[logfromblammo]

Ah, but if you have those interpersonal skills, you can advance almost as far without the engineering degree at all.

You see the problem.

The business economy rewards bullshit and schmoozing to a higher degree than it does actual work. Until that changes, any attempt to get kids to learn useful things instead of how to work the system is fighting to swim upstream against a very strong current.

As a result, a lot of people that are engineers, scientists, or any other profession that requires a great deal of training in proportion to the typical monetary rewards are doing it because that is something they had a personal interest in doing. They achieve personal satisfaction in doing work that is too difficult or detailed for others to do well.

You can only rely on that for so long. If you structure jobs in your companies for such people to be spectacularly unrewarding, the people who would have otherwise been engineers will choose other difficult careers that pay well, and satisfy their engineering urges as a sideline or hobby.

As long as we have a business culture that values the ability to have a conversation over the ability to land a camera inside a 10m by 10m square on a completely different planet and still get clear images back, the people who can do both will often choose to engineer their own career path rather than work for the benefit of people who do not fully appreciate their work.

[snowwrestler]

Big things are only accomplished by teams. Building and maintaining a team of people who are skilled and work well and productively together is actually very difficult. Most teams fail to achieve anything lasting of note. For example, most startups fail.

NASA needs great engineering to build things like the Mars Rover. But they also need great management--it takes both.

[logfromblammo]

I don't think I can agree with everything you said.

Big things are accomplished by people with high ability. Adding team support to those people will reduce the amount of time required for those people to finish. Adding good management to the team reduces the overall cost and prevents friction.

Building a team that works better together than the sum of the individuals in it working separately is actually pretty easy. The hard part is getting everyone to do something specific and profitable. The reason why startups fail is usually because not enough real people wanted to spend enough real money on the product to pay the team members as much as they could earn doing something else. If you try to assign blame for that, it might not even land on the same continent.

NASA only needs great management to stay on time and under budget. With no basis for comparison, no one can say for certain whether any particular feat of engineering prowess was fast or slow, cheap or expensive. But it is starting to become apparent that engineers of equal ability, working at SpaceX instead of a larger and older space contractor, can launch cargo into orbit faster and more cheaply. That's the difference management makes.

Engineering provides the raw ability. Management sets the multiplier for time and money costs.

[pm90]

Its a human thing more than a business thing. We believe in the principles that we are taught about when growing up, either by society or the media.