At least according to Ray Stata, the founder of Analog Devices, in a recent interview with EE Times (registration required):
EETimes: Let's talk about the state of the engineer in North America.
Stata: For whatever reason, engineering as a profession has never garnered the kind of prestige [here] that it has in other parts of the world. There's a certain breed of people who get interested in math and science, but are there enough of them? Clearly, there aren't. In Massachusetts, had it not been for the in-migration of engineers from other parts of the world, the engineering population would have declined.
I don't think anybody has got it figured out. I went to my 25th reunion [at MIT], and they had a questionnaire: "Would you send your kids to MIT?" The answers predominantly came back "No." The [respondents would] say, pardon my English, "I worked my ass off when I was there. Why would I want my kids to go through that, when at the end of the day it was the lawyers and the Wall Street guys who made all the money?"
When you're studying it, you work twice as hard as anyone in any other classes, and when you get out you work day and night and you don't make that much money. So you have to do it for love, not for money.
The one place where we haven't lost it is the whole notion of entrepreneurship, creating companies and things that are new. There's a lot of excitement there.
| 9/26/2005 1:14:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) |
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