Dream jobs and nightmares at home
Today I read two articles expressing more or less opposite views (or at least hopes) of employment in engineering. On one hand, IEEE Spectrum presented its annual round-up of dream jobs, beginning with a lament that "unflattering stereotypes persist, and they're tired [and] out of touch with reality". The Register, on the other hand, reports the views of one Mike Laverick that you need a home lab to keep your job — that is, you need to be exactly the kind of technology-bound stereotype that Spectrum wishes to take on.
Spectrum is, of course, cherry-picking a very small number of individuals who have what it describes as "dream jobs" involving travelling around the world, working on exotic projects and/or making noble contributions to humankind. The Register might be more representative of the common mass of engineers working on (presumably) worthwhile but unglamourous projects for mundane employers in their home town. The commenters on The Register's article certainly sound a lot more like the lab-at-home folks than the high-flying Rennaissance men and women featured in Spectrum.
I don't have a lab at home, and, indeed, resent the notion that I ought to spend my spare time training up for a job in which I have high formal qualifications, years of experience and continue to work in day-in day-out. Laverick's attitude seems to me to pander to what I think are wrong-headed views of programming that prioritise familiarity with the latest buzzword over the fundamental engineering skills possessed by truly competent programmers. Yet buzzwords are doomed to come and go, and, I, at least, feel I have better things to do than pursue them in a lab at home. What other trade or profession demands that its members practice their craft not just in their professional lives, but in their spare time also? (One even hesitates to imagine the goings-on in the home labs of, say, surgeons and nuclear engineers.)
So I'm probably more typical of the readership of Spectrum than of The Register. Indeed, it isn't immediately obvious that Spectrum's dream workers have a better lot than I do (though I suspect they earn more money). Simon Hauger appears to do more or less the same kind of work that I and numerous teachers do, while Marcia Lee appears to does more or less the same kind of work that I and numerous other software developers do, albeit for a better-known company than most of us (the Khan Academy).
Perhaps the most important aspect about Spectrum's dream jobs is that they show some vision for engineering beyond engineering itself. While Laverick and his followers are beavering away in their home labs in pursuit of yet more engineering cred (or at least buzzwords), Hauger, Lee and the rest are thinking about how science and engineering serve education, art, adventure and human development. This might sound like a utopian dream, but, if engineering isn't serving something like this, why are we doing it?
