<p>What a coincidence, I actually read everything on that site before my interview a couple weeks ago. Although there was enough information for me to impress the interviewer, my curiosity lingered on because as you said, it’s not too technical and I wanted specific answers. He told me that the work was more about service support rather than delivery. </p>
<p>I did take more CS courses than required but I will see how the internship before pursuing it further. If it’s a field I enjoy then maybe I’ll consider taking more courses that deal with the subject. Also, our school has a good systems engineering program for graduate students. School allows us to take grad courses so I can look in that area as well. Thanks for the help.</p>
<p>Granted business had a lot to do with schmoozing. How does medicine?</p>
<p>Please notice I listed “timing” first though. I worked for years in industry and heard on countless occasions…“It all has to do with timing”…getting a job at a company or start-up at the right time, graduating at the right time, not getting laid off because a layoff round came 6 months earlier or latter. It really bugged engineers that part of one’s sucess was due to “timing”. In this way, I really do think the engineering profession is different. Sometimes one’s fate just is not in one’s hands.</p>
<p>…or another way to look at it is that sucess in engineering may sometimes have more to do with reading a situation and making the best of it than hard work and ability.</p>
<p>Doctors have bosses too. Any workplace has politics, and medicine is no different. If you want to advance, you have to impress somebody, and being good at your job isn’t always going to be the only thing you need. If you want to present a paper at a medical convention, you better be well-liked or people will just dismiss your work. Honestly, you can’t escape politicking in this world. It just isn’t possible.</p>
<p>And I totally agree, sometimes one’s fate isn’t entirely in one’s hands. Where I disagree is that I would argue that this is true of nearly all professions. You are always going to have some degree of luck in what happens. You can minimize the roll of luck, but you can never really totally negate it, unfortunately.</p>
<p>Well, the problem is that you have to win tenure, which is no small feat. Many academics toil for years in the junior ranks, and then nevertheless fail their tenure reviews. What is worse is that all of those years spent in academia don’t really qualify you to do much else. Perhaps you might find an industry research position if your work has immediate commercial potential. But what if it doesn’t? </p>
<p>You have to keep in mind that tenure doesn’t actually increase job security within the overall system, but rather only redistributes job security. Those with tenure (obviously) have perfect security, but at the expense of the junior faculty exposed to tremendous insecurity. </p>
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<p>Is it?</p>
<p>*Employment is expected to grow much faster than the average, and job prospects should be excellent. *</p>
<p>What I mean by ‘uncertainty’ is that you never know if any particular startup is going to succeed. That success is largely out of your hands. For every Google, hundreds of startups fail.</p>
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<p>I don’t know what sort of experience you’ve had, but the truth is, the vast majority of startups fail, a figure that can be validated through VentureXpert or other studies that examine the entrepreneurship space. Most startups are never funded at all, and even those that are, the majority of them will still fail. Heck, that is precisely why venture capital firms insist on investing in a portfolio of companies to diversify their risk. If all (or the majority of) funded startups succeed, then VC firms could succeed by simply funding one or a few startups. {Every additional funded startup means more board responsibilities for the VC, more supervisory costs, and greater difficulty in maintaining pace with the technology, so why fund many startups if you can only fund a few?} </p>
<p>In reality, as I said, the majority of funded startups will never be sold at a price that provides a significant payback on their equity, or any payback at all. {For example, if your stock options’ strike price was $5, and the company is eventually sold for $4 a share, then you receive nothing.} Heck, there have been entire VC funds in which every startup in that fund was sold at a loss and so every engineer in every startup in that fund received nothing on their equity. Heck, there have been startups who didn’t even pay promised salaries during their final dying months. </p>
<p>*The work force, by then whittled down to 80, were handed their final pay checks and sent home. A day later, those wages were withdrawn from their checking accounts when Kview failed to cover the payroll. The employees went unpaid. *</p>
<p>I believe you’ve just hit upon the crux of the issue: comparing different careers, how much of your fate is in your hands vs. how much can be attributed to effort and talent. For example, if you graduate #1 in your class from Harvard Law, you are clearly going to have a high-paying corporate law firm job waiting for you if you want it. If you win case after case after case, then other law firms would surely snap you up at a high price. A superstar medical student is basically assured of whatever high-priced specialty he wants to enter. A star investment banker or consultant can demand a hefty compensation package. The pay scales rise to very high levels in those industries. </p>
<p>But, as aibarr and others pointed out, star engineers don’t make that much more than do the average engineers. Even the best chemical engineer in the world won’t make more than $200-250k a year in a nonmanagement role, as nobody is going to pay more, regardless of how talented you may be. {In contrast, those other industries will easily pay far more than that for better talent.} You may be talented enough of a chemical engineer to produce millions of dollars in accrued profit, but your employer is still not going to pay you what you’re worth, and you lack leverage because no other employer will do so either. {Which is why I’ve been saying that labor markets are not perfectly competitive free markets and hence are not amenable to simple economic analysis, for if they were, then everybody would be paid according to their productivity.} Hence, that star engineer is relegated to producing tremendous value that he is unable to capture.</p>
<p>What that also means is that there is no strong incentive for anybody to become a star. Why should an engineer study and work hard to become a highly productive star, when he can relax and just be an average engineer? He’s going to be paid roughly the same either way. What that also means is a braindrain of the students from the best engineering schools such as MIT and Stanford choosing not to actually work as engineers, but rather head for other industries that are more appreciative of their talents. </p>
<p>As Barack Obama and others have asked, the real question is, where do we as a country want to excel in the future? What industries do we want our most talented students to aspire to? Do we want to continue to be the leading science and technology nation in the world? Or do we want to turn into a nation of investment bankers and consultants? </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>