<p>That can be said of virtually any profession, and especially white-collar professions. Even a lineworker position at McDonald’s will be easier to obtain if one knows someone within the McD’s organization. </p>
<p>Very few employers will hire someone off the street to a position of high-responsibility. This is one of the reasons a conspicuously large percentage of Harvard graduates head to Wall Street; many people on Wall Street have Harvard degrees and would prefer to hire or work alongside someone who also attended Harvard because more than likely the prospective hire was recommended by someone who also attended Harvard, is a good fit, and has the “right” mindset.</p>
<p>Edit:</p>
<p>Something that people need to ask is, if someone else would have founded Microsoft, would that person have hired B. Gates? Would M. Zuckerberg hire a kid with the exact same credentials M. Zuckerberg had in 2004 for a position at Facebook? </p>
<p>I know, speculative.</p>
<p>Edit #2:</p>
<p>One thing that needs to be made clear is that time is more valuable than money; money inherently has no value and is nothing more than a physical representation of the time-energy delay of your past efforts. While earning $1 billion dollars is probably extremely difficult, it’s still much easier than getting 1 hour of your life back, and infinitely much easier than getting 1 year of your life back. </p>
<p>People who place greater value on money than on time may be smarter than you but are certainly not very intelligent.</p>
I’m afraid I don’t have time to tabulate every single top accounting department, but a cursory examination reveals that the overwhelming majority of professors in these departments have undergraduate degrees in fields of business, most often accounting. And - most crucially - I did not see a single one with an undergrad degree in engineering. While individual examples prove very little, I would be fascinated if you could present a single example of an accounting professor at a reputable institution with a bachelors degree in any engineering discipline. Empirically, this simply does not seem to occur.</p>
<p>This discussion probably wasn’t necessary, but it was somewhat interesting nonetheless.
<p>IMO, the thread comes down to the following:</p>
<p>There are certainly careers that make more money than engineering at the 90th percentile. However, those careers are very likely available to engineering majors at certain schools. My conclusion here is that no major clearly makes more money than engineering.</p>
<p>As far as working conditions are concerned, the BLS tells us the following:
[Engineers[/url</a>] “Many engineers work a standard 40-hour week. At times, deadlines or design standards may bring extra pressure to a job, requiring engineers to work longer hours.”</p>
<p>[Management</a> Analysts](<a href=“http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos019.htm#oes_links]Management”>http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos019.htm#oes_links) “Analysts and consultants generally work at least 40 hours a week. Uncompensated overtime is common, especially when project deadlines are approaching. Analysts may experience a great deal of stress when trying to meet a client’s demands, often on a tight schedule.”</p>
<p>I wish we had actual data to analyze. However, for now we must make do with these descriptions. They seem to correlate well with the conventional wisdom that - on average - engineering jobs require less hours and stress.</p>
<p>Though sakky’s points regarding Electronic Arts and other engineering sweatshops are worth noting, they do not disprove the conclusion that working conditions somewhat uniquely stressful in finance or consulting, at least on average.</p>
<p>Of course, you often won’t know ahead of time which 5% it is, and if you change jobs (whether within the same company or at a different company), it could be a different 5% (or whatever percentage).</p>
<p>Looks like a lot of “grass is greener” type of anecdotal claims. Also, using exceptional people like well known CEOs of major companies as examples, even though (in comparison to any field) they are exceptional in some way, much the way that top league professional sports players are.</p>
<p>You do not need an engineering or other degree to become a major league baseball player, but that does not mean that it is a realistic career path for most people. Similarly, you do not hear about the people who applied to investment banking or whatever positions and did not get hired, or the entrepreneurial people who started companies that never became big enough to be worth noting (and if some of them were university students who took time off from school to start their companies, they may have just gone back to complete their degrees after their companies failed). Survivorship bias certainly colors which stories become well known.</p>
