Bleak future for Western Society (1 Viewer)

[kartman]

I was sent this article recently. I find it very sad that fewer and fewer people are willing to do engineering at university when it is the most fundamental of degrees one can undertake.

Over the years in Australia the term 'Engineer' once reserved for people who did the hard yards and obtained a 4 year Bachelor of Engineering degree has been rubbished like no other.

Just flipping through newspapers you see jobs advertised for Sales Engineers, Sanitation Engineers (garbos) or Network/Systems Engineers. I don't believe any of these people deserve the right to be called engineers just as someone cannot self appoint themselves to be Doctors or Lawyers.

Whereas in Europe the term Engineer is protected by Law this isn't the case here and hence we see it rubbished like this. While you might say that it isnt a big deal what many people don't realise is that students are shunning engineering since they get the impression that a Mechanical engineer is just a glorified mechanic or a electrical engineer is a electrician.

Hence more and more bright students who finish school shun engineering at university and we as a country lose out.

The importance of engineers to a countries economic wealth is immense. They invent and develop products that can be exported hence bringing wealth into their countries. The reason Western society is rich comapred to say Asia was the fact that we innovated and advanced technologically due to our engineers. Now less and less students do engineering at western universities and we are seeing the effects of this already.

China and India rise to become economic superpowers and they graduate over a million engineers every year compared to around the 60,000 that the US graduates. The reason is that those two countries respect the Engineer title and havent devalued it. Hence they same demand is there for entry into undergrad engineering courses as is there for law and medicine.

All innovation and manufacturing is moving out of western countries to Asian countries. Soon Australia will only be relying on minerals to get money into the country. What will we do once that runs out?

It sad indeed that we as a country have devalued and rubbished the meaning of an Engineer and now we are going to pay for it dearly as our quality of life slips further and further down the drain......

Engineer: The Word Says it All

I recently read a short article about a ten year old Australian boy who recently became an engineer. Wow, an engineer at the age of ten! When I was that age I was still trying to memorize the name and location of each of the fifty states (I guess it’s easier in Australia.) Actually, what the precocious little tot did was to sit through a months-long short-course whereupon he was bestowed with the knightly moniker of Certified Network Engineer. Gee, and I had to sit through Professor Carlson’s Unsteady Aerodynamics course for a whole semester at Texas A&M. I feel like a complete idiot for having studied aerospace engineering for seven years, riding my bicycle through icy sleet every morning (Yes, Texas has a Winter) and living on a diet of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. If someone had told me about Microsoft’s CNE program, life would have been much easier.

In today’s high technology Golden Age, the word “engineer” still commands some admiration from the unknowing and innocent public, as do the words “scientist,” “physician” and “pastor.” In part, they have the idea that engineering is a challenging profession, reserved to the few who can weather the years of study and training. Yet, thumbing through the newspaper want ads each day, I am bombarded by the word “Engineer.” Besides the traditional titles like Mechanical Engineer, Structures Engineer, Electrical Engineer, and Control Engineer, I have also seen Sales Engineer, Reliability Engineer, Marketing Engineer, Software engineer, Field Engineer and Release Engineer. Most of these titles are a consequence of a growing and complex high technology economy where engineers are no longer crewcut guys in starched shirts stooping over drafting boards like we always see in those 60s-era documentaries. Today’s engineers find themselves involved more with the control of information rather than with the design of physical things. And the Software Engineer title definitely dominates all others in the Newspaper as Silicon Valley Companies struggle to raid each other of their best people.

When I was in school, many of my friends were studying something called “computer science.” It was a difficult major, where one was not only required to learn a multitude of programming languages, but also had to master the complex logic skills and critical thinking that are necessary to command a computer to perform tasks in the most efficient and memory-miserly manner. They were known as Computer Programmers. That term doesn’t quite have the high-tech flavor of “Software Engineer,” so I can see why they changed it.

