Retirement

Here at work they're doing away with pensions. The change will be to a more 'aggressive' cooperative 403b (we're a 501(c)3 nfp) plan, where if you invest 6% they'll match an additional 3%.

I have to wonder: are retirement plans really just some creamy corporate milk that companies feed you to keep you placated? If I were to take my salary today, and assume a 3% pay raise every year for the next 35 years, and then take 9% of that and invest it every year, and then get a healthy 7% return on my investment every year...I'd end up 65 years old with $1.1 million in the bank. Of course, that's $1.1 million in 2046 dollars. Back track to current dollars and I'd have about $568,000 if I were doing this today. And of course this is hilariously illusory because who has managed a 7% year over year the last 15 years? No one.

At least I have the comfort of knowing that when I retire in 2046 I can rely on my Social Security checks...oh wait.
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Engineering: A Bubble?

One of the things about engineers that people forget (or don't) is that we have a really high employment rate, an average salary that easily puts us in the upper middle class, and typically engineers enjoy a career that can be upwardly mobile, with six figure incomes reasonable in your first decade of work.
One might argue that the above job security factors are inherent in a system where getting a diploma from a four-year ABET accredited university in some engineering field is extremely difficult, and that the massive washout rate (75%) for freshman/sophomore engineering majors is evidence of the rarity/justification for the salaries of engineers. Or that the difficulties of the profession merit the pay. I wouldn't argue either of these points are wrong. They're just not explanatory of why engineers are thriving.
A lot of other college majors are hard. Take, for instance, biochemistry - where a student must master high level chemistry, math, and biology. And yet biochemists in general do not enjoy the pay rate, nor the upward mobility, that engineers do.

The answer, I'm afraid, is simply that this is the right world and right time to be an engineer. Engineers have become the ubiquitous go-to in a world where the average Joe can barely find the reset button on their wall clock. We design everything in your life. We build it. We design and build the store where it is sold. We design and build the manufacturing facility where it is designed and built. We design the store shelves it sits on, the cash register where you pay for it. The network of fiber optic cables that processes your electronic payment - we designed that, too. And programmed the software. We designed your car, the roads, the street lights, the stop signs. Even your mailbox...somewhere there's an engineering drawing for that thing. When you climb your stairs and go brush your teeth, thank the engineers that design, maintain, and coordinate your clean water supply, and who develop the packaging for your toothpaste. When you call someone on your phone, thank the engineer that designed the phone, the engineer that designed the software on it, the engineer that designed the radio tower, the engineer that designed the electrical cables...and so on and so forth.

Let's take one specific example, to further this point: the life cycle of corn. For this case, "designed by engineers" will be shortened to DBE. A farmer drives his truck (DBE) to the co-op and buys bags of seed corn. The bags? DBE. The farmer then drives them home and pours them into his planter (DBE) that is pulled behind a tractor (DBE). Earlier, he used a sprayer (DBE) to prep the field for planting. Behind the planter he pulls a fertilizer (DBE) sprayer. The corn grows up nice and tall. At the harvest, he drives a combine (DBE) that cuts the corn plants and separates the straw and chaff from the kernels of corn. The corn is then augured into a trailer (DBE) and driven to the co-op (DBE) where it is stored in massive holding silos (DBE). Soon it is sold and ground up with other ingredients (DBE) and fed to livestock. The livestock are butchered in a plant (DBE) and shipped in chilled trucks (DBE) to grocery stores (DBE) all over the country. I think you get the point. We engineers have our fingers in every pie. And there's a good reason for this.

Technology, quite simply, is at an engineer's level. Which wasn't always the case. Engineers did important work for the last ten decades, don't get me wrong. But we didn't always have digital displays on microwaves (or microwaves at all for that matter). We didn't have wireless internet connections in our homes. Our daily lives, 50 years ago, depended on engineers to be sure. It's just that the reach of engineers was a lot narrower. People didn't need a chemical engineer to formulate toothpaste back when a box of baking soda would do. People didn't need an electrical engineer to design in-car GPS systems when a map would do. It's just that, throughout the last century if you wanted to improve people's lives in terms of economy, simplicity, or efficiency, you took an existing practice and put an engineer on it. The question is whether (more like when) engineering is a field that will reach employment saturation.

