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RE: Give it up - you can't win this one

Posted by racerguy on January 5, 2008 at 07:49:33

In Reply to: RE: Give it up - you can't win this one posted by Ole Lund Christensen on January 5, 2008 at 04:03:40:

>>So I won the other ones:_)<<

If you thinking you've "won the other ones" will make you less annoying, then sure - you've won them all ;-)

>>More seriously, good engineers are never a commodity. <<

Sorry, but you're still wrong. If you had said "not always" instead of "never," you would have been right. The fact is that in many markets, especially emerging markets, even good engineers are often a commodity.

Just as an example: I have a good friend who comes from China. He is an engineer and scientist, he is brilliant, and he is highly educated (two PhDs granted simultaneously from the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University). He has been described as "one in a million." The problem is that in China, being "one in a million" means there are a million others just like you. That's the definition of commodity :-)

>>In England and USA an engineer lack social prestige, the Germans, Scandinavians, Chinese and Japanese place them at the top of their society.<<

My German engineer wife (RWTH-Aachen) believed this when she came to the US to get a PhD. There is some grain of truth to it - at one point nearly everyone in the US was called an "engineer." The trash collector was called a "sanitation engineer," the bus driver was called a "transportation engineer," even housewives were called "domestic engineers." It did do further damage to the title, "Engineer," but not nearly as much as it would in an engineer-worship society. After a bit more than 10 years of living in the US, my wife now thinks the overarching worship of engineers that she was used to in her home country is silly.

But that's not really germane to your point. The real issue is this - in rigid, socialistic societies, class and social standing are very important. In the countries and regions you reference, most people are nothing more than the sum of their education and social position. Since engineers tend to be highly educated, their status in a rigid, socialistic society will tend to be high.

OTOH, in a more egalitarian society such social class distinctions are less important. People are not merely the sum of their education and social standing. In an egalitarian society, rags-to-riches success
stories are commonplace. In an egalitarian society, a high-school dropout with a desire to succeed can become a billionare. While this does occasionally happen in the socialistic countries, it is by comparison extremely rare.

So, don't make the self-serving, egotistical mistake of thinking that the US is inferior because we don't put engineers on a pedestal. They don't belong there any more than does any other skilled worker.

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