This was originally posted about a year ago, and since so much has changed in the last year, I thought I'd resurrect it for this year's new crop of college students.
If you would like to see the original thread, it's located here.
From 9/7/2004:
This is a post I saw on another forum about why engineering is a poor career choice. Since I know a high proportion of the people here are in related fields, I wanted to see what the reaction would be. For the record, I do not care at all about point #6.
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Like Marley's ghost in "A Christmas Carol" I'm here to show you what your future will be like unless you make some changes. Let me tell you right now, so you can say you were warned -- ENGINEERING IS A TERRIBLE CAREER CHOICE!!
A few years back a cousin asked me for advice about majors and what engineering is like. After talking for a while he said I ought to share my advice with the people on the board so I posted my advice on the PrincetonReview board. It was controversial, to say the least. But today you need to hear this advice more than ever! The dot-com bust meant your chances of striking it rich and getting out in a few years have evaporated; if you choose engineering, you better know what you're getting into. It's time to reprise my post for this year's seniors.
Print this letter out, read it over, read it over again. If you don't believe me, just show it to anyone who ACTUALLY works in engineering. It's a little longer than most posts, I know, but we're talking about your future here. Take the time to study it carefully.
And when you read the bashing replies bound to come on this board, put your budding analytical skills to work -- decide if they address the actual points I make or if they are just ad-hominen attacks meant to distract you from the real issues. I post links and give info you can easily verify on the web; ask yourself if the critics give real facts or just engage in sophistry.
So who are you, the prospective engineer? Maybe you have a knack for math and science courses, so well-meaning parents and teachers have suggested you consider a career in engineering. Maybe you like the toys you have -- the DVD player, the cell phone, some cool video games, and you think it would be fun to help create things like them. Maybe the attractive starting salaries, among the highest for college grads BTW, seem to be calling out to you. Or perhaps you dislike uncertainty and ambiguitity, and finding a job after college worries you -- how do English and History majors find jobs anyway? Everyone knows the "want fries with that?" joke, and you figure if you endure the training at least that won't be your fate.
But make no mistake about it. If you go into engineering, odds are you will regret the choice a few years down the line. I'm going to spell out exactly why.
As an engineer
1) you will miss out on a lot of fun in college, forsaking some of the best years of your life.
2) you will miss the best chance you'll have to enrich your mind in a variety of academic areas
3) you will be limited to working in a few major cities.
4) the hours will be excessively long
5) you will be surrounded primarily be men at work
6) many if not most of your coworkers are going to be foreigners
7) your salary will top out early and those liberal-arts majors will catch and pass you
8) by the time you're in your 30's you will be worried about keeping a job
9) you're NOT going to get into management
10) the long-term outlook for engineers is dismal
1) Missing out on fun in College -- as an engineering major you will be loaded down with labs and problem sets. You will know the library better than your dorm room since you will spend more time there, working late most nites and on the weekend.
Even the industry press acknowledges this; recently in EETimes they wrote "There's a sense among students of, 'Why should I stay? My friends are studying half as long as me and having a better time,' " said Ray Almgren, vice president of product strategy for National Instruments. See http://tinyurl.com/642tf
I should note in passing that some guys choose engineering, consciously or subconsciously, for this reason. I was surprised how many guys majoring in engineering had NEVER gone on a date in HS. In college instead of admitting they don't want to go to a party because they're scared to talk to girls, they had the excuse of "need to study".
The outcome is that on average 1 out of every 2 people who start in engineering switch out before graduating. For EE it is 2 out of 3!!
And I say "guys" and "he" in much of what follows because thats what the studens are; these days only about 1/6 of the students getting engineering degrees are women (and thats considered an improvement over the past!).
2) missing out on a chance to explore the fields of knowledge -- For most students college is a time not only to learn about their major but to explore other areas as well. Take an art class, learn about history, perhaps there's a famous scholar teaching at your college or you want to work with one of the leading researchers in some area. That's what most students can do since they have ample time for electives. To pick Ohio State as a random example, if you are a history major you have 10 required classes for the major; see http://www.history.ohio-state....undergrad/majorreq.htm The rest of your classes include some required breadth classes but by and large you can pursue your cultural and intellectual interests, working directly with the profs and surrounded by others to learn from and with. College is a glorious time for the intellectually curious!
