Reply #10: As an engineer who worked in a difficullt undergrad and grad [View All]

program while

- my MBA collegues got rich on wall street

- MBAs crammed for exams between beer benders using frat houses filled with every past exam going back 20+ years

- jobs hemoraging to Inda and china - they aren't smarter, some havent seen a real computer until age 20, they work for $7/hr

- watching benefits and pension plans and salary go to shit

- after beign treated as shit by MBA manager assholes, many engineers decided to join them rather than fight them and became MBAs themselves.

I still am involved in core engineering and have had some modest success in my field. It is mostly luck that I worked for a few companies that held on to older engineering and corporate values.

I attribute a crisis in engineering to publish or perish - IEEE specifically has a purist attitude that demands "research cash" and bullshit journal articles over solid focus on fundamentals and skill.

Pick up an IRE journal from 40 years ago and you will see real engineering at work - important and accessible. These days, R&D journals are a mess of academic theories and mathmatical oddities, some tiny abstract corner of the world that used to occupy mathmatics and physics - intellectually challanging but rarely interesting or relevant to real world problem solving.

So two problems - engineering has lost its way and engineers don't want to work for $7 an hour without benefits.

Trust me - India and China are not better than us, they simply work for a fraction of the wage without benefits. What they lack in quallity they make up for in quantity. If they get sick, they get fired and another person takes their place.

Engineers are generally conservative republicans. They have no self preservation skills. So we stand back and watch another national treasure being outourced over seas without a complaint and marvel at the magic of the free market while trying figuring out how much it costs to get an MBA.

Intel used to complain about the same Engineering problem. Then they fired thousands of engineers and moved to India where loaded labor costs in a loosely regulated labor market allowed them to increase their profits while local communities were flattened with high unemployment of highly skilled people.