I've argued before (maybe not here but somewhere; I love to argue) that mechanical engineering is approaching obsolescence. Or maybe obsolescence is the wrong word. I think a better word would be to say that mechanical engineering is evolving into a supportive role in engineering. What do I mean? Well take for instance robotics. No longer are mechanical relays and actuators the primary driving focus of the robotic design. Instead, the electrical engineer's ability to embed circuitry, and the software engineer's ability to upload intelligence into that circuitry, has become paramount. Hydraulic pistons are hydraulic pistons. A mechanical engineer that was doing robotics 20 years ago with hydraulic actuators would still know how to operate in today's world. Only, the pistons wouldn't be controlled by pneumatic valves anymore, they'd be controlled with electrically-actuated valves with PID control architecture and feedback fuzzy logic...
Obviously this is a sensitive topic for me, as my title at work is "staff mechanical engineer" but even I see the end of the days where hordes of mechanical engineers go design cars or airplanes. Soon, instead of leading design efforts, their job will be to design packaging for electronics. Already this shift is happening. I know this because it is my job.

Combine this with the surge in engineers graduating from Universities - not so much here but in India and China. India is (by some accounts) producing 400,000 engineers a year, and that was five years ago. China is producing, depending on your source, at least that many if not 25% more. That's a lot of engineers. Add in engineers in all other countries combined and you are adding 1.5 million or so each year to the global engineering pool. Meanwhile, many economies are stagnant. The demand for engineers isn't going up as fast as the supply. Some argue that Chinese and Indian engineers do not take vacant jobs, they simply displace existing engineers from the current pool, either by literally taking their job or by making their company more capability-competitive in the market and forcing cuts at foreign companies.

So let's come back around to the original question: is engineering a bubble? The short answer is probably not. People aren't jumping into it for the easy money. Hiring engineers is a a pretty low-risk investment. But the evolution of the field of engineering has been one of broadening influence, increased specialization, increased collaboration, and an increase in project speed. It is the need for specialization that drives the current boom in engineering. No single engineer has the knowledge required to build the iPad. You need hundreds, each with a particular skill, all working in careful unison, to produce that sort of technology. Same for things like Garmin GPS. They employ hundreds of engineers to produce their products. Mechanical engineers that specialize in rapid prototyping, mechanical engineers that specialize in injection molding, mechanical engineers that specialize in PCB packaging/interfacing, mechanical engineers that specialize in packaging the device in boxes...and that's to just name the MechE's involved. Add in electrical engineers, computer engineers, computer programmers...and you get quite a cadre of specialized engineers, all working in unison on little bits and pieces of mega-complicated engineering projects.

The flip side of this is that increased specialization requirements drive a growth market in engineering, but also put more engineers at risk for sudden obsolescence. The idea of bubbles is that they grow fast and pop hard. Specialized engineering fields, on the other hand, grow slow and die slow. But make no mistake, I really believe that engineering fields will go away as technology drives them into obsolescence. My wise words to college students? Differentiate yourself from all your peers by double majoring in two different-but-related engineering majors. You'll have to work harder, obviously, but if the two majors are related then a lot of courses will count towards both degrees and you won't have to take too many extra courses. Your double major will make you doubly employable. Then, when you get hired, start learning a third engineering field on your own.
For example, I majored in biological engineering as an undergrad, then switched to mechanical engineering in grad school. As soon as I graduated, I began teaching myself electrical engineering and now I'm learning to write in C#, Java and Objective-C. Cross-disciplinary engineers are the kings of the engineering world.


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The Limits of Steve Jobs

There were some things that were sacred to Steve:

"Every evening, he would have dinner around the kitchen table with his wife and kids. He didn't go out socializing or to black-tie dinners. He didn't travel much. Even though he was focused on his work, he was always home for dinner."

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Foster Care and Austerity Politics

In an eye-opening and poignant article, Ben Dueholm writes about the state of foster care in America:

In a way that we never really anticipated, welcoming Sophia into our home led us into the wilderness of red tape and frustration navigated every day by low-income parents who struggle to raise children with the critical help of government programs. That same week, the office of the bone specialist who had treated Sophia’s broken leg at the hospital tried to get out of scheduling her for an urgent follow-up appointment. Like many medical practices, his endeavored at all costs to avoid working for Medicaid’s paltry reimbursement rates. (The office went so far as to deny ever having treated her; eventually, however, they gave in.) We went through a similar amount of stress trying to put Sophia into daycare. We had to run down a pile of government paperwork, prove our employment, and then simply wait and hope that our daycare center would accept the state’s stingy pay. And yet, frustrated as we were, we couldn’t exactly blame the doctors and daycare providers for being heartless. As the state’s stinginess pushes more of the costs of caring for foster children onto them, it’s no surprise that they start to balk.