And then there is engineering. Engineering is different. There is just so much to learn that you will be loaded down every semester with lots of required courses. Engineering programs are the same at every college since they're standardized by a group known as ABET. So lets go back and take a look at Ohio State. If you choose EE, for example, during your 4 years of college you will get to choose exactly 7 courses outside of science & engineering!! And BTW they must be on an approved list, not too many in any one area since they are your distribution requirements. See http://eewww.eng.ohio-state.ed...ademic/pdf/ughndbk.pdf Choose wisely...
Actually if you take only ONE thing away from this, it would be this heartfelt advice. If you major in engineering, plan from the start to take 5 years to get your undergrad degree so you have some time to experience and explore something in college besides endless classes in math and engineering.
3) Engineering employers are concentrated in a few large cities; Austin, Silicon Valley, LA, Boston, and some others. Sure there may be companies that hire engineers in many other places, but when there are just a few shops in town the salary is going to be lower because they know you don't have many options. Even during the boom salaries in San Diego were 25-35% lower than Silicon Valley just because the employers weren't bidding that hard against one another. And you have to put up with more crap because where are you going to go if you don't like it? Right now it may be hard for this to seem like a realistic concern because everything you own probably fits into a few boxes and you don't have kids, but imagine your life a 10-15 years out. To put it another way, how easy would it be for your parents to drop everything and move to a new city? Add to that concerns about layoffs; how would you like to be working for IBM in Burlington or Kodak in Rochester right now? If you lose your job in a town with few engineering employers you're basically going to have to move to get another one. The upshot is that the engineer seeking stability chooses to live in a place with more hi-tech employers, meaning he only has the choice of a handful of major cities.
4) long hours -- EETimes reported "In an open letter to Congress this past week, IEEE-USA president Bryant said that long hours, stressful job conditions and other factors are converging to 'make careers in engineering less attractive,' "
Why? Coming out of school you might expect to work long hours to "prove" yourself. However as a working engineer these long hours are going to be the norm for your career. For example, suppose a project with 45 people working on it just took 18 months from start to customer ship, and now they are launching the successor project. A good estimate is 18 months, but some manager who wants a big bonus will step up and say he can do it in 14. What is his secret? Simple. He simply brings in the deadlines for various steps by 4 months. You get to work late into the night and on weekends to make up those 4 missing months, he gets praise from his bosses and a big end-of-the-year check for his accomplishement. When you go home at 8:30pm every nite you can't do much more than chow down, pay the bills, and go to sleep just to do it all over again the next day.
So why don't people just leave? If you're in a smaller town, see issue (3). And in general its hard to leave. During good times there's the golden handcuffs; you have some options that vest over 5 years and if you leave you walk away from the unvested ones, plus you'll start at ground 0 somewhere else and the option price is higher than where you are now. Plus odds are good the next employer will have a manager just as aggressive to look good by pulling in schedules. During bad times l ike the present, well nobody's hiring. In short, good times or bad, its hard to leave.
5) mostly men -- these days only about 1/6 of the students getting engineering degrees are women (and thats considered an improvement over the past!). The women you meet at work are going to primarily be the admin for the group and the ladies working in the cafeteria. So if you think that will be meeting women socially on the job, think again.
6) mostly foreigners -- out here in CA I'd say the hi-tech workforce is 1/3 chinese, 1/3 indian, 1/3 white. If you've ever wanted to feel like a minority in your own country, engineering is the job for you. And BTW a lot of them don't bother with soap or deodorant because thats the way things are in their country. If you're in a building you can tell when you're close to the section where the farm of cubicals for engineers is just by the odor.
7) many HS students are attracted by the high starting salaries for engineers, especially compared to what the other majors make out of the gate. However don't be fooled by the number that applies at one point in your life. You will be working for 30+ years and you need to consider what happens over that span. Liberal arts majors may start out in relatively low-paying jobs but as they prove themselves and become more valuable they rise in salary. Now if you already expect that you won't be able to prove yourself in business maybe tech is right for you; but for those who have faith in themselves after a dozen years or so those engineers will be working for you!
