<p>Yes roderick. The simplest reason would be education. There are computer scientists from everywhere now. The world doesn’t always depends on the US computer scientists. This is why outsourcing is so bad to American people.</p>
<p>LOL Yes. Andy is my hero. He graduated from our school, and he was an immigrant. He didn’t know any English before attending City College. A real man.
I am strongly convince with this
</p>
<p>Whether it is in USA, or oversea, startups has become a popular alternative to a regular employment. In fact, many companies encourage their employees to have their own businesses beside their regular employments. How many succeed? Not that many. But again, not everyone is a millionaire. </p>
Wow, not my experience at all. Heck, anything I invent related to company business becomes their property, so I could only have a side business if it was totally unrelated to what I do!</p>
<p>This is one of the truly crappy things about engineering, and one of the few things I really do consider a reason to avoid the field: as noted in Office Space, engineers who are expected to innovate are not rewarded in proportion to their innovation. I received a higher bonus for helping with a failed contract proposal than I did for inventing something genuinely new. I would love to find somewhere that this is not the case, but that is hard to find unless you have enough standing to demand it and make it stick, usually at small company.</p>
<p>One of the hiring managers at my company lamented that he used to ask new engineers what inventions they had been working on in college, and they would be able to show him one or two projects. Now, they don’t. I pointed out to him that big companies don’t reward innovation, so those guys go to small companies or start their own. He wasn’t pleased.</p>
<p>He was not pleased but does he do anything to fix that problem? I am not targeting that particular hiring manager, but it seems many employers expect employees to give 200% effort for 80% compensation. Why would I be happy with someone else enjoying the fruits of my hard labor while receiving little in return?</p>
<p>And also because the specialty I chose (because I enjoy it) is not suited to the kind of company I could build on my own anytime soon - my last development program had a budget of $35M, and required a total engineering staff of over 40. I could start a little company making components, or doing design for small systems, but that is what I would choose to do even if it is more lucrative.</p>
<p>I should also note that the basic pay and benefits are quite good, and I try to give a full measure or work. I no longer really try to innovate like I used to - that ended for me when, as I think I mentioned, I received a higher bonus for helping to write a failed proposal than I did for creating a genuinely new technology that has been slated for the next iteration of a major production system. Translation: sales work is valuable, inventing is not. So they can pay me for my sales work, and I’ll skip the invention.</p>
<p>thanks, cosmic, for the notes from real experience. I bet a lot of students go into engineering since they knew of someone who did so, and recvd some infor from experience. this forum is a way of collecting the experience of many. my son, for example, has no model or rlations in the engineering field from which to get this info.</p>
<p>(1) Technical or program management, where you are primarily a business person but need a strong technical background. Our program managers don’t do design work but they need to know how the systems work.</p>
<p>(2) Entrepreneurship, limited to those areas where the intended product is something you have a personal technical stake in developing and which can be reasonably designed and/or produced by a small company. I know people who started small companies designing ultrasound sensors and DVD player boards, and that is managable. Figure that a hardware company typically costs thousands of times the price of its product, so if you want to make vacuum cleaners it could easily be a million dollar business. This is why most small companies make cheap stuff, or software (which has astonishingly low start-up costs).</p>