Engineering or Not?

Updated Nov 11:
The news just broke Ericsson will spend less on its R&D, therefore shut its UK site by next year and whatever remains will be relocated to "lower cost-base countries"

This is totally not surprising because Ericsson is for-profit and has shareholders to report to. Those shareholders care only their return of investment, nothing else. This kind of stuff happens at UK now, and it will soon happen in Singapore.

Hence what should engineers do NOW? I will say we should have more breadth in more fields, especially business. Nowadays everything centrals around money, and often times, a profitable tech product is not necessarily solid technically, examples abound: IP (The one in the TCP/IP suite), NTSC standard, and yes, the MS Windows as when it first appeared.

"Stay hungry, stay foolish" -- Steve Jobs
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Nowadays my usual topic with Mr. Snail will be about the prospect of engineering in Singapore, and despite I tried my best to be optimistic, the future of engineering here still doesn't seem so bright.

A few days ago I grew curious and searched google on this topic, and found a few discussion threads with hundreds of replies from former and current engineers, all venting fumes on more or less what I and Mr. Snail talked about.

Here are two of the threads I found: one, two.

If you don't have the time to plow through them, here is the gist (all currency in SG$):

• Engineering pay is pathetic in Singapore, with fresh grads starting around $2.7K (manufacturing) or $3.5K(R&D). The money seems much better in finance and banking, which can go around $5.5K for fresh grads while five digit salaries are very common in banks.
  
• One person even boasted an annual salary of $300K + stock options doing sales
• A lot of engineers want to exit engineering and jump ship
  
• Those who remain in engineering are damn bitter

Some people reasoned banks only employ a few people for trading but rack in millions, ergo each of them can get a significant amount of money after dividing the loot. While in engineering, there are a lot of overheads (RnD, raw materials, factory spaces, machinery, etc.) and the profits are divided thinly among number of staff. Therefore banking is the best occupation in terms of benefits and money.

But what I don't understand is: what those bankers do are NOT adding values to the economy, there is no real outputs and basically banks are just fucking with other people's money and grow things from nothing! What are the contributions of the financial sector and banks nowadays? except charging some exorbitant fees on basic banking transactions, giving meager interests on our savings but charging an arm and a leg for the loans. When the loans go bad, poof, they are written off and the government will use OUR money to bail those banks out.

No wonder everybody wants to be banker.

If you really wanna enter the banking sectors, I was told these two websites are compulsory readings:

Mark Joshi
E. Derman