It turns out that salaries in engineering rise rapidly for 6 or 7 years and then plateau. Why is that? Because the ideal engineering employee is someone with 3-7 years experience. After you've been around the block once or twice you know what needs to get done on a project, you know how to run the tools, work with the vendor, etc. After this its just doing more of the same thing. Unlike doctors or lawyers or other professionals who become more valued as they get older, in engineering those most in demand are 25-30 or so. They often don't have families so they don't complain about the long hours, and they can be plugged right into the project.
Another source of the salary cap is the H1B program. Your friends in Congress let hi-tech employers bring in 120,000 workers from overseas each year (thats where the Chinese and Indians come from). And its communist China, BTW. Think about that. Do they say "well, lawyers are making too much so lets bring in 100,000 each year to help keep the cost of legal advice down?" No. Same with doctors, accountants, other professions. But employers have the bucks to lobby Congress, so they had the cap raised from 65,000 to 100,000 just a few years ago. The beauty of this program to employers is the visa is for 5 years and is non-renewable. In other words they can get a worker at low cost, have him work his ass off for a couple of years, and then US Immigration boots him out of the country before he starts demanding more! And BTW search on the web and you'll find out that even though this program is supposed to address the "shortage" of workers, there is NO requirement that H1B visa holders be laid off before American workers! So since they make less, many companies have been doing just that; firing the Americans and keeping the cheaper foreigners. All perfectly legal.
8) By the time your only in your 30's you'll be worried about your job. That's right! The ideal employee is 25-30, so by the time you get a little older you might not be as willing to work the insane hours. And since your salary goes up a little each year (2-4%), after a few more years all of a sudden you are making 20% more than people doing essentially the same work. So you're first out the door and the last one in.
IF YOU FOLLOW NO OTHER LINK IN THIS POSTING, you have to read "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html PRINT IT OUT. Read it, read it again. Put it away for a few days, then read it one more time. Its from a UC Davis professor and it spells out in great detail exactly why you are going to have trouble finding work by the time you are in your late 30's. The article is aimed primarily at software people since the professor teaches CS, but it applies to all the other engineering disciplines as well.
As he points out, "An InformationWeek survey of hiring managers found that only 2% of them would prefer to hire an applicant with more than 10 years of experience."
He also notes that "Twenty years after graduation from college, only 19% of computer science majors are still employed as programmers".
In most other professions, those with experience are valued. You want your lawyer to have seen a bunch of similar cases, your doctor to have experience, your accountant, your professor, and so on. Yet to be honest engineering is blue-collar assembly-line work done with the mind instead of the hands. So sure, its indoor work with no heavy lifting, but just like a mechanic or painter or something all they want is a couple of years experience and then you're as good as you're going to get as far as industry is concerned.
Here's a quote you should read carefully -- "I spent seven years in school, and it resulted in a six-year career," says Mr. Porter, who feels his master's degree in engineering is little more than "a base." And another -- "Many engineers are facing a challenge of a different sort. Graying engineers who have decades of work experience are as rare as a black and white TV. Even those under 40 are often considered old". See the article for yourelf at http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html
9) You won't be a manager. If you share this with your teachers or counselor, they might agree more or less with the 8 points above. But they have an ace left up their sleeve. "The age discrimination might be real, and maybe most people aren't working in what they slaved over learning in college, but it doesn't matter to you. See, you'll be a manager". If only it were true! Sure, in a growing field there's room for advancement. But other than the phony numbers the industry manufactures to justify the H1B programs, there's not a huge amount of growth left in engineering. So do the math. The average 1st-line manager has 10 employees. Since the field is barely growing, only about 1/10 of those starting in hi-tech will become managers.
10) long term its going to get worse for engineers. Its easy to ignore slow changes until they are pervasive. Global warming, for instance. But here's a fun one. Ask your parents what the perception was of Japanese quality back in the 60's. You aren't going to believe the answer!!! The stuff was seen as junk, low quality stuff nobody wanted. And yet today they dominate consumer electronics, build better cars than the US makers, and so on. The change was gradual but sure, people were able to ignore what was happening right under there noses, and all of a sudden the american manufacturers were dead.
The same slow change is dooming engineering in the US. Employers just want low costs and their search to find them is going to make even that high starting salary go away. Most major hi-tech companies already have engineering efforts overseas. going to happen in engineering. Just yesterday it was reported that Microsoft is investing $400 million in India. (see http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/4500683.htm) And the 65,000 (soon to be 100,000) trained workers that are going back home, well they are competing against american workers on salary.
