| Two personal anecdotes: (1) I grew up in the GDR (East Germany). During the standard ten year "polytechnical secondary school" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytechnic_Secondary_School) when it came to deciding what I wanted to become I chose... officer in the East German army, specifically, engineering, airplane maintenance. It never came to that because the wall came down and I switched target to computer science and the civilian sector - for the exact same reason why I wanted to go to the army: A civilian engineering job seemed quite useless. During school we had lots of contact with real world jobs. Apart from summer jobs, where I usually ended up in some food production factory (brewery, chocolate, sausages - everything was very clean and sanitary, not a single bad anecdote here in any of them), we had "lessons" where we went to the factory and did some limited production of household goods ourselves, learning factory life, processes and various machines. It was a lot of fun and an unambiguously good experience by the way. Anyway, during my time in the (huge, extremely run-down chemical fiber) factory I saw engineers with shovels digging. That was the last straw, for good pay, good advancement, good social standing and better job satisfaction than the pretty much non-existent one one of an engineer in the GDR (as far as I could witness) the army was the only real option. Ironically, for the exact same selfish reason I switched to desiring a company job immediately after reunification, to the dissatisfaction of the guy in the recruitment office who still hadn't realized how everything had changed around him including his own citizenship. (2) The German equivalent of "Business Week", which is called "Wirtschaftswoche", even before the actual reunification had a thick special edition for students about to leave high-school, for the first time issued for both East and West Germany. It included some really big test that one could fill out to get some free advice for oneself based on the result. It was popular enough that tens of thousands of results were available from both West and now also from East Germany, I had submitted one of them (by letter). It had taken a whole afternoon to fill out. The result was that overall the East Germans were better than the West Germans in the STEM fields, worse in languages (East German language education sucked, mostly rote learning - even though I had had not just Russian but English too) and in text interpretation. |