smarter in whatever it is you end up doing. </p>
<p>In the case of Bill Gates, let’s say that Microsoft had never landed any of the PC programming language contracts that got the company off the ground. So what? Gates would have just gone back to Harvard. At least he would have tried. </p>
<p>What I am saying is this. If you’re a student, and you already have an idea that you want to try, the ‘cost’ of doing so and failing is quite small. Honestly, what do you really lose? The worst thing that will happen to you is that you’ll be young and broke. Yet the fact is, most young people are broke.</p>
<p>I happen to know a bunch of guys who dropped out of MIT to start companies that failed. Now they’re all back at MIT. Heck, one of them was recently talking about dropping out again because he has another idea. I see nothing wrong with that.</p>
<p>You lose some money & time? Big deal?</p>
<p>1) Do we really need to get into a debate about how important time and money are? I’d reckon they are the two most important “resources” out there. So yeah, when you lose time & money you are losing relative to what would have happened.</p>
<p>2) We should be looking at the expected value of dropping out and starting your own company. I’d reckon that’s also highly negative. We all know the stats on new business.</p>
<p>3) And speak for yourself, someone on track with an engineering degree is generally not young and broke. In fact, they’d likely be in the top 5% looking at cash flow and net worth relative to age cohort.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you want to get into an economic analysis, I think it has been shown that founding/joining a startup is, on average, one of the most lucrative financial choices you can make. That is, the average startup employee will make more , on average, than a comparable employee elsewhere.</p>
<p>Of course, the difference is that the variance in earnings is very large. In other words, for every 1 startup employee who ends up making a million in a year (i.e. from stock options), 9 will make zero. But that still means that the average person will make $100,000 a year. That’s how the numbers shake out. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Again, see above. The expected value is almost certainly strongly positive. Google and Microsoft alone can compensate for numerous failures. </p>
<p>Look, I agree, the vast majority will fail. But the few that succeed are so successful that they easily compensate for all the failures. Think of it this way. Bill Gates is worth about $60 billion. Hence, even if 1000 other people tried to become Bill Gates and failed (hence, having zero net worth), all of them put together still made an average net worth of * $60 million *. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh really? Not young? So what exactly is the age of the average engineering bachelor’s degree recipient? Almost certainly in the early 20’s, right? That seems pretty young to me.</p>
<p>As far as broke - again, yes, frankly, they are broke. Note, the notion of comparing them to their age cohort is meaningless - that entire age cohort is basically broke. In fact, that’s precisely my point - most young people are broke regardless of what degree they have or what they are doing. Most people in their early 20’s are paying off their student debt, and hence probably have net negative worth.</p>
<p>In fact, that dovetails nicely with what I discussed above. Startups are highly lucrative on an expected value standpoint. The problem is that they are risky. But it is PRECISELY when you are young is when you should be taking risk, because that is the time in your life when you are most able to take that risk. If you found a failed startup when you’re 40 with a mortgage and a family to take care of, that could be a serious problem. Far better to do that when you’re young and you have no such responsibilities, and you’re still used to living the life of poverty of a student. </p>
<p>What you seem to be saying is that nobody should ever join startups PERIOD, regardless of their age, because they’re risky regardless of how old you are. Well, considering that entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of the US economy, that is indeed a very strong stance to take.</p>
<p>1 & 2) One reason I hate average statistics. Look at median (which I should have stated in my argument initially). The median position is not lucrative. In fact, I’d reckon one has to be at the 80th-90th percentile before you actually start breaking even.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I said “not young and broke”. You read “not young or broke”.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I guess we should start getting specific. Does an income of 1M/year but zero assets qualify someone as broke?</p>
<p>An engineer coming out of school making 65K/year does not qualify as broke for me (I doubt many would disagree with that opinion). Really, the definition of someone’s financial well being tied solely to assets is ridiculous.</p>
<p>
No, I’m saying someone should get the degree first. As our economy becomes more educationally stratified, being without a degree is a dangerous position.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Uh, no, the median position is NOT meaningful. After all, you brought up the notion of ‘expected value’. Expected value is, by definition, the AVERAGE. The expected value of entrepreneurship is high, because like I said, the winners win so much as to compensate for all of the losers. </p>
<p>What YOU are talking about with regards to the median is risk. And that’s exactly what I am talking about too: that the best time to take risk is when you are young. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, strictly speaking, yes, they are broke. Note, they won’t be broke for long. But at that moment in time, they are broke. </p>
<p>But besides, this is not germane to the point of contention anyway. The point is, when you’re young, you can afford to take risks. If you join a startup (or create your own) when you’re young, and it fails, you have the rest of your life to make up the difference. But at least you tried. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And I am saying that these positions are not exclusive of each other. If you have an idea while you’re still a student, there is very little cost in dropping out to try the idea out. If the idea fails, you just go right back to school and get that degree. Furthermore, you’re probably going to know in a relatively short period of time (i.e. a year) whether your idea is gaining traction or is just a waste of time. But if your idea succeeds, then you won’t need the degree.</p>
<p>In other words, dropping out of school for a startup doesn’t mean that you’re forgoing a degree forever. You always have the option of going back. Nobody says that you have to go through school all the way straight through. Plenty of people withdraw and then return. Hence, the cost of trying out an idea is quite low.</p>