Whats happening is this. American employers are capping salaries today by bringing in hundreds of thousands of cheap workers. And after a couple of years they go home where they continue working for tech employers, but now at 1/10 of what an american makes. It takes a while to get the critical mass going. At first they start with sustaining engineering (eg supporting existing products), then they will move to having the overseas workers cost-reduce existing products. Next they will be used to add improvements to existing products, at which point they are poised for the final blow. New product development will go to Shanghai and Bangalore, and who needs those overpaid Americans anymore?
This change is coming, its already starting. Just like the Japanese change from junk manufacturers to best in the world, it may take a decade or two but its going to happen. And in a decade or two you're barely 30, then what are you going to do?
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FWIW, this is a followup post by the OP:
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I have no illusions that I will change the mind of people already in the program. As you say, denial runs deep. Cialdini wrote in his excellent book 'The Psychology of Influence', "... our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done. Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision.?
My hopes are to reach the students on this board who are *considering* engineering but haven't yet committed. I myself am an EE who has worked for hi-tech companies, mostly household names, in the Bay area for over a decade. Of course on an anonymous board nobody can verify that, and I want to keep my anonymity. But they CAN go out and talk to real engineers and see what I'm saying is true, they can follow the links and read the stories for themselves.
And what you say about offshoring is true; just see the BusinessWeek article called "Look Who's Going Offshore : Tech startups are heading overseas even more eagerly than multinationals" at http://www.businessweek.com/ma..._20/b3883090_mz063.htm for one example discussing the trend.
However I will quibble with you on one point. You write "there is still a need for, and there will be jobs for, highly educated (grad degrees), creative "architect" engineers". This is true today but won't be true in 15 or 20 years. The experienced designers are here in the US and there are few overseas today, but given 2 decades of experience my bet is that there will be a sufficient supply of them abroad as well. Many MS and PhD's in engineering are going to foreign-born engineers, and eventually they can take over that role (and many will choose to return home where the standard of living at even 1/3 the pay is head and shoulders above what they can get in the Bay area with its $500K starter homes).
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If you would like to see the original thread, it's located here.
From 9/7/2004:
This is a post I saw on another forum about why engineering is a poor career choice. Since I know a high proportion of the people here are in related fields, I wanted to see what the reaction would be. For the record, I do not care at all about point #6.
***************************************************************************************
Like Marley's ghost in "A Christmas Carol" I'm here to show you what your future will be like unless you make some changes. Let me tell you right now, so you can say you were warned -- ENGINEERING IS A TERRIBLE CAREER CHOICE!!
A few years back a cousin asked me for advice about majors and what engineering is like. After talking for a while he said I ought to share my advice with the people on the board so I posted my advice on the PrincetonReview board. It was controversial, to say the least. But today you need to hear this advice more than ever! The dot-com bust meant your chances of striking it rich and getting out in a few years have evaporated; if you choose engineering, you better know what you're getting into. It's time to reprise my post for this year's seniors.
Print this letter out, read it over, read it over again. If you don't believe me, just show it to anyone who ACTUALLY works in engineering. It's a little longer than most posts, I know, but we're talking about your future here. Take the time to study it carefully.
And when you read the bashing replies bound to come on this board, put your budding analytical skills to work -- decide if they address the actual points I make or if they are just ad-hominen attacks meant to distract you from the real issues. I post links and give info you can easily verify on the web; ask yourself if the critics give real facts or just engage in sophistry.
So who are you, the prospective engineer? Maybe you have a knack for math and science courses, so well-meaning parents and teachers have suggested you consider a career in engineering. Maybe you like the toys you have -- the DVD player, the cell phone, some cool video games, and you think it would be fun to help create things like them. Maybe the attractive starting salaries, among the highest for college grads BTW, seem to be calling out to you. Or perhaps you dislike uncertainty and ambiguitity, and finding a job after college worries you -- how do English and History majors find jobs anyway? Everyone knows the "want fries with that?" joke, and you figure if you endure the training at least that won't be your fate.
But make no mistake about it. If you go into engineering, odds are you will regret the choice a few years down the line. I'm going to spell out exactly why.
