<p>I think anything can lead to many other job opportunities. Engineering is overrated.</p>
<p>
Not true, at all. There are plenty of lazy morons that graduate with engineering degrees and go on to get engineering jobs. Some of them will inevitably move up the corporate ladder and receive the associated pay raises. Engineering is not nearly as hard as most people make it out to be.</p>
<p>I work for a highly respected, well-known employer and a bunch of people I work with have masters degrees. I would hardly call them “the best” or “hardest working.” A few are pretty smart and do work hard, but the majority are average at best with a terrible work ethic.</p>
<p>I do think engineering is overrated, both in terms of difficulty and in terms of career benefits.</p>
<p>i am not challenging you or anything, i am just curious. What 4 year degree do you think sets you up better for advancement/ career opportunities? Business Administration?</p>
<p>IMHO, it’s more about matching the student to the career that’s right for him/her. So many people who are technically minded seem obsessed with getting a degree with “engineering” in the title that other technical degrees - mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and even things like computer science and materials science - are left behind.</p>
<p>And there are other things that set one up for a good career later on. Like you said, business degrees aren’t half bad. Accountants, managers, economists, etc. do pretty well for themselves, I should think. Pre-law, pre-vet, pre-pharm, and pre-med programs don’t have to be related to engineering at all, and those aren’t terrible jobs. If one is interested in politics, a good liberal arts degree wouldn’t even be a bad choice. Then there’s journalism, which is a whole other can of worms.</p>
<p>Surgeons, anesthesiologists, orthodontists, obstetricians and gynecologists, oral and maxillofacial surgeons, internists, prosthodontists, all other physicians and surgeons, family and general practitioners, chief executives, general dentists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, all other dentist specialities, podiatrists, lawyers, natural sciences managers, engineering managers, airplane pilots and copilots and flight engineers, petroleum engineers, computer and information systems managers, marketing managers, financial managers, sales managers, air traffic controllers - these are the top-paying professions.</p>
<p>Let’s consider how many of these require an engineering education, or would obviously benefit from an engineering education over, say, a non-engineering one:
- engineering manager
- airplane pilots and copilots and flight engineers
- petroleum engineers
- air-traffic controllers</p>
<p>That’s 4 of the top 25 professions. So what sort of preparation beats an engineering one? Well, what about natural science education?
- all of the surgeons, physicians, and dentists
- natural sciences managers
- computer and information systems managers</p>
<p>What’s left? Well, liberal arts, business, and social sciences:
- chief executives
- lawyers
- marketing managers
- financial managers
- sales managers</p>
<p>Hopefully, this has made the case that engineering is not the only choice leading to a good career.</p>
<p>Another interesting tidbit:</p>
<p>A lot of people don’t consider computer-related stuff to be engineering; in any event, CS doesn’t contain the word “engineering”, and is generally not considered as such.</p>
<p>Compare the computer field to the engineering field:</p>
<p>Computer (comp. scientists, database admins, soft. eng.'s, analysts, programmers, comp. & info. sys. managers)
2006:3,464,000
2016:4,313,000
Change: 25%</p>
<p>Engineering (all specialties, check the BLS OOH):
2006:1,512,000
2016:1,671,000
Change: 11%</p>
<p>The relative sizes of the industries boggles the mind. Based on these sorts of numbers, CS would seem to be a more career-oriented degree than engineering, at the least.</p>
<p>“Hopefully, this has made the case that engineering is not the only choice leading to a good career.”</p>
<p>Thanks Auburn, but I was talking about one 4 year degree that can provide better salary, advancement potential, and career opportunity than engineering. So that rules out all the medical professions you listed and law. I probably worded my original question poorly but could you stick with it and see if you could help enlighten me</p>
<p>sorry i posted ^ that before i saw your 2nd one.</p>
<p>but do CS majors make as much right out of college as engineers or have advancement/ diversification opportunities?</p>
<p>There are two tiers of CS majors. There’s people doing “real” CS coming up with new ideas and new products and there are people doing more technician stuff such as network administrators and programmer monkeys working at small companies making their fairly simple custom programs.</p>
<p>It’s similar to the difference between engineering and engineering technology degrees. One will get you out there making new products and the other will have you in more of a technician role.</p>
<p>Is Engineering overrated? Depends on how you are rating it. If you believe it is a Silver bullet(A magical Solution to quickly kill a horrible monster), you are rating it far higher than it deserves. With that being said, I don’t know if there are many professions in the US that are still Silver Bullets… </p>
<p>-Doctors are burdened with debt, need to go thru years of grueling residencies, and only really make more than an engineer if they specialize. They also have the prospect of significant changes coming in the US health system(thru Obama plan or later) that are very likely to lower salaries for most Doctors.
-Investment bankers are lucking to have jobs these days. If they are still employed, they aren’t paid too much because most of their salaries are bonuses.
