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.


_