It's that week (that few pay attention to) to celebrate the people who do much more to improve our lives than most people realize.

As someone who went through the early 90s
aerospace depression (650,000+ laid off) I have a difficult time supporting cynical exercises to lure kids into the engineering profession, particularly aerospace engineering.In fact, the most financially successful aerospace engineers of my aquaintence becamse so when they quit engineering and went into real estate.

And as someone who had similar experiences, I urge children to get into engineering because no matter the circumstances, we need engineers badly. Yes, we had a bad season: gee, that's sad and tragic. Well, one either deals with life, or quits. If you think that showing children that engineering can be fun and rewarding is cynical, then you don't understand engineering at all. Certainly having enough money is nice, but real engineers are such because they love to do what they do. I recommend a book titled "The Existential Pleasures Of Engineering" by S. Florman.
And now, with the new launch companies coming up, we are _desperate_ for engineers. Just a couple of days ago the local newspaper had an article about Scaled Composites: they need about 200 engineers and technicians. They are not alone: the engineering force in the U.S. is getting old. We need to start gathering our replacements now, before all the know-how we have is lost.

Personally, I'd call that child abuse. But you are right about one thing, we do need engineers badly. Who else is going create all those government specifications and master change records and schedules and reports to management and customer briefings and cost accounts and engineering change records and lots and lots of extraineous BS that doesn't actually require an engineering degree?

There will be an engineering shortage when companies have to assign the above bureaucratic exercises to people without a graduate degree in engineering and assign the engineers to do actual engineering stuff, like design, test and research. You know, the kind of thing you'd expect to be doing after reading "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering". Until that point, and we are a long way from it, adding more engineers is just an exercise to keep engineering salaries down.And recuiting kids into with the promise that they will be "engineers" is just a lie.

I can tell you where we lost half our engineers, they became secretaries when word processors were put on their desks.

When did secretary become such a dirty word?

Besides, why do we need engineers... China is happy to take care of all that messy stuff for us. We're just a service economy, right?

I am now seriously contemplating quitting electronics engineering after 30 years of having to put up with lazy, incompetant managements and so called "whizz kids", management fads, etc.
The Dilbert cartoon series should be mandatory reading for anyone contemplating a career in it.
How we can exist as nations by selling each other life insurance sure beats me.