It’s a major bureaucratic process to remove a child from her home and family. The state insures the child, pays for daycare, investigates the claims of abuse, and retains legal custody, but it cannot actually put a baby to bed at night. And so, on the other side of this most intimate public-private partnership are usually people like us, left alone with a stranger’s child and a garbage bag full of clothes and wondering what’s going to happen next. And what happens next depends, to a stomach-churning degree, on the state’s willingness and ability to keep up its half of the bargain.

I agree with him that this is an incredibly important article. I encourage all my readers to take the whole thing in, and I challenge you to do so without getting emotional. By the time I had finished it, I had resolved to open a Science/Engineering Orphanage and somehow take in hundreds of children and raise them on STEM curriculum, then send them in droves to MIT and Stanford.


Disclosure: Ben Dueholm is my brother-in-law. Smartest thing he's ever written? Obviously his wedding vows to my sister.
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Back In My Day, Things Were More Cynical

This is just the kind of epic nonsense that makes me use profanities on my blog.

I will say this directly to Mat Honan: if you can bitch about the recession that occurred when you graduated while simultaneously telling someone else not to bitch about the recession that is occuring when they graduate, you are a hypocritical asshole. Oh, and while you are trumpeting all your insanely awesome Gen X innovations like Google and Twitter (because a whole generation of people gets credit for the work of three people) let me point out that you are writing this on your tumblr (which was founded by a Millennial). Maybe we Millennials should also get credit for Groupon, Facebook, reddit, 4chan...I mean really do we want to have this fight? I don't think we do. Oh, and while you were perfecting all of musicdom you also produced this. I'll happily give credit where it is due for that.

Honestly, more of a response than this is beneath me.


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Not-Faster-Than-Light

Back in September, I chided people for jumping on the FTL neutrino bandwagon, though I admitted that the facts might sway even me into the "Einstein was wrong" camp.

Unfortunately for hype-beasts, it appears Einstein wasn't wrong. Faster-than-light travel continues to be impossible.


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Peter Thiel's UTTER NONSENSE

First, let me admit that I am really upset right now by what I read in Peter Thiel's article on the stagnation of technology called "The End of the Future." I am going to discuss it angrily, I admit, but please forgive me if this seems like a direct attack on Peter Thiel - I don't know him and I doubt if I did I would dislike him. He was, and is, a brilliant venture capitalist (more on that later) but I just really, really dislike what he wrote:

The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. But any such assessment encounters an immediate and almost insuperable challenge. Who can speak about the true health of the ever-expanding universe of human knowledge, given how complex, esoteric, and specialized the many scientific and technological fields have become? When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?

Mr. Thiel, I have two degrees in science. Many of my friends have PhD's in science. I work at a research and development company, a not-for-profit, that specializes in not only cutting-edge research in life sciences, chemistry, and engineering, but also has several large government contracts to provide "subject matter experts" to them, which are essentially people whose specialized knowledge has no peer. At my company there are 140+ people with PhDs. There are 100+ more with at least a master of science degree.

And so with this large sample of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and coworkers I can assure you: we are not secret lawmakers. We are not politicians in disguise. In fact, politicians make us sick. The conservative conspiracy theorists that assume intelligent scientists have an agenda are only half correct: our 'agenda' is to increase the scientific knowledge available to our species. Our agenda is to vote against politicians who suggest Darwin was a fraud. Our aim is to secure as much government revenue for ourselves as we can, because our research has a proven track record of economic stimulus. Pointless wars, half a planet away, have done nothing for the economy other than help to cause the Great Recession of 2008 upon which your thesis is based.

Thiel then writes this:

In the past decade, the unresolved energy challenges of the 1970s have broadened into a more general commodity shock, which has been greater in magnitude than the price spikes of the two world wars and has undone the price improvements of the previous century. In the case of agriculture, at least, technological famine may lead to real old-fashioned famine.

