Your comment is a fancy way of saying that people without a degree are lazy or stupid!.
And then you wonder whyTechseveryone gets upset!
Unfortunately,for those of us with insufficient means,there is a third reason why we may not undertake a Degree course,-------Simple economic survival!
You,somehow managed to keep body & soul together for 8 years at University.
I can only surmise,that either:-
(1) You have independent means of your own.
(2) You have wealthy parents.
(3) You have an enormous Student Loan.
(4) You worked your way with various menial jobs---If so, Bravo!!
(3) & (4) are the ONLY options left for most of us,so you will find most people opt for the less prestigious path of becoming a Technician.
Anyone with family responsibilities has to balance his/her "dedication" to self improvement against that required by the family.
Your comment is a fancy way of saying that people without a degree are lazy or stupid!.
And then you wonder why Techs get upset!
It won't be long before the lab skills are completely unnecessary in most work places.
It won't be long before the lab skills are completely unnecessary in most work places.i have to add to that .. it won't be long before the engineering bits can be outsourced too.. India and china are full of an immense potential. Just like japan started by manufacturing by copying 50 years ago and then moved into actual design , the chinese and indians are gaining fast. they actually have overtaken 'the west' in several area's...
it won't be long before all we have in 'the west' are 'man-agers' and unemployed people ...
And then there will be role reversal... the thrid-world is coming ...
better start making 'mandarin' a requirement class in engineering courses...
No one has yet to answer my question about how to fix the "broken" system. Why complain if you can't suggest a better alternative?
No one has yet to answer my question about how to fix the "broken" system. Why complain if you can't suggest a better alternative?Hell that's an easy one! Base rewards on ability and productivity! Cadetship based user/s pays education. Let industry wear the cost and the benefit of education. Educational institutions working with industry rather than being an insular process line for unemployable w**kers.
Add less government interference and you have a recipe where innovation and ability reaps national rewards. Asia has no problem with this while the western world bogs itself to standstill with flawed regulation.
You finally admit that having the piece of paper makes a difference.
If the schools weren't teaching anything useful, employers wouldn't pay for it now, would they?
Another metric is the fact that very few folks in the upper half of my graduating class could not find work.
Obviously the students had something to offer that employers were looking for.
To me, that indicates anything but unemployable people.
And if Asian countries have it figured out so well, why is it so common for Asian students to study abroad, for example, in USA?
One more thing; you know who is the first to go when there are budget cuts? That's right, the strictly technical folks. Management gets a raise for saving the day by slashing expenses. And people wonder why I chose the managerial route...
No one has yet to answer my question about how to fix the "broken" system. Why complain if you can't suggest a better alternative?
At least where I live, it is very common for employers to pay for school. Kind of hard to turn down free money, isn't it? Not to mention a healthy pay raise when your finished.
In that case,you are extremely fortunate.The days of "Cadet Engineers" are long gone in my country!
Can't pay for undergraduate school? Yep, me and most of my buddies actually worked our way through school.
From your "healthy pay raise" comment above,you were already working in the Industry.
I can't see MacDonalds giving you a pay rise when you graduate!
When there is a will, there is a way.
Again,priorities intervene.
If you had to work menial jobs,& raise a family,buy a house,plus pursue your University studies,you too,may have decided it was not worth it!
To those of us of an earlier generation, except for those fortunate enough to obtain a Cadetship,which were never plentiful, University was really not a viable option,as we needed to be making reasonable money from the time we left school.
Many Techs did "Go back to school"& do Engineering Degrees when they were more financially stable.Most of these people were very fine Engineers.
I have a lot of respect for techs; I personally would never do that kind of work, though I'm certainly capable of it. The EEs that I've worked with have no reason to go to a lab troubleshooting circuits. Instead, their pre-occupied with managing the project and / or designing circuits. And most do a damn good job at it.
There are numerous telecom companies in my area. Most don't have a lab here; instead, we have design, management, and customer support personnel. The test / manufacturing has been outsourced to China, Korea, and a host of other countries. It won't be long before the lab skills are completely unnecessary in most work places.QuoteMany types of equipment require testing over & above that performed at the factory.
Technicians do still need to do a lot of the stuff I enumerated earlier,both in installation & ongoing customer support.
Your scenario seems more gloomy for EEs than for Techs.
Then why didn't you go for an MBA,instead?
I didn't get an MBA because I had no interest in it. The EE program was fun and a great challenge. I figured that I could easily get into engineering management without the MBA and I was right. Haven't regretted it in the least, after seeing how EEs are treated at most places.
I think I'll just add some fuel to the fire and mention that "I'm better than you" issues are not restricted to different levels of education. There is also the whole "I'm better than you" between different fields of engineering.
I think I will now sit back and enjoy the dysfunctional family circus. (secretly laughing at chimp behavior)
PS
My experience tells me, I am only considered as good as my last engineering task. If the last task went well everybody praises me and I can do no wrong, if last task went bad/wrong everybody vilifies me and I can do no right.
The second situation cannot be avoided, when you are pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Customers always want things twice as fast, twice as cheap, exotic features, etc...
This means that often university educated engineers break good design rules, not because they "don't know crap", but because they are expected to deliver designs meeting specifications that cannot be achieved using the conventional engineering way of doing things.
I didn't get an MBA because I had no interest in it. The EE program was fun and a great challenge. I figured that I could easily get into engineering management without the MBA and I was right. Haven't regretted it in the least, after seeing how EEs are treated at most places.
So you actually worked your way into management without any formal qualifications in the field? Fancy that!
What if you have to find another job, and you come across a company that rejects you because you don't have that MBA?
(BTW, that's actually not uncommon here in Oz, MBA's have been all the rage in the last decade or so)
What is the difference between you working your way into management without qualifications in management, and someone working their way into engineering without (or with lesser) qualifications in engineering?
Both engineering management, and practical engineering have long histories of allowing technically "unqualified" people into the roles (at least in Australia, I won't speak for other countries). The difference is just semantics.
Dave.
It is the job of the engineer to educate management. if they tell me they need x in y amount of time with z performance and my gut says it can't be done i TELL them! i give them a couple of options but i am not going to deliver a mediocre product. i have, on numerous occasions, gone in against 'the managers' , even in front of our customers. They appreciate this tremendously. Whenever there is a design review meeting or kickoff meeting for a new design one customer DEMANDS that they fly me over ... even if i only need to be there for 10 minutes.
better to take an extra day to work it out than spend 3 months trying to fix it later ...
I simply refuse to deliver crap and i make this very clear. i am not afraid to speak my mind.
Simply nodding 'yes' is the best way to end in the downward spiral of delivering crap , having to fix it later and then being labeled a 'bad designer' since it didn't work right and 'how come your stuff ran over budget and over time'. once you are 'burned' you are 'burned' for the rest of your life. I refuse to fall for that.
And as far as the 'marketing and sales' promises to the customer are concerned : they can get stuffed for all i care.
I see a tendency to use to term practical engineering for what I consider to be the lower level engineering jobs, as if higher level engineering (at the level of architecture, systems engineering, modeling, etc.) is less practical.
I think we can all agree that lower engineering functions can be accessible to someone without a degree.
Just like the lower to middle levels of management are attainable by someone without the MBA.
But as you progress up either one of these ladders, the more important the degree becomes.
I know plenty of degree-less folks that made it into lower level engineering jobs after 10 years or so experience, only to hit a glass ceiling because they had no formal qualifications.
The same is true with management. And yes, when the MBA becomes a limiting factor, I have no reason not to go back to school at the company's expense.