Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!eric!joplin!hui
From: hui@joplin.mpr.ca (Michael Hui)
Newsgroups: comp.org.ieee
Subject: Re: The Image of the Engineer
Message-ID: <1919@eric.mpr.ca>
Date: 25 Nov 89 17:17:48 GMT
References: <138.256E4637@ieeefs.UUCP>
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In article <138.256E4637@ieeefs.UUCP> Bill.Wilkes@ieeefs.UUCP (Bill Wilkes) writes:
>     Would you advise your child to pursue a career in Engineering?
>     Why?

My answer: not in North America or most of Europe.

Why? The management, social and economic structures and values of this
society treat engineering staff like robots on a production line.
It gets more and more difficult to start your own small firm, since the
initial capital outlay is large. The continueing R&D budget is still
large even if you manage to get started. And, (un)fortunately, depending
on how you look at it, an unspoken assumption is that engineers want to
work on the latest ideas and developments, keeping themselves as close
to state of the art as their intellect would allow. That translates to
a big R&D budget, which implies joining a large corporation.

A lawyer, or a physician, does not have an R&D budget, runs his/her own
business most of the time, get a challenging enough assignment without
any big initial capital outlay, and does not need continueing R&D
dollars to keep afloat.

The key here is this: pursue a profession that allows you to own your
own professional practice as easily as possible, without foregoing any
opportunity for technical challenge.

MH  1987 UBC B.A.Sc.  IC design engineer