<p>As far as the overwork and overly stressful job stories that one may hear about engineers and software developers, I hear worse stories about investment banking and management consulting type of jobs touted as alternatives. IT is sometimes touted as a low effort, high pay job, but it often comes with 24 hour on-call duty at least some of the time, as well as only being recognized or noticed when doing a bad job.</p>
<p>I really do not know why we have to keep bringing up high-finance. Those jobs make up a very small percentage of the jobs and also are pretty much centered in one geographic area. Not all of the high-academic achieving engineering grads will go into high-finance because…THERE IS IS JUST NOT ENOUGH POSITIONS FOR THEM.</p>
<p>I know some of you have taken some statistics courses and know about small sample theory and large sample theory. Until high-finance jobs get a sample high enough, I don’t think there is much use in comparing it to engineering or computer science (Note: I’ll will separate computer science since some of the “real in-jun-ears” do not like to include us software engineers). As someone pointed out, it is still an elitist job category where many non-academic factors come into play as much as the academic ones.</p>
<p>The vast majority (read: large sample) of college graduates head into non-elitist jobs and work for companies and not very many majors will give you “your bang for your 120 credits” than engineering.</p>
<p>I think high-finance is often brought up because of the exceptionally high level of pay. I don’t think we’ll hear about a teacher or plumber receiving $12.6 million in restricted stocks like L. Blankfein did last year. Same thing with professional sports or Big Law.</p>
<p>Personally, I’d steer clear of any profession where a very small number of people earn very high pay; to me, that means there’s a very large number of people who earn normal or low pay.</p>
<p>I really don’t think I should be doing your homework for you. </p>
<p>But fine, since you asked: right off the top of my head: </p>
<p>Robert Kaplan - Harvard. ** Indeed, Kaplan is arguably the most famous and well-cited accounting professor alive today**. He actually was named Dean of the business school at Carnegie Mellon (now known as the Tepper School) at around age ~37-38, which is a ridiculously impressive feat. **His undergrad degree is in electrical engineering from MIT ** </p>
<p>Also, consider David Larcker, Stanford, also one of the most prominent accounting professors alive today. His undergrad degree is in engineering ( I believe mechanical engineering).</p>
<p>Brochet- ?
Campbell - math/economics
Datar - ?
Hawkins - BA from Harvard, which does not offer an undergrad degree in business or accounting
Healy - Accounting/Finance
Kaplan - **Electrical Engineering **
Asis Martinez-Jerez - Law/BusAd
Mikes - ?
Narayanan - Commerce
Palepu - ?
Ramanna - **Biomedical Engineering<a href=“verifiable%20here:%20%5Burl%5Dhttp://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/40952/212628191.pdf?sequence=1%5B/url%5D”>/b</a>
Riedl - bus ad
Serafeim - ?
Simons - ?
Soltes - Economics
Srinivasan - **Electrical Engineering **
Yu - ? (Probably economics)</p>
<p>So of the 10 accounting faculty at Harvard whose undergrad backgrounds I could easily discern, a maximum of 4 (Healy, Asis Martinez-Jerez, Narayanan, and Riedl) could be said to have undergrad degrees in accounting or business (or their foreign equivalents), and only 1 (Healy) could be said to have a clear undergrad degree in accounting. (I suspect that Riedl also has an undergrad degree in accounting). In contrast, the remaining 6 do not have undergrad degrees in accounting/business with three of them actually holding degrees in engineering. </p>
<p>Now, granted, there are a surprising number of profs whose undergrad degrees are not easily discernible publicly, and I will do some asking around to find out exactly what their backgrounds are. But the bottom line is that a substantial number of accounting faculty at what is inarguably the famous business school in the world do not have AACSB- accredited degrees, and indeed, quite a few actually hold engineering degrees.</p>
<p>Now, granted, I strongly suspect that accounting departments at low-tier business schools probably indeed do have a plenty of accounting professors who were former accounting undergrads. But I’m not talking about them, as I suspect that most engineering students from top programs such as MIT or Stanford aren’t exactly champing at the bit to become accounting professors at low-tier schools. It seems to me that they would strongly prefer to, say, the next Bob Kaplan, who, like I said, himself graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from MIT and is now arguably the most famous accounting professor alive today.</p>
<p>Armstrong - Commerce
Baiman - Accounting
Balakrishnan - **Engineering **
Blouin - ? (probably accounting)
Bushee - Economics
Cassar - Commerce
Gonedes - Economics (but from Wharton)
Guay - **Engineering and Management
Hail - Business Administration & Economics
Holthausen - ?
Ittner - ?
