Where does the top Mechanical Engineering talent in the US work?

[noimagination]

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Actually, you have actually answered your own question: value is subjective. Sure, not all engineers perform the same tasks, but not all investment bankers perform the same tasks. I therefore must return to the original statement that it is not at all clear why investment bankers should be paid more than engineers, when it is certainly not clear that they provide more value to the world. “Value” is fundamentally speaking a political and social judgment, not merely an economic one.

Correct, value is subjective. Compensation is not and should not be set based on sakky’s interpretation of the ‘value’ provided by a certain profession.

Uh, how’s that? While the absolute numbers of bankers and consultants may be small, the financial power that each one possesses relative to engineers is absolutely yawning, indeed, often times larger by an order of magnitude (or, in the case of bankers, sometimes by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude).

If you want engineering firms to “pay salaries in accordance with the consulting and banking firms” that capital has to come from somewhere. I believe you have previously suggested that engineering employers ought to terminate or downsize current management consulting contracts in favor of wage increases for engineers.</p>

<p>However, there are more engineers than highly-paid management consultants. There isn’t enough capital to give out very many raises. Just as only a few people will ever survive the competition and become wealthy consultants, only a few engineers could expect to gain these highly competitive positions.

Put another way, according to the BLS, there are around 1.5 mn engineers in the nation. Imagine if instead of bailing out the finance industry to the tune of $700 billion, we could have distributed that sum to the the engineers instead. That would represent nothing less than a whopping $400,000 “lump-sum bonus payment” for every single engineer in the country. And that’s just the funding associated with the bailout, that doesn’t even count all of the regular revenue/profits that the finance industry enjoys. Why exactly is the nation unable to afford to improve engineering pay, when it apparently can conjure nearly a trillion dollars at will to rescue the bankers?

I am not interested in talking about the economics of the “bailout” as that is a political topic outside the domain of discussion on CC. Suffice it to say that we may agree on this point to the extent that your description is accurate.

Now allow me to turn the question around. For as long as I have been on this part of the forum - which has been years - I have battled numerous posters, seemingly including yourself, who apparently continue to believe that engineers should simply not be paid better, but rather should simply be satisfied with their lot. And to that, I must continue to ask the question: why do you fight? You guys are truly not interested in having more money? Or at least the possibility of having more money. If so, hey, feel free to send it to me. I’ll take it off your hands.

First, I fundamentally disagree with the position that salaries ought to correspond with your subjective notion of value.</p>

<p>Second, I don’t like witch hunts. In the absence of a specific advocacy your rants about comparatively low salaries in engineering are at best useless or at worst negligent. There are many approaches that might ‘solve’ this ‘problem’ but prove harmful overall.</p>

<p>Third, the time I spend on this forum regularly drives home the point that CC is not at all representative of the real world I live in. Dude, engineers make a solid living. I looked at the BLS stats for my community; only physicians, dentists, and management occupations outearn engineers (and engineering managers outearn all management occupations other than CEO). Becoming an engineer is a whole lot less risky and stressful than incurring huge debt for medical school.</p>

<p>See, I don’t like everything about the status quo. You want to argue that too much capital is allocated to the FIRE sector compared to manufacturing? That’s cool, I’m sure there are lots of places on the Internet where you can enjoy that discussion. But barring major structural changes to the economy, I see increased engineering wages as a bad thing. I see that causing increased competition for places in engineering school and careers in the field, plus decreased global competitiveness.</p>

<p>You say that a few kids from MIT get to be hard-charging investment bankers…good for them. I don’t care. Can you prove that it costs me anything?</p>