Shouldn't we also talk about the grain subsidies for corn-based ethanol, championed by many an ill-informed (or self-preserving) politician, which have completely ruined the agricultural balanced system in this country? Shouldn't we point out that while ethanol remains an impossibly tiny contributer to the overall energy portfolio in America, the commodity shock due to the scarcity of corn-based feed for livestock has caused an outward flowing ripple in the food price system in this country that has had as great, if not greater, effect than the slowdown in crop yield acceleration he blames on poor innovation?

Thiel then writes this:

While innovation in medicine and biotechnology has not stalled completely, here too signs of slowed progress and reduced expectations abound. In 1970, Congress promised victory over cancer in six years’ time; four decades later, we may be 41 years closer, but victory remains elusive and appears much farther away.

Mr. Thiel makes no mention of cancer survival rate over this period, which has gone through the roof, if you will. It turns out that a Congressional promise of cancer cures is not the same thing as a doctor's promise of cancer cures (Thiel later acknowledges the abject lack of scientific knowledge in Congress). It also turns out that politicians are full of crap on many instances, and putting all of humanity's biotechnological progress on trial for the misstatements of 70's Senators is ridiculous, and utter nonsense.

Thiel then writes this:

If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity. And also in reverse: If economic gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and technological progress.

This is a fallacious argument. Meaningful technological progress has occurred for the last 30 years in the area of fuel efficiency and power in diesel locomotives. Currently, just a few engines can pull a quarter mile long, fully loaded, string of coal cars from Wyoming to Texas at a very high speed. I know this because they go right past my house, hulking monstrosities of American engineering wonder. And yet, this coal super-train capability cannot honestly be held responsible for economic prosperity. On the contrary, stronger diesel engines means less are necessary to pull a finite amount of coal, so fewer need to be built. Longer trains means less trains, which means less engineers driving them which means fewer jobs. Automation and traffic control of train/rail systems has streamlined efficiency and driven down margins, making coal-train-operation less profitable.
And to use Mr. Thiels words, and also in reverse: in the middle of the Great Recession of 2008, Apple released both the iPhone and the iPad, Google launched their Android OS that has become prevalent on many smartphones, and both Apple and Google (and their hardware manufacturers and their shareholders) have enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity. Further, saying "if economic progress, as measured by certain key indicators" is an unfair statement. Because it allows the writer (Mr. Thiel) or anyone else to choose whichever key indicators they want to make their point (I'll use one in a second). I could point to Apple's stock price as a key indicator. I could point to the 25% decrease in gas prices the last 3 months as a key indicator. I could point to the housing market collapse as a key indicator...of something.


Mr. Thiel then writes:

Economic progress may lag behind scientific and technological achievement, but 38 years seems like an awfully long time.

Indeed, most of Mr. Thiel's article seems to suggest that since 1973 we are no better, the economy is no stronger, and Americans are no better off. How can this be? Let's use a carefully selected key indicator, the GDP/population. In 1973 this would be $4.9 billion/ 211 million people = $23/person. Fast forward to 2010, and this becomes $42/person. According to this key indicator, every American is contributing basically twice as much to the economy, or stated a different way: the economy is twice as strong per unit of population.
Mr. Thiel then writes:

This analysis suggests an explanation for the strange way the technology bubble of the 1990s gave rise to the real-estate bubble of the 2000s. After betting heavily on technology growth that did not materialize, investors tried to achieve the needed double-digit returns through massive leverage in seemingly safe real-estate investments. This did not work either, because a major reason for the bubble in real estate turned out to be the same as the reason for the bubble in technology: a mistaken but nearly universal background assumption about easy progress. Without fundamental gains in productivity (presumably driven by technology), real-estate values could not go up forever. Leverage is not a substitute for scientific progress.

Wait, so it's technology that is to blame for the housing market crash? I cannot believe what utter nonsense this is. And if that is his point, then shouldn't he castigate himself a bit here? Thiel helped found PayPal in 1998, right in the midst of the Dotcom boom.

Mr. Thiel then writes:

The technology slowdown threatens not just our financial markets, but the entire modern political order, which is predicated on easy and relentless growth.

