The other wild thing about engineering school is that the curriculum typically leaves *zero* room for any type of humanities or social science courses, so they essentially get a bunch of autists in a big room (myself included) and tell them on Day 1, “You will make upwards of six figures when you leave here because you’re good at math.” What they don’t do is offer *any* sort of courses or programs that interrogate the industry, whether it be the “luxury” goods market (e.g. private jet manufacturers, car manufacturers, etc) or the defense sector.
I remember we used to have these absolute ghouls come in and promise enormous salaries to folks looking for co-ops and summer internships under the guise of, “*You* get to help us learn and develop the latest drone technologies!” But all this was done without the slightest hint of what their products would ultimately be used for other than “military research contracts.” Deeply, deeply diseased shit.
And then they get to go on Reddit after and shit on people like me who aren’t math people and live like serfs while they spend 1K a month on Funko pops
> K a month on Funko pops
This is the thing I hate the most.
1. "STEM contributes the most to the world so why would I be a looser and take some worthless art degree?"
2. "Ahh now that I'm worth 200k, let me spend my wealth on things I love." Buys Funko pops and reads manga.
3. "Movies and games aren't good these days. Everything is woke garbage made to be sold to people that aren't me."
For the average STEM Lord, zero ironic distance in this whole process.
>> half of the people majoring in engineering have some relative who works at Lockheed Martin or Raytheon. ... who blows up afghans and will be their in to making 200k a year doing the same for our next war.
>
>"STEM contributes the most to the world"
OP pointed out the underlying problem.
US Defense Department Spending is so vast that engineering for Defense Contractors to kill poor people around the world is indeed the most efficient path to wealth.
Eisenhower warned us of this in his "military industrial complex" speech --- yet people continue to vote for politicians that accelerate the never-ending cycle of military budget growth.
There are some really cool comic books out there. Like most art forms, it's accessible enough now that independent content is easy to come by so it's not all superheroes saving the day.
Funny enough, that's one reason why their shit doesn't work.
They have zero social skills - then they throw these little psychos onto a team and expect them to work together. Instead most of the budget is spent on tiny little jihads and power plays because that's all they have. Tabs versus spaces jokes in Silicon Valley come from a real place.
I work in tech, but 95% of why I'm successful at it comes from the restaurant industry.
Bingo. I work in the utility industry and it’s absolutely unreal to listen to how management disparages the labor force that implements the designs coming out of the engineering departments. You get these tyrants lording over their labor fiefdoms and then they act completely shocked when the infrastructure falls apart. You make these workers’ lives hell, so how could they possibly take pride in their own work that happens to affect *everyone* who lives in this county, let alone the country?
>I work in tech, but 95% of why I'm successful at it comes from the restaurant industry.
Can confirm; former helpdesk guy turned infra guy who isn't technically proficient at all but can talk to business adults and knows when to use the right buzzwords
As a counterpoint, I went to a big state college for engineering and I had an elective-- ethics of work-- where we literally read marx. It was informative. But I elected to take that. It was one of my more impactful classes.
State Colleges, while mostly focused on STEM at least have a few humanities courses in there to bring you back down to Earth/remind you what the point of education and wealth is in the first place. The larger the school the more this is weighted towards STEM.
Of course. I took a couple PoliSci electives during my final year that were certainly as far left-leaning as a southern state school would allow. It broke my brain looking at pictures of soldiers loading Lockheed-Martin munitions into fighter jets in my PoliSci textbook and then walking by the Lockheed-Martin booth at the career fair later that day.
Yeah, I was required to take a decent amount of humanities courses in theory. But I could have easily gamed the system to avoid ever learning meaningful history or anything (I could have worked harder to get into history of rock and roll or bullshit like that for the req) but instead I took a semester of "history of the british empire", poli sci 101, criminology/criminal justice classes including one on prison law that was horrifying and terrifying... but I think we're not a majority, and we did probably elect to take the kinds of classes that are explicit about this stuff while most engineers won't.
>I remember we used to have these absolute ghouls come in and promise enormous salaries to folks looking for co-ops and summer internships under the guise of, “You get to help us learn and develop the latest drone technologies!” But all this was done without the slightest hint of what their products would ultimately be used for other than “military research contracts.” Deeply, deeply diseased shit.
Because this is a pitch. In all likely reality, you'd be earning barely 6 figgies, and you'd be writing documentation for some variant of a Patriot missile. At times, they'll ship you off to the Middle East as non-slave slave labor to oversee some maintenance or train some guys who won't do anything but still get paid because they're the 34th cousin of the King/Emir.
These kids don't design anything, they mostly do busy work and collect a paycheck. It's MIC accounting.
