Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists
by Philip Greenspun
Posted on 10/02/2003 3:29:44 PM PDT by A. Pole
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Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientistsby Philip Greenspun
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Site Home : Careers
"We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time of life when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent ... "-- William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus", 1903
If you are one of MIT's 25 Nobel Laureates, or in CS at MIT, Stanford, or CMU, at the MIT Media Lab, or if you are in any department at Harvard University, please click here or here.
If you'd like to know the value that members of the opposite sex put on your advanced training, try playing The Game.
I am fascinated by the 30-year decline in the relative salaries and prestige of engineers and scientists that has been accompanied by 30 years of statements by politicians and university administrators that there is a shortage of engineers and scientists.
Could the source of negative stereotypes be conditioning of youth by toy manufacturers? What about the thoughtful critiques of Artificial Intelligence research that have appeared in the media?
Naturally, the ever-expanding MIT Administration does its best to ensure that there isn't an oversupply. They've spent twenty years, for example, trying to increase the number of "underrepresented minorities" in MIT graduate school. Perhaps it is the dignified manner in which the MIT Faculty comports itself.
Of course, many computer science graduates have happy experiences, but on the whole you may be better off staying in graduate school.
[Note: I hope you don't feel, after all, that you chose the wrong college major.]
THIS IS YOUR EDUCATION, THIS IS YOUR SALARY
! $50K! ! ** ! ** * $40K! ** * Any Questions? ! ** * ! ***** * $30K! **** * ! **** * ! ***** * $20K! ***** * ! ***** * ! *** * $10K! *** * !** * ! * 0 +--------+----------+-----------+------------+---------+--*--------->
no high some Bachelor's Master's Doctor high school college Degree Degree of school diploma Philosophy diploma
Portraits of people who are putting their advanced training to good use.
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Rachel, PhD Biology UCLA 1992, enjoys the wealth of material comforts that she has accumulated during 10 years of hard work in science.
(click on the photo for a 500x750 JPEG; click here for a 1000x1500 screen-filling image)
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Though the Superconducting Supercollider project was never finished, many of its research teams have stuck together in their new careers. At the upper right is a team of high-energy physicists, still hard at work on their discretized version of Quantum Chromodynamics. At the lower right, medium-energy physicist Dr. Albert Meyerstein notes that, "I miss working with Dr. Gerald Abelson on more efficient sources of pulsed spallation neutrons but I'm glad that we can continue our collaboration on the polymeric properties of automotive pigment in a detergent-rich environment."
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Chip, PhD Chemistry Princeton '90 says "I never thought I'd be writing papers for the Journal of Root Vegetables (Fried) This career is so exciting!
Note: "Root Vegetables" is a registered trademark of the MIT Media Laboratory; not affiliated with the Journal of Root Vegetables (Steamed).
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Joe, PhD Physics Stanford '86, and Mike, PhD Biochemistry UC Berkeley '88, have become entrepreneurs in Times Square.
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Albert, PhD Electrical Engineering and Computer Science MIT '84 relaxing on 15th Street in New York City. "I had a tenure-track position at Carnegie-Mellon but after seven years they said it was unfair to keep me from the great opportunities outside the university."
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Bob, PhD Physics University of Chicago '65 working on 5th Avenue and 20th Street in Manhattan. "The experience I had publishing in Academia has been very helpful in my new career, distributing information to the public." Of course, it was pretty tough to land any sort of position at all until I took advantage of a PhD expunging service.
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Vijay and Rama find that the teamwork that got them their Harvard PhDs in astrophysics continues to pay off as they work together in the "real world".
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"Ten years of graduate school is more formal preparation than is strictly needed for most musical careers, but I find the PhD gives me the confidence I need to perform before large audiences in important venues," John, Mechanical Engineering PhD. Purdue '93
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David, PhD 1985 Artificial Intelligence MIT notes that "while my knowledge engineering skills don't seem to be worth much in today's C-hacking world, I'm learning Java and hanging out around the big New York publishers. I'll be a multimedia developer soon."
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Stammbach, Eduard. (1988). "Group responses to specially skilled individuals in a Macaca fascicularis." Behaviour, 107 (December 1988), 241-266
Does the staggering wealth of particular engineers and programmers mean that there is any chance for nerds to rise socially?
Stammbach worked with a colony of longtailed macaques. In the paper cited above, the running header is "Responses to Specially Skilled Java Monkeys." Stammbach took the lowest-ranking macaque out of the society and taught him to operate a complex machine and obtain food. When the nerd monkey was reintroduced to the society, the higher ranking macaques stopped kicking him out of the way long enough for him to complete operation of the machine and obtain food for the community. I.e., society cooperated to create the conditions under which the nerd could toil for them. However, the monkey who acquired these special skills and provided for the society did not achieve any rise in his dominance status.
-- Unabomber Manifesto, Ted Kaczynski"A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate."
Text and pictures are copyright 1990-1998 Philip Greenspun
Even if you got your BS in Long Island Sound, in this economy you may still be sleeping in the street.
Actually, 'working alongside' is a misstatement. They hired me because the weather was really hot and the work was really hard and they couldn't hire an illegal immigrant willing to do it. So basically, at age 47, I was doing the work that illegal immigrants won't do.
Forget those grim unemployment numbers. Demographic forces are about to put a squeeze on the labor supply that will make it feel like 1999 all over again.
I read this article while waiting at my son's dentist office. Out of the Top 10 jobs that will be in demand, 8 of them (if I recall correctly) are in the tech sector.
He also has a cool Web site, an interesting travelogue Travels with Samantha, an online version of his book Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, and an interesting lawsuit.
And what demographic force might that be . .
Too many over 50 applicants and not enough young ones?
You know, it occurs to me that such success stories must always be a minority of the population.
Because were everyone to be a billionaire--they would all be competing for the same goods, so the price of those goods would rise until no one is rich, even though they're each worth billions.
Now were one to argue that everyone could be be worth billions and still be rich if we lived in a world where the cost of producing goods was so low, that everything is made by self-replicating solar-powered robots for free.
But then, most people would not be able to have more than the next guy, which would make them not "feel" superior.
And so that would be a nightmare world for the majority of the wealthy who seek to accumulate money as means to assuage their feelings of inferiority.
So it would appear that no matter how much we try, money will never really make us happy--only less miserable at best.
Vijay and Rama need to move back to Bangalore. They may end up living in a mud hut, but they'll be on the cutting odge of computing evolution.
Are high wages (excepting doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, and real estate agents, of course) bad for an economy? If so, how can you still call yourself a supply-sider?
Sounds like a plan to me.
Not when the democRATs keep blocking offshore drilling.
Once you hit 50, nobody will hire you as an engineer. Your only options will be to go into business for yourself or get out of engineering altogether.
I'm all for it. Hope there is a lot of activity in that area.
'Fraid you're more right than wrong. Not only won't they hire you, they won't even bother to reply with a decent "get screwed" letter.
I gave up on engineering and am working as an architectural designer now, basically doing stuff I learned in high school drafting. My career has gone full circle.
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