Lambert - **Electrical Engineering **
Schrand - Business Administration
Sikes - Political Economy
Taylor - Economics (but at a business school)
Verrecchia - Engineering
Yang - Business Administration</p>
<p>Now, here I agree that a strong majority of accounting professors do indeed have accounting/business-administration backgrounds from AACSB schools or their equivalents. I consider an economics degree from an undergrad business school to be an AACSB accredited degree. Nevertheless I find 3 or 4 (if you count Guay) accounting professors whose undergrad backgrounds were in engineering. That includes Robert Verrecchia, who is one of the most heavily cited accounting professors in the world. </p>
<p>Kothari - Engineering<br>
Ng - Business Information Technology
Rowchowdhury - **Instrumentation and Control<a href=“basically%20an%20engineering%20degree,%20having%20been%20earned%20at%20the%20Ambedkar%20National%20Institute%20of%20Technology%20in%20%20India”>/b</a>
Sletten - Accounting & Finance
Verdi - **Civil Engineering **
Watts - Commerce
Weber - ?
Wysocki - **Engineering Physics **</p>
<p>Again, of the 7 Sloan accounting professor whose undergrad backgrounds I could identify, *more (4) actually had engineering or equivalent undergrad backgrounds than business/accounting/commerce backgrounds (3) *. That’s right - more. </p>
<p>The bottom line is, whether undergrad engineers can become accounting professors, I believe I’ve safely put that question to bed.</p>
<p>I suppose I should have been more specific. The engineers that I was referring to are Boeing outsourcing partners, who are not members of unions and therefore not eligible for any SPEEA-mandated overtime whatsoever. (I suppose I erred in calling them “Boeing engineers” when they are more accurately termed “Boeing-subcontracted engineers”). In fact, the widespread use of outsourcing is precisely what engendered such conflict between Boeing and the union in the first place, as the union is exactly right in that Boeing was (and still is) outsourcing significant quantities of work in an effort to reduce labor costs.</p>
<p>In the case of high finance, that does not apply. Like I said, even the new employees fresh out of college will make 6 figures, or close to it. Hence, everybody in investment banking is doing well. And obviously the top players are doing exceedingly well. </p>
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</p>
<p>But that doesn’t really matter, because the issue is that the finance industry poaches a substantial number of the the very best engineering students. Like I’ve said on other threads, if the finance industry tempted away only the mediocre engineering students, I wouldn’t really care. They were probably never going to become star engineers anyway. But the finance industry poaches many of the very best minds. Many of the engineering students at the very best schools such as MIT or Stanford ironically choose not to work as engineers at all, but would rather become bankers (or alternative careers). </p>
<p>Before the economic crash, nearly half of all MIT undergrads who entered the workforce took jobs not in science or engineering, but in finance or consulting, and even after the crash, around 1/3 continue to do so. This ain’t some scrub school we’re talking about - this is the most prestigious technical school in the world. Yet even there, many of the students apparently do not want to take jobs in science or technology.</p>
<p>Enginox, and which profession would this be?</p>
<p>I still remember in the 70’s/80’s Goldman Sachs and McKinsey were neck and neck as to the leading company in the U.S. with the most employees making over $100,000/yr.</p>
<p>In the case of high finance, the number of positions available are very limited and seemingly, the people with the best chances of landing those positions attend a small number of schools. Furthermore, investment banking != finance industry.</p>
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</p>
<p>Are these students opting out of science or engineering because the jobs are dreadful or because these students find the high potential pay of finance more attractive? Option a) engineering job starting @ $85k with 3% pay increase every 2 years or option b) finance job starting @ $125k with bonuses every year and good opportunities to clear millions of dollars in stock options, bonuses, etc. What option might a 22 year old MIT grad take?</p>
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</p>
<p>Lawyers, musicians, actors, comedians, writers, journalists, photographers, adult entertainers, dancers, fitness trainers, radio hosts, athletes, among others. You’ll find a large number of people earning normal or low pay and a small number of people making huge amounts of money.</p>
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</p>
<p>That’s great. Goldman Sachs and McKinsey are a very small part of the finance industry. Tellers, brokers, financial analysts, commercial bankers, etc. also form part of the finance industry. Those positions don’t necessarily offer that level of pay.</p>
<p>I think we making an assumption that best academic mind = star engineer. Just like first-rounder rookies are busts in the NFL, the same can happen in engineering. I know during my 20 years in software development, I have come across engineers from Top-10 schools would never end up a star. They have technical/academic knowledge out of their pores but ask them systematically come up with a feasible solution for a client and they are lost. On the flip-side, I have met engineers from schools that I did not know even existed and sometimes they make me want to go back to the Univ of Wisconsin and yell at the Industrial & System Engineering department.</p>
LOL, what? You’re the one arguing that the ability to become a highly-paid accounting prof is a reason for engineers to work in finance or management consulting. It isn’t my homework.</p>
<p>Anyway, I congratulate you on some good research. I’ll concede this point, though I’m not convinced that its impacts are sufficient to outweigh the other factors we’ve discussed.</p>
<p>Regarding the question in the thread title - which is not really the subject of our argument - I think this provides yet more proof that engineering is an outstanding major in terms of salary potential.
