So, you are a young man about to leave high school, and you want to study engineering. Or, your son is going to college soon, and you would like to advice engineering as a career. Or, you have just completed your engineering studies and is now looking for an engineering career. Whatever the situation, you might want to seriously reconsider. In no particular order of importance, here are seven reasons not to be an engineer.
Reason 1: Extremely low female to male ratio
Anyone who tell you otherwise are lying. Don’t believe it! I was engineer for many years, and I say this from experience. Even before college/university, you might already noticed the disparaging ratio in certain high school classes. Engineering related subjects like physics and mathematics almost always have very small number of female students. In my engineering degree classes, there were typically two female students to thirty males. Maybe things have improved in recent times, but I don’t believe the ratio is even close to 50:50. During my corporate life in several companies, a mid-size engineering department of 50 people almost always have less than 10 female engineers, sometimes none.
Here is another “proof”, if you don’t believe me. Do a google search for “reasons not to be an engineer”. The search results will instead give you lists of “reasons to date engineers”. If you don’t realized what that means, I am not going to spell it out for you.
Reason 2: Your would never earn top salaries
Anyone who says engineers can earn top salaries are pulling your legs. Sure, an engineer’s starting pay could be higher than many other jobs. Sure, you could earn a comfortable income. But, you should think about the longer term. Many other professional jobs will pay better in the long run.
I looked at my fellow engineers and I can tell you, most quit the field after a couple of years and moved to management career path. Engineering became a stepping stone. Any top engineers who say otherwise are actually not engineers anymore; they might not have realized that they have become managers.
You could argue, why can’t I take the same path? Use an engineering job as a stepping stone to better things. To which, my reply is the next reason why you shouldn’t be an engineer.
Reason 3: Using an engineering job as a stepping stone to management is a waste of time
There are better ways to build your management skills, doing jobs that would pay better, faster. I have seen fellow engineering students who quit the field upon graduating, and went on to sell insurance and real estate. The experiences learnt from these other jobs would be more useful when climbing the corporate ladder. Plus, success at a marketing job would reap significantly higher income than working as a junior engineer.
Reason 4: Your would never earn top salaries
Wait, didn’t I mention this already? Sure. But look at it from another angle. You see multi-million dollar businessmen. You see rich CEOs. Top lawyers, actors, singers, with million-dollar incomes. How many multi-million dollar engineers do you know of? I rest my case.
Reason 5: Sooner or later, your job would be outsourced
People, especially corporate management, like to tell the engineers that they have unique irreplaceable skills. Well, that’s just to keep you working at 150% when they needed it. However, when crunch time came, a younger cheaper engineer from certain countries (which shall remain nameless) would be around to take your job from you.
Face it, there is no such thing as unique engineering skills. Instead, what you need are transferable skills. What are those? Interpersonal skills, communication, leadership, critical thinking, negotiating, planning, organization, financial, etc. Could an engineering career give you these skills? Sure. Do you actually need to be an engineer to acquire these skills? No.
Reason 6: Engineers are unappreciated by Hollywood
Did you catch this year’s summer blockbusters? Iron Man, Indiana Jones 4, The Chronicles of Narnia 2, Sex and the City The Movie, The Incredible Hulk 2, The Dark Knight, Hellboy 2, The X-Files, etc. What did these movies have in common? The heroes were not engineers. Worst, sometimes the engineer were the bad guy in movies. Other times, they were the goofy guys who appeared in a movie only because the hero needed an expert on something.
“Big deal,” you said, “Hollywood are shallow.” To which I replied, “Hollywood defines the cool factor in our society, and engineers are not cool.”
Reason 7: Engineers are unappreciated, period
To those engineers reading this, and managed to stay thus far with my long ramblings, I ask you, “What was your greatest achievement in your job?” Don’t tell me about your achievements after you have defected to management level. I am asking about specific engineering achievements.
When I thought back to my work life, I realized my greatest achievement involved redesigning a circuit board to make it cheaper by a few dollars. Those few dollars translated to a few hundred thousands in savings for the product line. Multiply those few hundred thousands by the number of product lines I worked on over time.
Did I get a decent percentage of the millions saved? No. Could I tell my family and friends I made great saving for the company and hence, the world is a better place? No. Did my cost saving effort, which resulted in cheaper products you bought, made your life any better? Maybe. I like to fool myself about that sometimes.
In conclusion
Engineers are the peons of the modern technological world. It is a perfectly decent job, just like the farmers and labourers of the olden days. However, if you want what’s best for you, your family or friends, skipped the peon role and jumps straight to a career for the royalties (translation: the rich and the powerful).
Please leave a comment and tell me what you think.
Comments 9
Not to mention the painful office politics. Dilbert was sugar coated…
I do mean to thank you for your ubuntu post of
apt-get install build-essential
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A linux with an initially crippled compiler, what will they think of next?