-etc</p>
<p>Also, after working as engineer it is simply not true that…
</p>
<p>The average Corporate engineering job is a 40 to 50 hour a week deal with a few crunch times of 60 to 70 hours a week. Your managers and colleagues may even get a little annoyed if you work more than that. This is not bad at first, however it often gives little room for advancement. You can’t really work you way up. Often promotions are given on seniority in a organization.</p>
<p>Of course, working as an academic is going to be far far different…this is a different story.</p>
<p>wow. this thread has really become interesting. i guess a better question than the original “should engineers be paid more?” is “is engineering overrated?”</p>
<p>(assuming we are talking about lifestyle and upward mobility)</p>
<p>“Thanks Auburn, but I was talking about one 4 year degree that can provide better salary, advancement potential, and career opportunity than engineering. So that rules out all the medical professions you listed and law.”</p>
<p>Actually, it’s this mindset that fools people into thinking engineering is better. It’s a contradictory point of view… that engineering is somehow harder and therefore more worthy of study, while at the same time it doesn’t require an advanced degree. How does that logic work?</p>
<p>Law and medicine are great professions… not initially, because you invest in yourself early in your career. For most, if not all, the investment can be worth it.</p>
<p>"but do CS majors make as much right out of college as engineers or have advancement/ diversification opportunities? "</p>
<p>In a recent article I read, I believe by CNN Money magazine, CS majors had one of the highest starting salaries, I believe only behind chemical engineers, computer engineers, and petroleum engineers (I might be missing a couple). So the major makes plenty of money out of college.</p>
<p>Software engineering was ranked as the #1 job to have, a couple of years ago… I believe it may still be fairly highly ranked, but then again I don’t know.</p>
<p>If you want a ton of information on salaries, advancement, etc., consult the BLS OOH. It’s my one-stop shop for all information on employment trends. Also, there are often articles with jobs or degrees ranked according to some criteria… those always make good reads.</p>
<p>thx auburn, i’m not even considering engineering as a major or anything so don’t think i am sucking up to it. I have never worked with computers at all but is CS a natural ability thing or is it just strong in math or how do you know if you are a good candidate for CS if you have never dealt with computers?</p>
<p>I don’t accuse you of sucking up to engineering… you just expressed a very common contradictory view regarding engineering, and I wanted to point out my feelings. I didn’t mean to be too argumentative; sometimes I fear that my manner is somewhat confrontational. It wasn’t intentional.</p>
<p>Math skills correlate well with CS ability. If you enjoy solving puzzles or playing games of any kind, then CS wouldn’t be a terrible choice. CS is just about as pure of a “problem solving” degree as one can find, aside from maybe math (and CS may be better than math for problem solving).</p>
<p>Working with computers is overrated in the context of CS. So many fellow CS types think they’re so hot at CS because they can recite from memory portions of some Linux kernel, but they don’t know the difference between regular and context-free languages and couldn’t write a proof to save their lives. You learn to use computers as necessary to deal with the coursework; but, for the most part, the only reason computers are used at all is that (a) it’s convenient and (b) it’s practical.</p>
<p>I must warn you that the skills you learn in a computer science program don’t translate well into actually working as a software engineer. I know lots of software engineers and none of them have ever had to do proofs. I still think that computer science is one of the best majors you can pick for employability right out of college but really you’ll gain most of your practical skills working on projects. The curriculum is in my opinion quite useless unless you like math-for-maths-sake.</p>
<p>I agree that working on projects is important, but if you don’t take the time to really learn the fundamentals, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Theory isn’t at all useless; IMHO, the reason that most software engineers don’t use it is because most software engineers aren’t very good at is, as I indicated above. I imagine that those who are good at it do use it, and with positive results.</p>
<p>In any event, I think it’s a little far-fetched to claim theory is useless. If it were useless, nobody would waste time learning it.</p>
<p>Plus, theory is a large part of the undergrad CS curriculum, so liking mathematics and problem-solving means you would probably enjoy the curriculum, no?</p>
<p>I think if you like math and problem solving you would enjoy computer science.
I personally like the aspects of building and making software and systems more than exploring theories and solving puzzles, so my personal preference would be software engineering. On the other hand, TOO much practical orientation can be tedious, tiresome, repetative. Best is to strike a balance between the two, I think. Most modern CS curricula do this. </p>
<p>I also disagree that software engineers don’t use these theories because they aren’t very good. I mean these days you just call Array.Sort(), how often do you need to make your own sorting algorithm? Things like set theory and graph theory are so far removed from reality…really only a tiny fraction of people work on these underlying parts of a software system and, more often than not, established techniques and algorithms are used. Of course, to be a literate computer scientist you must understand that an nlogn algoirthm is better than an n^2 one and be able to eyeball these things. But studying them for four years…thats already a matter of personal interest rather than applicability.</p>
<p>There’s a lot more to the design and analysis of algorithms than sorting.</p>
<p>I mean, imagine that you have a lot of matrices that need multipling together. If you didn’t know the theory, you could naively multiply the matrices (perhaps like C = MatrixMultiply(A, B)) in an arbitrary order. Significant gains could be achieved by optimizing the order in which the multiplications take place. Also, what if the MatrixMultiply isn’t parallelized for portability reasons? How much faster would the system be if you parallelized it?</p>
<p>This is just one example. What it really comes down to, in the end, for me is just this: knowing the theory is the same as really knowing what you’re doing. There’s something qualitatively different about knowing what a Turing machine is and knowing how to write a Java applet plugin for an internet dating site using the x87a protocol on a GreenFoot Direct MegaWide backend. I certainly wouldn’t say the former is useless and the latter is a valuable experience.</p>
<p>I guess, fundamentally a theoretical background will make you a smarter person who is capable if solving a broad variety of problems rather than very specific ones. That’s a fair assessment, I think.</p>
<p>i suck at math and it seems like most good jobs are math related besides law. what should i do?</p>