Sales Engineer is another common want ad demand. To establish the company’s high tech bottom line, a sales engineer would need an engineer’s education to understand the product they are marketing. Lets face it though, the title “sales engineer” seems somehow loftier and more professional than the term “salesman” or “salesperson.” With the latter terms we immediately envision some guy named Carl in a loud polyester suit hocking a used Oldsmobile for $8999.99. It’s all about perception and a rose by any other name is NOT as sweet.

Still, I find the preponderance of titles using “engineer” a bit disturbing. I fear that engineers are becoming the laborers of tomorrow and that may not be a good thing. Ten years ago I worked for a short time at a long-established aerospace company in England. In the UK, the word “engineer” commands little respect. People used the title frequently to describe a multitude of jobs including plumbing, grave digging, advertising, janitorial work and car repair. When identifying yourself as an engineer in reply to another’s inquiry (You never volunteer your livelihood in Britain for fear of being branded boastful) you are likely to be invited to look under their automobile bonnet to troubleshoot a sticky cam shaft. The engineers at my firm actually went on strike while I was there! I had never heard of engineers going on strike. I could just have easily pictured attorneys, architects or doctors picketing the company. To see engineers on strike like Teamsters was bizarre. They won their raise of course, but they were still poorly paid.

When I have brought my concerns to fellow engineers, I have been almost unanimously assailed with either severe apathy or an admonition that I am being way too “high brow” about engineering. After all, those doctors, lawyers, and architects are burdened with more personal accountability and have more formal education, generally, than the average engineer. I must confess, that I have yet to see a briefcase-toting attorney handing me a summons because the wind tunnel data I just took at NASA had a calibration error. Yet with the declining interest in science and engineering among school children it is unlikely that engineers will ever receive the holy reverence reserved for the other professions or even athletes and pop musicians. As the reputation and prestige of engineering is chipped away by the flippant commandeering of the word “engineer”, the best and brightest in this country will flock to other things: law, medicine, business, junk bond trading, acting etc. That would be a tragedy by any name.

 

[stazi]

hahaha im hung over and read it as 'black future for western university' i.e. UWS

 

[ace]

I dun like what this guy has to say about software engineering.

Hes probably unemployed with his "aerospace engineering" degree and needs to bitch. I bet hes wishing he had done software engineering.

 

[underthesun]

sounds like someone jealous over other "engineering" titles that are easier to achieve. Even if the name is "tainted" by crappy engineering wannabe degrees, real employers will always still be able to distinguish good engineers from bad ones. It's not like having the term "engineer" suddenly raises your status by some predefined levels.

and he obviously doesn't speak from experience when he's talking about comp sci and software engineering. It's that *much* more work than normal computer science degrees, particularly here at UNSW.

and it's another one of those hard-worker rant against people who took shortcuts. Hard work pays in the end, but if you're insecure enough to rant about others who got it a different way, should have worked smarter, not harder, no?

 

[2 Dea]

The reason China and India are in a state of economic boom is that they have the largest populations and the largest workforces. Anyway, eventually those engineers will migrate to Australia, so it doesnt really matter whether we are doing engineering or not.

 

[chris_c28]

Why is this guy equating Software Engineers to Computer Programmers? Software Engineers do so much more than Computer Programmers.

 

[Purp|e]

i think the point he's trying to make is a good one ... that here in Aus engineering is pretty much a self regulating proffession with no 'official' registration scheme (like other proffesions like med, achitecture ...etc.)

Basically all Engineers have to go buy is the shitty IEAust code of ethics which is completely un-enforcable, its only a lame guide which most australian engineers know little about.

Without some sort of rego scheme that differentiates engineers and the tasks only they are allowed to perform, most projects can just be done by who-ever. Without a compulsary code to refer to we can say to a client 'doing it this way would breach *blah blah* enviro sustainabilty, we've gotta make these changes...' but that will most likely result in them telling you to get fucked, and getting someone else to do the job.

im not sure if any of this makes sense, but anyway...