As an engineer
1) you will miss out on a lot of fun in college, forsaking some of the best years of your life.
2) you will miss the best chance you'll have to enrich your mind in a variety of academic areas
3) you will be limited to working in a few major cities.
4) the hours will be excessively long
5) you will be surrounded primarily be men at work
6) many if not most of your coworkers are going to be foreigners
7) your salary will top out early and those liberal-arts majors will catch and pass you
8) by the time you're in your 30's you will be worried about keeping a job
9) you're NOT going to get into management
10) the long-term outlook for engineers is dismal
1) Missing out on fun in College -- as an engineering major you will be loaded down with labs and problem sets. You will know the library better than your dorm room since you will spend more time there, working late most nites and on the weekend.
Even the industry press acknowledges this; recently in EETimes they wrote "There's a sense among students of, 'Why should I stay? My friends are studying half as long as me and having a better time,' " said Ray Almgren, vice president of product strategy for National Instruments. See http://tinyurl.com/642tf
I should note in passing that some guys choose engineering, consciously or subconsciously, for this reason. I was surprised how many guys majoring in engineering had NEVER gone on a date in HS. In college instead of admitting they don't want to go to a party because they're scared to talk to girls, they had the excuse of "need to study".
The outcome is that on average 1 out of every 2 people who start in engineering switch out before graduating. For EE it is 2 out of 3!!
And I say "guys" and "he" in much of what follows because thats what the studens are; these days only about 1/6 of the students getting engineering degrees are women (and thats considered an improvement over the past!).
2) missing out on a chance to explore the fields of knowledge -- For most students college is a time not only to learn about their major but to explore other areas as well. Take an art class, learn about history, perhaps there's a famous scholar teaching at your college or you want to work with one of the leading researchers in some area. That's what most students can do since they have ample time for electives. To pick Ohio State as a random example, if you are a history major you have 10 required classes for the major; see http://www.history.ohio-state....undergrad/majorreq.htm The rest of your classes include some required breadth classes but by and large you can pursue your cultural and intellectual interests, working directly with the profs and surrounded by others to learn from and with. College is a glorious time for the intellectually curious!
And then there is engineering. Engineering is different. There is just so much to learn that you will be loaded down every semester with lots of required courses. Engineering programs are the same at every college since they're standardized by a group known as ABET. So lets go back and take a look at Ohio State. If you choose EE, for example, during your 4 years of college you will get to choose exactly 7 courses outside of science & engineering!! And BTW they must be on an approved list, not too many in any one area since they are your distribution requirements. See http://eewww.eng.ohio-state.ed...ademic/pdf/ughndbk.pdf Choose wisely...
Actually if you take only ONE thing away from this, it would be this heartfelt advice. If you major in engineering, plan from the start to take 5 years to get your undergrad degree so you have some time to experience and explore something in college besides endless classes in math and engineering.
3) Engineering employers are concentrated in a few large cities; Austin, Silicon Valley, LA, Boston, and some others. Sure there may be companies that hire engineers in many other places, but when there are just a few shops in town the salary is going to be lower because they know you don't have many options. Even during the boom salaries in San Diego were 25-35% lower than Silicon Valley just because the employers weren't bidding that hard against one another. And you have to put up with more crap because where are you going to go if you don't like it? Right now it may be hard for this to seem like a realistic concern because everything you own probably fits into a few boxes and you don't have kids, but imagine your life a 10-15 years out. To put it another way, how easy would it be for your parents to drop everything and move to a new city? Add to that concerns about layoffs; how would you like to be working for IBM in Burlington or Kodak in Rochester right now? If you lose your job in a town with few engineering employers you're basically going to have to move to get another one. The upshot is that the engineer seeking stability chooses to live in a place with more hi-tech employers, meaning he only has the choice of a handful of major cities.
4) long hours -- EETimes reported "In an open letter to Congress this past week, IEEE-USA president Bryant said that long hours, stressful job conditions and other factors are converging to 'make careers in engineering less attractive,' "
Why? Coming out of school you might expect to work long hours to "prove" yourself. However as a working engineer these long hours are going to be the norm for your career. For example, suppose a project with 45 people working on it just took 18 months from start to customer ship, and now they are launching the successor project. A good estimate is 18 months, but some manager who wants a big bonus will step up and say he can do it in 14. What is his secret? Simple. He simply brings in the deadlines for various steps by 4 months. You get to work late into the night and on weekends to make up those 4 missing months, he gets praise from his bosses and a big end-of-the-year check for his accomplishement. When you go home at 8:30pm every nite you can't do much more than chow down, pay the bills, and go to sleep just to do it all over again the next day.