In which case Global’s anecdotal reference to his time at Boeing and other defense firms was not adequately addressed by the anecdotes you provided.</p>
<p>Further, the only other position you presented on the issue of working conditions was the example of Electronic Arts, which I would argue is somewhat unrepresentative given the uniquely high demand for gaming industry jobs. Thus, the BLS analysis I presented in post #122 stands.
You never do the groundwork necessary to prove that the “best engineering students” are poached. You need to present an argument for what makes an engineering student good and then link that to the schools recruited by finance.</p>
<ol>
<li>As an extension to #1, what impacts actually occur as a result of this?</li>
</ol>
<p>In [MIT’s</a> 2009 career survey](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation09.pdf]MIT’s”>http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation09.pdf), there were 112 engineering respondents out of 183 bachelor’s degree respondents (does not seem to list total graduates in each major). That leaves 71, or 39%, in non-engineering majors (including such things as economics and management). The same survey reports that 57, or 31%, of the respondents went into jobs in various financial and consulting type of industries (10 of which were investment banking and 23 of which were management consulting, presumably the top end of the finance and consulting jobs).</p>
<p>Yes, some MIT engineering graduates went to finance and consulting. But probably not as many as it may seem from your claim, since there are plenty of non-engineering graduates from MIT.</p>
<p>Economics and management are relatively small majors, compared to the MIT School of Engineering. </p>
<p>And besides, many of the students who chose those majors were surely transplanted engineers (or science majors). After all, few students who outright dislike engineering and science would choose to matriculate at MIT, or would be even admitted in the first place, and every student, regardless of major, must fulfill the non-trivial technical General Institute Requirements. {I have always recommended that those students who dislike science and technology should not attend MIT.} Yet many of those students surely discover the zeitgeist of the MIT career recruiting environment and therefore decide not to major in engineering/science once they arrive, but rather switch to management. One could therefore say that these were students who simply made the ‘transition’ to consulting and banking earlier than everybody else. </p>
<p>The upshot is that many of the best young science and technical minds in the world come to MIT as freshman…and leave to become consultants and bankers.</p>
<p>Uh, LOL what? It is your homework. I told you to look up a few CV’s of accounting professors, and you clearly refused to do so, necessitating me to do it for you. In fact, you challenged me to find a single accounting professor at a top business school who was a former engineering student. I happened to find far more than one, and indeed, at one particular top B-school (MIT Sloan), such former engineers comprise the majority of the accounting faculty. What a silly and easy challenge indeed. </p>
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</p>
<p>But that has never been my point. Indeed, I have always stated that more people probably should major in engineering. The question is whether they should work as engineers. </p>
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</p>
<p>Uh, why sure it is. The question that I posed to Global is that if he wants to propose the notion that engineers should find an employer that pays overtime, he should provide clear and actionable (but non-obvious) steps as to how one should actually do that. For after all, there are clearly plenty of engineers who don’t work for firms that pay overtime. </p>
<p>Again, keep in mind that I am not the proposing that engineers should remain in the field to find overtime-paying positions. Global said that. Hence, it behooves him to identify a ladder by which other engineers can then reasonably do so themselves. </p>
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</p>
<p>Absolutely false. How many engineers at Microsoft are paid overtime, yet work overtime hours? How about Google? How about Apple? How about Oracle? </p>
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<p>Uh, sure I have, over and over again. Surely we can agree that the investment banks are not exactly hiring droves of engineers from Idaho State University. They are hiring from the MIT’s and Stanford’s of the world: the most prestigious of all engineering schools. And surely, they’re not hiring the worst such students. If you’re getting straight C’s at MIT, you’re probably not going to be hired at an investment bank. Those who are hired strongly tend to be some of the best performers.</p>
<p>Therefore, those engineers who are hired tend to have strong grades and come from top-ranked schools. Hence, it is safe to say that they are poaching from among the very best engineering students in the world. QED. </p>
