The money is just a symptom. What do engineers do these days? I’m working on a program to modify a jet with new avionics. It is taking 2x longer and costing about as much to put that new, and it some ways less capable system on the airplane than it took to design the whole vehicle from nothing. Engineers aren’t putting men on the Moon, we aren’t making jets that go higher, faster, or farther. In the private sector, innovation has been greatly inhibited by our lawyer brethern and their lawsuits. We won the cold war for America, and now we’re useless.

Griffin often mentions that he has 3 and half years or so to do what he wants to do as NASA admin. I think he says this just as an acknowledgment that he “could” leave when Bush’s second term expires and that he’s planning based on that. There is every chance that he could stay on, he has been praised by Democrats as well as Republicans in most all circles. After all, Goldin was appointed by Bush 41 and he stayed on through 8 years of Clinton.

I am sure glad I work for a small engineering company. We have a retention rate (over our 11 year history) of 98%. Of course being smaller each person has a lot more responsibility to the overall project and we get paid for ever hour we work (which is nice).

BTW I still love engineering after 12 years. My wife hates it and went back to school to be a doctor.

“Go into something where you not only make money, but more importantly, you get the minimal level of respect due a professional.”

Okay this confuses me. For my experience and considering the cost of living in Northern Alabama, I make a small fortune. And most people are impressed when they find out I am an engineer. Could be a regional thing, though.

What a steaming pile! Here’s my executive summary, “Bush is doing everything wrong and Clinton did everything right.” Nothing political here. Oh, and by the way, Abbey and Lane, if it wasn’t for the export controls, we wouldn’t have any domestic launch industry. Launch costs are so high, they need their domestic monopoly to continue.

As for the decline in interest in engineering, I’m an engineer and I’m not even interested in engineering any more. Are you thinking you want to be an engineer? Stop. Go into something where you not only make money, but more importantly, you get the minimal level of respect due a professional. I’ll believe there is a shortage of engineers when we stop taking out the company’s trash. I’m not holding my breath, the company can’t milk the government $200/hr to have a janitor do that job. I’ll believe there’s a shortage of engineers when they start hiring draftsmen and engineering technologists again. Oops, they can’t charge that exorbitant rate for those guys either.

A cube farm full of engineers taking out their own trash and releasing their own drawings. Each one of them working on parts so small and insignificant, they have no chance of making a positive impact on the quality of the vehicle. As for the release process, it consists mainly of getting the 20 to 30 signatures required for each drawing. Real cutting edge stuff. When you’re not getting screwed over as you try to collect signatures, you can go to meetings, like ethics training. The sheer irony often keeps me awake for minutes at a time.

The really sad thing is, those are the good jobs. If you’re really unfortunate, you’ll end up writing specifications. These are a collection of “shall” statements that mean nothing to no one, but must be traceable to the “master spec” though a process that makes watching milk curdle seem exciting by comparison. Forego the temptation to write a requirement that the person who is supposed to give a damn about what you wrote do something other than a half-baked job of meeting the requirements they actually do come close to meeting. It won’t help. Specifications are all about telling someone the least they can do, and by the time they are done, you’ll find out what the least they can do really is.

The typical retention rate for a large aerospace company: 50% of college grads are gone in 2 years. I don’t have any statistics on how often they leave the engineering “profession” after those 2 years, but personal experience has many going for an MBA, or into patent law, or one recently left to become an anesthesiologist. She felt the ethics training class made her uniquely qualified to put others to sleep, and the school concurred. Go figure.

Please don’t. I saw where you were coming from and was perfectly happy that you did not employ emoticons. I consider them vulgar myself, like using “air quotes” in a conversation at a fine restaurant.

In future, I’ll add a smiley.

You’ve scored a home run today already.

And how would that be a bad thing?

What are you saying? Take out the ideology and political spin, and you’ve silenced half the alt.space community…