So why don't people just leave? If you're in a smaller town, see issue (3). And in general its hard to leave. During good times there's the golden handcuffs; you have some options that vest over 5 years and if you leave you walk away from the unvested ones, plus you'll start at ground 0 somewhere else and the option price is higher than where you are now. Plus odds are good the next employer will have a manager just as aggressive to look good by pulling in schedules. During bad times l ike the present, well nobody's hiring. In short, good times or bad, its hard to leave.
5) mostly men -- these days only about 1/6 of the students getting engineering degrees are women (and thats considered an improvement over the past!). The women you meet at work are going to primarily be the admin for the group and the ladies working in the cafeteria. So if you think that will be meeting women socially on the job, think again.
6) mostly foreigners -- out here in CA I'd say the hi-tech workforce is 1/3 chinese, 1/3 indian, 1/3 white. If you've ever wanted to feel like a minority in your own country, engineering is the job for you. And BTW a lot of them don't bother with soap or deodorant because thats the way things are in their country. If you're in a building you can tell when you're close to the section where the farm of cubicals for engineers is just by the odor.
7) many HS students are attracted by the high starting salaries for engineers, especially compared to what the other majors make out of the gate. However don't be fooled by the number that applies at one point in your life. You will be working for 30+ years and you need to consider what happens over that span. Liberal arts majors may start out in relatively low-paying jobs but as they prove themselves and become more valuable they rise in salary. Now if you already expect that you won't be able to prove yourself in business maybe tech is right for you; but for those who have faith in themselves after a dozen years or so those engineers will be working for you!
It turns out that salaries in engineering rise rapidly for 6 or 7 years and then plateau. Why is that? Because the ideal engineering employee is someone with 3-7 years experience. After you've been around the block once or twice you know what needs to get done on a project, you know how to run the tools, work with the vendor, etc. After this its just doing more of the same thing. Unlike doctors or lawyers or other professionals who become more valued as they get older, in engineering those most in demand are 25-30 or so. They often don't have families so they don't complain about the long hours, and they can be plugged right into the project.
Another source of the salary cap is the H1B program. Your friends in Congress let hi-tech employers bring in 120,000 workers from overseas each year (thats where the Chinese and Indians come from). And its communist China, BTW. Think about that. Do they say "well, lawyers are making too much so lets bring in 100,000 each year to help keep the cost of legal advice down?" No. Same with doctors, accountants, other professions. But employers have the bucks to lobby Congress, so they had the cap raised from 65,000 to 100,000 just a few years ago. The beauty of this program to employers is the visa is for 5 years and is non-renewable. In other words they can get a worker at low cost, have him work his ass off for a couple of years, and then US Immigration boots him out of the country before he starts demanding more! And BTW search on the web and you'll find out that even though this program is supposed to address the "shortage" of workers, there is NO requirement that H1B visa holders be laid off before American workers! So since they make less, many companies have been doing just that; firing the Americans and keeping the cheaper foreigners. All perfectly legal.
8) By the time your only in your 30's you'll be worried about your job. That's right! The ideal employee is 25-30, so by the time you get a little older you might not be as willing to work the insane hours. And since your salary goes up a little each year (2-4%), after a few more years all of a sudden you are making 20% more than people doing essentially the same work. So you're first out the door and the last one in.
IF YOU FOLLOW NO OTHER LINK IN THIS POSTING, you have to read "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html PRINT IT OUT. Read it, read it again. Put it away for a few days, then read it one more time. Its from a UC Davis professor and it spells out in great detail exactly why you are going to have trouble finding work by the time you are in your late 30's. The article is aimed primarily at software people since the professor teaches CS, but it applies to all the other engineering disciplines as well.
As he points out, "An InformationWeek survey of hiring managers found that only 2% of them would prefer to hire an applicant with more than 10 years of experience."
He also notes that "Twenty years after graduation from college, only 19% of computer science majors are still employed as programmers".