We are now in section six, page four of this essay and he has never given any evidence of a technology slowdown, in fact he has stated twice that a technological slowdown is nearly impossible to measure. I'm reading his article on a tablet PC, by the way. Which is receiving wireless internet from another room. Which is also connected to a flat screen TV and gives me ATT Uverse. Which is sent as photons through a fiber optic cable that can stretch hundreds of miles. Which is made of a super-pure form of glass in a clean room in a cutting edge manufacturing facility on another continent. Technology slowdown? Harumph.
Lastly, Mr. Thiel writes:

Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost.

Did he really just write that? I wish I'd started with this section of his essay, because it's clearly where he saved his best:

Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse.

So wait, are we supposed ignore that the hippy-elected, black President recently made the news for a $535 million loan to Solyndra, a solar energy company? It's almost like the hippies elected him for more than just the color of his skin. The thing is, I don't think there are many people left in America who don't acknowledge that in many ways, things are getting worse. But this article Mr. Thiel wrote was supposed to be about technology, not the public school system or criminal justice system or mass transit system or military industrial complex or foreign wars and torture at 'black' locations or the myriad of irrelevant-to-this-discussion topics where America is struggling.
Look, I do want to quote positively one thing Mr. Thiel wrote:

Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects.

Sadly he is correct. While in large I disagree with him about technological progress - in my opinion the world is an amazing place filled with wonders that someone in 1973 could not have possibly imagined without the assistance of LSD - I do think that he is right about the Federal Government by and large hampering research and development, despite the existence of entities like the NIH and NSF. Many R&D projects are going to the the same companies, over and over, and the "military-industrial complex" label becomes appropriately applied.

One last thing: Mr. Thiel, I have this really great idea for a technology that would change modern medicine (and make you a boatload of money). I've built a working prototype at my kitchen table and proven it works to a few close friends. If you would be interested, I would love to talk to you about investment. Call me shameless, but seriously...do call me.


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Jobs Death, in his own words

In 2005, he said:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

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Squinting Into the Glaring Light of My Own Mortality

We make big plans for ourselves. Well, some of us do.We get an idea in high school that consists of "you know what would be cool? If I were to ______" and then we slowly evolve from there. In college we major in engineering, because the desire to solve problems is like an addiction to us. Eventually we graduate with a box of parts in the trunk of our car and a broad but useless array of engineering fundamentals. Our diploma is a gatekey into some engineering firm or some startup where we tirelessly and meticulously build the world, or maintain it, or even develop means to destroy it. We toil, we think, we create, but mostly we fill out paperwork.We live comfortably in the upper middle class, retire comfortably, and raise healthy, balanced children. At the end of our 30 year careers, we look back on an array of projects in which we were integral, but replaceable, and we murmur to ourselves that our lives were significant because we made tangible contributions. We explain the complicated things to our grandchildren. We die loved and fondly remembered.

And then there are people like Steve Jobs. He was the engineer rock star. The Freddie Mercury of engineering.

The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach tonight isn't because Steve Jobs is dead. I never met the man. I don't own an Apple product. My wife owns an iPod and I find the interface taxing. No, the sinking feeling in my stomach isn't for Jobs. It is the cry of my soul as it is reminded of its own fleeting mortality. "If the greatest engineer since Edison can die at a paltry 56 years," my soul worries, "then so too can I die one day." I'm only 29, I shouldn't have to worry about these things. But neither should a 56-year-old. The tragedy of life is that we don't get to choose when it starts, nor when it ends.

Update: What I wrote here about Steve Jobs' retirement seems particularly poignant, considering.

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AlphaBot

The above video has been circulating amongst us engineers (and other nerd types) with awe and wonder. As is my nature (and because I am intimately familiar with many of Boston Dynamics projects) let me just drop this one grain of salt: notice the hydraulic and power lines leading up to the suspension system?
The thing is about as autonomous as a fetus. That's not to say that in the future it won't have on board power generation, compressors, hydraulic fittings, and computer systems. It just means that it won't be next week.

Some will remember BigDog, BD's last four legged robot. It ran autonomously, as this video (which inspired widespread fear of a robotic mule uprising) shows. So it certainly is possible to pack all the guts on the bot, instead of in the ceiling above it.

I guess my bottom line is "calm down, nerds! wait for 2.0!"


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