People who think this way are blinded by their own worldview. A large number of the best engineers aren't in the business to become wealthy, and they don't leave the industry if they become wealthy.
The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.
> ... that chase for social status and immeasurable wealth is really downplayed since most good engineers won't get there
I think that this is an excellent observation, but I also think it's worth noting that many good engineers don't care if they get "there". If you're naturally inclined to find reward in problem-solving, then trained in how to solve progressively more complicated (and therefore rewarding) problems, the value comes from that activity, rather than in accumulating wealth.
Many engineers I've known are anything but "grounded," especially when it comes to their opinion of their own technical prowess, but that doesn't necessarily make them money-motivated.
I semi-agree but my take is that money can buy you people, it can buy you lines of code, more moving parts, more stuff. But it can’t buy elegance, efficiency and good design - those have to be nurtured. Most engineers nowadays haven’t ever seen a codebase that isn’t a hot mess (no offence folks). The demand for talented and experienced engineers eclipses the available supply. The industry is growing too fast for that. The engineers that really are good are needed in leadership, or become founders.
Oh engineers can do what ever they want. They are found in places like Facebook, Wall Street and the NSA doing pointless things with talent anyway. The problem isn't really the choices engineers make.
When the smartest people work for the richest people, to make the richest people so rich that hardly any of that wealth can ever get spent in even ridiculous ways, it automatically makes the system more unequal, less stable and secure for everyone involved.
That's why more people don't become great engineers, though, not why people can't become great engineers. In order for the latter to be an interesting question we assume a hypothetical person who already wants to become a great engineer - which, yes, may be because of the money.
Life isn't just about "getting rich" and being wolf of wall street. Engineers aren't billionaires or VPs but they're making a real good living most places in the US.
Is this the case for most careers, because it seems to me it's a software industry issue. Maybe this applies elsewhere, but is it to the same extent? Are the best civil engineers the ones that think like investors? How about nuclear physicists or airplane mechanics?
> I have a rule that any engineering work must have a minimum of 2x of the rewards to justify the cost. If I spend a month migrating, it has to save me two months of time to payoff.
That's not engineering though, it's management and/or business. Why study years and years of how computers work, to then think about people and business problems? It's just interesting to me that it's a common industry expectation.
I'm with noname on this one. 99.99% of those excellent engineers are NOT going to be billionaires.
They'll be lucky to be millionaires (and I'll envy them if I can't join them).
For those marvelous engineers to become millionaires, they need to have the luck to be paired with an excellent business team, build the right product and have a large dose of luck.
I'd rather have a not-so-brilliant engineer and an excellent team, vision and execution (as in build the right thing at the right time and produce value), for most products (very especially for your AirBnB or Facebook examples) you don't need top-tier talent to build it (you do need some to scale).
Edit: some of these marvelous people, which have actually built a succesful startup, tried again and FAILED. So it's not just the person, the idea must be right, the timing must be right and luck has to be on his side.
Generally, the mindset that makes the best engineers is an obsession with solving hard problems. Anecdotally, there's not a lot of overlap between the best engineers I know and the best paid engineers I know. The best engineers I know are too obsessed with solving problems to be sidetracked the salary game. The best paid engineers I know are great engineers, but the spend a large amount of time playing the salary game, bouncing between companies and are always doing the work that looks best on a resume, not the best work they know how to do.
Lawyers and investors provide pathways to the market that allow engineers to build things that have actual value. The idea that engineers like you and I hold all of the tools and training to "create wealth" is too dismissive of those professions.
Paying someone a lot doesn't magically make them a good engineer. You have to actually hire the best people, and there's only so many of them to go around.
It's like being told you are heir to the throne, and many engineers carry that same princely arrogance obliviously. At least doctors and lawyers have gone through a second gauntlet after acing school to temper this somewhat. Those fields might not even start making good money until you are years above the entry level, even with a pricey professional degree.
I mean, there’re brilliant individuals in any profession. I don’t see how that turns into a generalization. Most of engineers I’ve seen had to spend many years to become senior. Selling fast growth is denying the reality for most people.
I think judging an engineer's engineering skills by the (effectively random) chance of them being at a startup that "makes them rich" just reveals a significant lack of understanding of how the current startup world works. The vast majority fail. The ones that succeed tend to not make anyone any significant amount of money except the founders.
There seems to be a significant number of tech industry employees still floating around that are convinced that instant financial independence is available for all.
This mentality is why the industry is having layoffs.
You should have stayed in academia if you didn't want to worry about business value.
No field is exempt from the need to balance the two. We could make planes safer by making them cost 100x as much and then no one would be able to afford to fly. The difference between an ok engineer and an exceptional engineer is being able to pull your head out of the weeds and realize no piece of engineering exists in isolation.
I'll actually be graduating soon from an engineering program, and myself and all of my classmates face the same issues. Some have been offered lucrative careers in tech, some in consulting, some in management, and some are considering MBAs.
The answer? Because some of us actually like tech. There are two types of people who join engineering: those who have been doing it in some amateur form or another for years, and those who are in it because they had nothing else better to do, and it seemed like an ok bet.
The former won't be attracted by an MBA, because they enjoy being in the trenches, working out the difficult technical problems. They derive thrill out of the act of engineering, and that's why they are there.
The latter will inevitably go for an MBA, or go work at some bank in the vain hope that someone will notice him and promote him to day trader status (believe me, many engineering grads work at banks precisely for this reason). They have no real interest nor attachment to engineering, and will simply go for whatever pays the most.
I think the belief that all MBAs are just frat-boy do-nothing is sour grapes. That being said, I do believe that the industry and investors in general have altogether too much faith in MBAs and pure-management types. The company my father works for had its engineer-CEO retire a couple of years ago, and investors replaced him with a pure manager - someone with no engineering expertise, and is a "pure" business type. The company is floundering, selling off assets, and generally in a miserable state. To me the concept of letting non-experts in the company's field manage the company is downright insane, but yet people do it on a daily basis. If you run an engineering company, for God's sake hire a CEO who's an engineer.
The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.
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