Posted 03 Aug 2008 at 3:44 pm ¶Cheer,
Chip
Thanks for your comment, you are the first! I am starting to despair nobody is reading my blog. lol.
I was recently made redundant in my job. So while trying to be humorous, the post was probably sarcastic and whiney instead.
But your remark on office politics gave me an idea for another post… thanks!
Posted 03 Aug 2008 at 5:01 pm ¶Couldnt agree more with you…
I was in aerospace engineering for a total of forty years, until a new management think tank realised that permanent engineering staff were a luxury they could no longer afford; that our skills and more importantly our experience meant little or nothing in the long term scheme of things. A lot of specialisttools are involved in aircraft engineering, tools whichrequire regular inspection and calibration toensure the safety of the appliances upon whichthey are used. So they have a definite shelf life, after which they must be replaced, just like the engineers that use them. When replacement becomes due, it becomes an accountants decision as to whehter the replacement will be permitted.
You dont actually say it in your post, so I will. To an accountant in this business there are just two listings, ASSETS and LIABILITIES. Guess whats at the top of the Liabilties list… Engineers.
For various reasons, not least of which was a serious disagreement between myself and our accountants, my life was made pretty intolerable, and despite the fifteen years of experience I was eventually forced into the position of having to take voluntary redundancy and early retirement. The payoff was set at the UK governments minimum guaranteed figure and amounted to three months pay…
Three months pay for fifteen years of working all the hours God sent to make sure that the company could meet it its contractual obligations.
Fifteen years of working in steadily deteriorating conditions.
Fifteen years of coming up with original ideas to make the aircraft downtime as short as possible.
Engineers in this business are like Doctors and Nurses; if they f*ck up the patient dies…
You might like to consider that the next time your flight is delayed! The pressure on the engineers in these circumstances is incredible; but are their efforts appreciated? Not by the passengers, not by management, and not by the airport authorities if the aircraft happens to be at a boarding gate.
Engineers are indeed scum… but despite this I’m proud of the efforts I made.
Just for the record there can be no such thing as a Software Engineer; call them whatever you like but they are not, by definition, Engineers. At best they are Technicians. If they were engineers, they would be accountable for their actions. Microsoft have a lot of these non-engineers, and just look at the garbage they have produced over the years…
Just my thoughts on the subject…
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 1:59 am ¶hi whitenoiz
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 10:11 am ¶Thank you for reading and leaving a long comment. Very sad about your personal experience.
“Reason 6: Engineers are unappreciated by Hollywood
Did you catch this year’s summer blockbusters? Iron Man, Indiana Jones 4, The Chronicles of Narnia 2, Sex and the City The Movie, The Incredible Hulk 2, The Dark Knight, Hellboy 2, The X-Files, etc. What did these movies have in common? The heroes were not engineers.”
Ironman is an engineer. To quote from wikipedia:
A billionaire playboy, industrialist and ingenious engineer
Engineers are awesome!!!
Posted 20 Mar 2011 at 12:02 am ¶I would say that Iron Man is foremost an Industrialist, who just happened to have awesome technical expertise. If you want to split semantics, Bruce Wayne could be said to be an engineer as well, inventing all sorts of nifty Batman gadgets.
But in Hollywood, you have to be “billiionaire” first to be cool. The “engineer” part is added in to put a dark spin to the story.
Posted 20 Mar 2011 at 12:38 am ¶No i think hes an engineer not just a guy with awesome technical expertise. Isn’t an industrialist more of a business man. He wouldn’t have come up with all his great inventions if he was just a businessman. It seems like he gets more of a kick out of building stuff and learning how stuff works. To quote again from wikipedia:
A boy genius, he enters MIT at the age of 15 to study electrical engineering and computer science.
I don’t really see how engineer puts a dark spin in the story.
And didn’t batman get his gadgets made by some other guy. I’m not sure but i think i remember in the dark night, was it morgan freemans character designed and built all his gadgets and suits.
Posted 30 Mar 2011 at 7:46 am ¶As a billionaire industrialist, he was able to create the cool Iron Man suit. Didn’t matter that he invented the suit himself, he could easily employed some geeks to make it for him. But of course, the story would not be as interesting. By making him a genius inventor, they spiced up his character with a “dark side”.
Really, we just have to disagree on this one.
Posted 30 Mar 2011 at 7:31 pm ¶While I wholeheartly agree with the bulk of you article, you overlook one positive in the otherwise sordid world of engineering:
Once the crap hits the fan and society descends into a chaos of race and food riots (oh yes! It will happen!), then those people who can actually do something useful will be the survivors.
Posted 09 Jul 2011 at 3:21 am ¶Post a Comment