In most other professions, those with experience are valued. You want your lawyer to have seen a bunch of similar cases, your doctor to have experience, your accountant, your professor, and so on. Yet to be honest engineering is blue-collar assembly-line work done with the mind instead of the hands. So sure, its indoor work with no heavy lifting, but just like a mechanic or painter or something all they want is a couple of years experience and then you're as good as you're going to get as far as industry is concerned.
Here's a quote you should read carefully -- "I spent seven years in school, and it resulted in a six-year career," says Mr. Porter, who feels his master's degree in engineering is little more than "a base." And another -- "Many engineers are facing a challenge of a different sort. Graying engineers who have decades of work experience are as rare as a black and white TV. Even those under 40 are often considered old". See the article for yourelf at http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html
9) You won't be a manager. If you share this with your teachers or counselor, they might agree more or less with the 8 points above. But they have an ace left up their sleeve. "The age discrimination might be real, and maybe most people aren't working in what they slaved over learning in college, but it doesn't matter to you. See, you'll be a manager". If only it were true! Sure, in a growing field there's room for advancement. But other than the phony numbers the industry manufactures to justify the H1B programs, there's not a huge amount of growth left in engineering. So do the math. The average 1st-line manager has 10 employees. Since the field is barely growing, only about 1/10 of those starting in hi-tech will become managers.
10) long term its going to get worse for engineers. Its easy to ignore slow changes until they are pervasive. Global warming, for instance. But here's a fun one. Ask your parents what the perception was of Japanese quality back in the 60's. You aren't going to believe the answer!!! The stuff was seen as junk, low quality stuff nobody wanted. And yet today they dominate consumer electronics, build better cars than the US makers, and so on. The change was gradual but sure, people were able to ignore what was happening right under there noses, and all of a sudden the american manufacturers were dead.
The same slow change is dooming engineering in the US. Employers just want low costs and their search to find them is going to make even that high starting salary go away. Most major hi-tech companies already have engineering efforts overseas. going to happen in engineering. Just yesterday it was reported that Microsoft is investing $400 million in India. (see http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/4500683.htm) And the 65,000 (soon to be 100,000) trained workers that are going back home, well they are competing against american workers on salary.
Whats happening is this. American employers are capping salaries today by bringing in hundreds of thousands of cheap workers. And after a couple of years they go home where they continue working for tech employers, but now at 1/10 of what an american makes. It takes a while to get the critical mass going. At first they start with sustaining engineering (eg supporting existing products), then they will move to having the overseas workers cost-reduce existing products. Next they will be used to add improvements to existing products, at which point they are poised for the final blow. New product development will go to Shanghai and Bangalore, and who needs those overpaid Americans anymore?
This change is coming, its already starting. Just like the Japanese change from junk manufacturers to best in the world, it may take a decade or two but its going to happen. And in a decade or two you're barely 30, then what are you going to do?
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FWIW, this is a followup post by the OP:
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I have no illusions that I will change the mind of people already in the program. As you say, denial runs deep. Cialdini wrote in his excellent book 'The Psychology of Influence', "... our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done. Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision.?
My hopes are to reach the students on this board who are *considering* engineering but haven't yet committed. I myself am an EE who has worked for hi-tech companies, mostly household names, in the Bay area for over a decade. Of course on an anonymous board nobody can verify that, and I want to keep my anonymity. But they CAN go out and talk to real engineers and see what I'm saying is true, they can follow the links and read the stories for themselves.
And what you say about offshoring is true; just see the BusinessWeek article called "Look Who's Going Offshore : Tech startups are heading overseas even more eagerly than multinationals" at http://www.businessweek.com/ma..._20/b3883090_mz063.htm for one example discussing the trend.
However I will quibble with you on one point. You write "there is still a need for, and there will be jobs for, highly educated (grad degrees), creative "architect" engineers". This is true today but won't be true in 15 or 20 years. The experienced designers are here in the US and there are few overseas today, but given 2 decades of experience my bet is that there will be a sufficient supply of them abroad as well. Many MS and PhD's in engineering are going to foreign-born engineers, and eventually they can take over that role (and many will choose to return home where the standard of living at even 1/3 the pay is head and shoulders above what they can get in the Bay area with its $500K starter homes).
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