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<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>
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<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>