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<p>No, I don’t think I need to ‘present’ anything, as the logic seems to be perfectly clear. I believe we can safely assume that engineering students at the top schools are indeed strong engineering students. (For otherwise, why are schools such as MIT or Stanford so highly ranked?). We can also safely assume that those who achieve higher grades are probably better students, for what is the meaning of grades otherwise? </p>
<p>Let me put it to you this way. Arguably the greatest Berkeley engineering graduate of his generation is Ankur Luthra, who was Berkeley’s first Rhodes Scholar in ~20 years, and who I believe broke the record for the most A+ grades ever earned by an engineering undergraduate. But after earning his MSCS at Oxford as part of his Rhodes, did he choose to work as an engineer? Absolutely not - he immediately headed for Harvard Business School and now works as a fund manager. He could have clearly been an engineering star. But he chose to take his talents elsewhere. </p>
<p>Or consider David Danielson, who won the Karl Taylor Compton Prize, the prize given to the best overall student at MIT, while earning his PhD in materials science & engineering. But did he actually choose to work as an engineer after graduation? He did not - instead he took a job at General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital firm. </p>
<p>Or consider what the President himself said about the issue:</p>
<p>…Obama’s advice was offered on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (see video). "We need young people, instead of – a smart kid coming out of school, instead of wanting to be an investment banker, we need them to decide if they want to be an engineer…</p>
<p>Yet unfortunately the underlying incentives have not changed. As long as investment banking pays so much more than engineering - and Wall Street paid out the highest total employee compensation in 2010 than in any other time in history - then that industry will continue to draw the best minds from other fields, including engineering. The same could be said regarding consulting.</p>
<p>Consider the sad lament of Nicholas Pearce:</p>
<p>*…Even at M.I.T., the U.S.'s premier engineering school, the traditional career path has lost its appeal for some students. Says junior Nicholas Pearce, a chemical-engineering major from Chicago: “It’s marketed as–I don’t want to say dead end but sort of ‘O.K., here’s your role, here’s your lab, here’s what you’re going to be working on.’ Even if it’s a really cool product, you’re locked into it.” Like Gao, Pearce is leaning toward consulting. “If you’re an M.I.T. grad and you’re going to get paid $50,000 to work in a cubicle all day–as opposed to $60,000 in a team setting, plus a bonus, plus this, plus that–it seems like a no-brainer.” *</p>
And you rose to the challenge - however silly and easy - admirably. Nonetheless, it remains your burden to support your arguments
Exactly, and I’m fine with having that argument. I simply wanted to make it clear for those who click this thread expecting to read about the question in the title that we both concur there.
WORKING CONDITIONS
He mentioned the defense industry, where he has personal experience. Given that your response does not apply to all Boeing engineers - indeed, not even to what most of us would call “Boeing engineers” at all - it is not an adequate response.
These are all in the software industry, which certainly doesn’t apply to all engineering students.
The BLS analysis I presented applies across the board on these fields. You only present individual examples from single companies. My evidence is preferable because it at least attempts to answer the real question: whether engineering jobs are less stressful/time-intensive than finance/consulting jobs.
POACHING IMPACTS
But how do we define “best”? In terms of net benefit available to society? There is no link anywhere in your argument showing that students at highly-ranked schools with good grades offer a significantly greater benefit for society as engineers.</p>
<p>Look, you are saying that society is losing out because a small number of students at a small number of schools are choosing not to work as engineers. Unless you are prepared to argue that those slots are literally going unfilled, we know that other engineers - presumably from slightly lower ranked schools - are taking those jobs instead. You don’t prove that there is a significant impact on society because of that small reduction.
See above. The high rankings are based on whatever the methodology of the ranking agency is - the burden is on you to prove that this is a proxy for the value of that student to society. Same applies to grades, especially because failing students will probably not get jobs anyway.
If it means anything to you, I hold Obama to the same standard as yourself :)</p>
<p>Actually, if anything I find his perspective less credible because he has a strong vested interest in political popularity and hating on bankers appeals to his base.</p>
<p>I don’t contest that some poaching occurs or that it is because of $$$, so we don’t need to worry about Nick Pearce this time.</p>
