<p>^ Tell your friend to get a job as a big 4 accountant. Let's see how marketable his industrial engineering degree has really made him. Good luck to him!</p>
<p>industrial engineering is a rare and infrequent offering at the most prestigious schools (harvard/yale/amherst/williams/duke/etc), as are most technical majors</p>
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^ Tell your friend to get a job as a big 4 accountant. Let's see how marketable his industrial engineering degree has really made him. Good luck to him!
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<p>Well, i meant more of a general business job (business administration) like a manager or working in corporate development/strategy.</p>
<p>^ what your friend is referring to is the fact that engineering students learn technical skills in school that are required to do the job. Someone with a management degree can't do the work of a chemical engineer because they don't have the technical expertise. By contrast, the skills learned by a management major are largely soft skills, which can often be picked up on the job.</p>
<p>However, your friend is kidding himself if he thinks he can get any business job because he has an engineering degree. The reason so many engineers go back to get their MBA is largely based on a large number of them getting stuck in dead end engineering jobs.</p>
<p>Exactly. A lot of engineers seem to think their diploma is a ticket to career success. That they are somehow more qualified for a business/management position because of it. They get shot down in engineering companies. They now need an advance degree. Maybe a top MBA, but most of the engineers there are former analysts at IB's and consulting firms. They can't get in. They then go on a crusade slagging of any technical career path.</p>
<p>What you are saying is also another reason there are so many engineer CEO's. There are so many because there are so many technical companies. An engineer would obviously have a better chance.</p>
<p>What I've seen is that many engineers get promoted into management and they are expected to contribute individually and be a manager until they get enough people and responsibility so that they don't have time to be an individual contributor.</p>
<p>what does any of this have to do with operations management?</p>
<p>ttttttttop</p>
<p>This got to be the most surreal discussion ever. My dad is an engineer. An industrial engineer to boot. He is still ****ed to this day that he didn't opt for accounting or int'l commerce or whatever back in his university days. very rarely, in fact, have i met engineers who recommend for their own sons the career paths. most engineering students i have met seemed to have fallen in love with science on a whim, and not out of following of any convention or tradition.</p>
<p>people who think their engineering diploma, with a mba tacked on, is a ticket to success, are idiots, pure and simple. i know a couple people who are doing that. (guess who won't be the big donors at the Old Boy functions, wink wink) for some, it is just too darn hard to realise that the world they seem to think they are still in, i.e., the engineering/management combo the golden passport in Industrial America, is long gone and won't ever be back. anyone who thinks otherwise are deluding themselves. It almost feels like a time warp to back when that idiot Jimmy Carter was president when people talk about their "golden plan" of engineering undergrad plus MBA for the "perfect set of skills" to "succeed in the business world." this is the modern, career, equivalent of Carter telling people to use less electricity.</p>
<p>i am sorry if i am offending, or have offended, anybody with the last post. but i just cannot there are still people who believe in the whole Engineering/MBA fantasy. I thought the 80's swept away all the delusions people have about business; clearly i am wrong. there is nothing wrong with either an engineering or an mba degree; what is disturbing is how people can still imagine themselves maximally advantaged by having an engineering undergraduate education in preparation for their MBA and glory in Corporate America. This is as bad as, if not worse than counselors saying public service law is a good way to jumpstart your legal career.</p>
<p>I'm a longtime engineer in a big company and for the most part, managers are promoted from within. We run with lean management and managers are expected to do a fair amount of individual contributor work unless they have a very large number of employees under them. We generally hire those with at least a graduate degree in an engineering-related field.</p>
<p>sf606508, leave the thread. Your posts seem to do nothing but offtrack the thread from what I'm trying to get information about. And yes, you do come off like a bonehead. </p>
<p>Stop posting in it.</p>
<p>Well, like I’ve said before, Engineering is the only field I have ever heard so much negative feed-back about. I never even hear about philosophy or history majors regretting so bitterly their decision. All I hear is “don’t major in engineering, if I could go back I would do something else”. Why is this? </p>
<p>Another thing I’ve noticed. If someone comes on a board like this and wants to get into IB or consulting without knowing exactly what it is, they are slagged to hell. "You're only in it for the money, you fool!" Yet someone who wants to be an "engineer" and hardly knows the difference between electrical and mechanical engineering deserves a noble prize.</p>
<p>Since sf606508 likes to insert his uniformed opinion into the discussion based on antecdotal evidence, I'd like to do the same. I have friends with engineering backgrounds and MBAs who are going into investment banking and mgt consulting. On average, engineering degrees offer the highest starting salaries of any undergrad degrees and they give students a good quantitative base which will help them be successful in graduate business school. I do not see this as a bad career path to take.</p>
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I never even hear about philosophy or history majors regretting so bitterly their decision. All I hear is “don’t major in engineering, if I could go back I would do something else”. Why is this?
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<p>Engineering is not easy, and it is not necessarily as "fun" as other occupations. Not easy + not fun = higher salaries. This is not just true of engineering, but of many fields. It's funny how infatuated people on this board get with investment banking and actuaries. Many believe that the high salaries are derived from the fact that others aren't capable of doing their work. To a point, that is true. However, the bigger component is that many of the people who are capable of working in those roles don't want to.</p>
<p>I'm also guessing that many engineers get caught in a "dead end job" and then that high starting salary means little as they are 5-10 yrs removed from college and the salary is not moving up as much as one would like. One remedy for that would be to get an MBA before you have 5 yrs of experience. Another remedy would be to not stick with any one employer for an extended amount of time (if possible).</p>
<p>On a side note, I don't believe this thread was about engineering.</p>