Engineering sux

The incredible boredom of concentrating your attention on important details.

The difficulty of remaining unemployed when you have marketable skills.

The mandatory vow of chastity.

No time for properly primping in front of a mirror five times a day.

Or, on a more serious note, the soul-numbing consequences of filling your days with an activity you apparently don't enjoy, would get no satisfaction from, and are likely to do badly as a result.

1) they are constantly being pushed around by MBAs who don't know their ass from hole in the ground and whose qualifications apparently boil down to frat connections and good golf patter

2) they are constantly having to design down because of endless cost-cutting, a shrinking manufacturing base, investors who are unwilling to take risks, etc

3) they didn't go into pure science, their career arc basically ends with them sitting behind a desk, with a plaque that says "manager" or "vice president", doing tons of paperwork and attending tons of meetings with lame braindead MBA fratboys, looking over their underlings designs

4) the amount of business travel increases as you go up the ladder

5) engineering firms reward good workers by shoving them into the most soul-killing divisions of labor: management, sales, customer satisfaction, QA, etc

anyway, you get the idea. they spend LOTS and LOTS of time bemoaning that they went into engineering and made tons of money (cue accusatory stare at their children) instead of staying in grad school forever and researching robotics or astrophysics or applied math or something.

And you will be surrounded at your workplace by nothing but other engineers, who will be thinking these exact same precise thoughts.

Silence, if you don't want to be an engineer and especially if you can't see beauty in the symmetry of mathematics or don't have any fascination with machinery or structures, then don't. If you're doing engineering because someone else is footing the bill, give up that sugartit and strap some balls on and go do what you want. You don't have to discredit engineering to justify your decision.

And since this is a books place - go read What Color is Your Parachute or Mindfulness and Meaningful Work: Explorations in Right Livelihood, something along those lines.

Yes, but beware the alternative of doing superficially arty but actually just much worse-paid soul-numbing crap instead.

"Jones the Steam"

Don't count on me, I engineer
On every move we make from here
I'll take the lead
You take the pain
You see, I engineered this game

Who do you think you fool when you talk about us?
Why do you walk on glass when you know it cuts?
There must be a reason why,
You put my life in overdrive.
I'm up to here with push and shove...
From here on in, I've had enough!

Don't count on me, I engineer
On every move we make from here
I'll take the lead
You take the pain
You see, I engineered this game

I'll leave it all behind in a cloud of dust,
There's an even chance I'll shine or rust.
On my own I've got the time...
There's a light ahead at the end of the line.
Seeing you leaves me no doubt,
I'll take the wheel from here on out.

Don't count on me, I engineer
On every move we make from here
I'll take the lead
You take the pain
You see, I engineered this game

On my own I've got the time...
There's a light ahead at the end of the line.
Seeing you leaves me no doubt,
I'll take the wheel from here on out.

Don't count on me, I engineer
On every move we make from here
I'll take the lead
You take the pain
You see, I engineered...........

Bloke now wishes he'd done engineering in college too, but it was kind of frowned on - oh, you want to do playing with meccano instead of PURE THOUGHT? How common! If he had enough money to live on without having to work, he would go to college and get an engineering degree.

Oh wait, we're supposed to be talking you out of it. Er, well, where I went college engineers were resolutely dorky and drank too much and wore aran jumpers and couldn't get girls to go out with them. How's that?

but it was fun, anyways.

scott seward... nice poem.
and for heaven's sake keep me out of your wishes!

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=60310&page=4

before I came here.

It's more than I need. Engineers themselves talking about it.

If needed by anyone else...

But anyways, I have no regrets about changing from engineering to literature. accentmonkey is otm imo, pure thought is more fulfilling than meccano.

And I'm actually surprised to see that an engineer reads books of fiction and visits this site. I was under the impression that engineers only read, you know, technical and managerial things. But Jaq is probably a European engineer and thus somewhat more cultured than us lowly Americans. That's another thing too. I sit in on meetings where ESA reps teleconference with NASA reps. Being from the North, it really surprised me to hear Texan Board Chairs in these meetings using phrases like "might could have" (as in "We might could have fixed that foam issue better") or "used to could" (as in "We used to could send people to the moon"). I always wonder how the Brits and the other ESA reps, for whom English is a second language - yet whose English is better than a lot of the Texans' - regard their Texan counterparts.

Most of my co-workers read massive amounts of sci fi and fantasy and one reads scads of romance novels. I seem to be the only one interested in Updike, Vidal, Robinson, Lessing, those sorts, along with the sci fi.

Most of my co-workers read massive amounts of sci fi and fantasy and one reads scads of romance novels. I seem to be the only one interested in Updike, Vidal, Robinson, Lessing, those sorts, along with the sci fi.
Of course, often both camps seem to like
this

I'll check the book title; what fun if it's someone around here!

"I have steered clear of Mr. Pynchon, though his titles shout out at me from the shelves. As with Mr. Joyce, there's much trepidation on my part." [how does one get things to appear in italics on this site?]

--I think it should be a requirement that all engineers read Gravity's Rainbow at some point in their lives, just out of respect for the background they share with him. I would imagine they'd like him, too.--I just quickly skimmed an online biography, apparently different than the one I'd read before, that says Pynchon graduated with a BA in literature; apparently he changed majors from engineering physics to literature. I'd always thought he'd first gotten an engineering degree, went and fought in the Korean War, and got an MA in English upon his return to the States. So I guess engineers don't necessarily have all that in common with him. I guess I have more in common with him than I'd thought. Except, of course, that he's an incredibly better writer than I can ever really hope to be.--So I guess I'll rephrase what I said above: It should be a requirement for everybody to read Gravity's Rainbow at some point in their lives, just out of respect for incredibly good art.

As for you, Jaq, you should probably read Joyce's Ulysses as well as Gravity's Rainbow and decide which one you like better. Just for fun. It doesn't matter how much of either you understand, they're both pretty impossible to follow too closely. For me it's the prose itself that's just awe-inspiring. And, by the way, Gravity's Rainbow wins out over Ulysses in my opinion.

And by golly, it is! Playback, by one Mark Coleman. Woot! I was being read aloud fascinating bits of it last night while falling asleep.

I like the idea of going for both Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses. I was put off the idea of Mr. Joyce by reading Edna O'Brien's short bio before I actually read anything he wrote. But husband read The Dead and Portrait of the Artist aloud to me a few months back, and well....okay he's genius with words.

You can use the standard html tags in here: < i > and < /i > for italics.

i too thought jaq was a quebecois(???) male, or something.

oh and in response to the original post: engineers suck. i don't know anyone who likes engineers and i don't know why anyone would.

perhaps because some of us also swallow?

Sorry Chris, to so lower the tone, but since you're the mod you can sweep it away.

one of the negative points is unrealistic expectations from small companies who hire you but do not train you too well. This led to me losing my first engineering job about 3 months before Sept 11th happened and all tech hiring stopped. I was unemployed for 6 months before heading to the mortgage industry for 3 years. I escaped that in april, and am now trying to work my way back into an engin job, even tho i have little experience and skills that have been rusting for the last 4-5 years.

also, you graduate from school with an ass-load of student debt.

This is not limited to engineering. It's a small company thing. Bloke just went from working in a small company as Sys Admin and general all-round IT god to working in G00gle, and he was amazed that on his first day he wasn't asked to do any actual work, just listen to a lot of information about how the company works and what will be expected of him when they finally do let him do some work.

Why would I do such a thing!?

For a more humourous view try Dilbert
www.dilbert.com