Quote: (04-22-2016 01:24 AM)All or Nothing Wrote:
Quote: (04-22-2016 01:11 AM)philosophical_recovery Wrote:
Take SpaceX, for instance. Cool tech, no doubt, but they work their employees to the bone (over 100 hours a week from the rumors I've heard) and sometimes don't even pay 80k.
People need to understand that:
Engineers = Blue collar workers + technical skills
They are the intellectual workhorses of major corporations. A workhorse with a high speed mind is still a workhorse.
Being an engineer, I used to think that we were special.
We aren't.
The author that spurned this is correct, however. Some technical people are worth an order of magnitude better than the others.
Doesn't matter if you can't escape a salary and monetize it.
You're still a salary drone.
Good engineers or not, throw enough of them at a problem, and give them access to a lab and testing equipment, and they can solve a problem (if a solution exists), or waste a lot of money and find out something can't be done.
Or, they could miss something fundamental and just waste a bunch of money.
Point is, enough men are good enough at math and have a long enough memory and access to existing literature to be able to get to the bottom of problems, solve them, write the report, and build your widget.
Sometimes, you fuck up and piss off the skilled guy that knows all the intricacies of the interconnected bits and you lose a few years because nobody else can wrap their head around the problem.
Other times, you stumble across a guy that can absorb that, deal with the politics, and get you product working again.
Forging a path out of that fray is a worthwhile goal.