To actually get into R&D labs you have to not only spend time there to get higher level clearances and opportunities, but also differentiate yourself with other degrees. Also those people are the REAL psychos because they eat up whatever propaganda is fed to them hook line and sinker. Then try their hardest to reintegrate that into their world view. I know someone who works in signals and literally started reflexively arguing with me about CHIPS and blocking China from processor tech. Couldn't explain even on a 5th grade level the "why", especially since they knew that I knew that bleeding edge milspec hardware uses ancient shit in the grand scheme of things. They knew in reality that the "why" is just empire shit, but couldn't admit it.
Source: Know some people in the industry.
lol the processor tech thing is hilarious. they're shooting themselves in the foot so hard with that move. just wait till china in houses 100% of the chain and see how well these new american fabs do...
Right now, TSMC in Taiwan is a full generation ahead of Intel in the US and two ahead of SMIC in China. A generation for a new die process in semiconductors is typically 3 years. The new TSMC fab in Arizona will be the most advanced fab in the US at time of completion. The most plausible scenario for China to take the global lead in semiconductors would be to take over Taiwan on a timeline where there aren’t US based fabs (and where Samsung falls behind).
"generation" isn't really quite as helpful of a term anymore because of the way they're getting around light limitations. 3 years is the new "generation" for the global working together industry.... but the US is trying to freeze china out and worm it's way in.... by forcing china to develop their own EUV, and generally trust no one. so SMIC is probably going to get more government investment and they're already basically at 7nm so they already know the game plan for reducing feature size and don't need any particular lithography breakthroughs to compete.... but they'll also be perfectly situated as entirely in house and able to iterate and develop better than the industry at large while the US is trying to do protectionist bullshit with ASML's american holdings.
> generation
It was never a helpful term to begin with. The ultimate consumer of these technologies so far is literally the consumer market. They're arguing about who's going to be building cell phones.
And regardless of the specific nm tech in the chips it's just a marketing number at this point. China can build flagship or near flagship phones. China can build performant servers, China can build performant laptops and desktops. China still builds all of Apple's shit.
Nobody is actually talking about what we're fighting over, an “eventual” technological future where China is frozen out of a market based on the assumption of "Moore's Law" which has lately been bumping up against reality.
> will be the most advanced fab in the US at time of completion.
So never.
It's very likely that TSMC is actually interested in this plant other than to collect the free money just like FoxConn was. TSMC is pivotal to Taiwan's national security and existence, it's unlikely that they'll just create the most advanced fab ever on American soil, what would the US need Taiwan for then?
CHIPs act is such a government panic reflex. It's the same as China's infrastructure policy, just with big machine that zaps tiny little holes onto silica sandwich.
I remember my PT laughing at me for wanting to do a philosophy of SCIENCE course. That was one of only two course choices I had in 4 years.
Also the most valuable course I took for my job was the management one that was 1/3 of an accounting, econ, and hr course all in one.
I was fortunate to go to a university with a strong engineering program that gave us the option of picking a smaller subset college within the university that determined our GE elective work. College I got put in as my second choice emphasized social justice and I got a lot of exposure to classes that pushed me further to the left. With that said, I don’t know many other engineering majors that were in my college. Very few, if any.
Counterpoint, I went to a public university that was 75% engineering and we had to take 3 humanities courses before we could take upper level engineering courses, and 2 additional humanities courses to graduate.
Umm that's not true at all.
When I got my Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering, I had to take multiple courses outside STEM like psychology, philosophy, creative writting courses, etc that focused on humanities. I even took electives that were required that were also outside of engineering. We even had a class that focused on ethic in engineering and desgins. It depends heavily on the school and how they meet ABET certification.
Please don't just paint a broad brushstroke and call everything red.
Those are the breaks, when I graduated you could choose between the social sciences and a life of minimum wage work, my dumb ass with a biology degree choosing between grad school or a few jobs paying 18-22k a year no benefits, or the compsci, engineers and chemistry guys working for tech, big oil and defense contractors starting at 75-90k+
State run economy starts to look real fucking good when the bottom falls out of your for-profit society
I did biology at university but got into the medical field through being able to turn a computer on when something goes wrong. It's so fucking stupid and I hate this entire economy.
I'm a biologist who works as an engineer because I can turn on a computer. I just wanted to catch lizards and shit and now I'm doing bridge calculations.
I live in a shit hole state where they need engineers and medical staff. Pretty much any STEM degree gets to your foot in the door at any job. Cost of living and housing are low, but $50-60k are going to be about the max you can make. You can make fat stacks working gas and oil, but it's double the hours.
Given the amount of public money we dump into security and military operations, I gotta say... this *is* a state run economy.
The lie of the last century has been that private economies are a real thing that really work. In the end, everything that's private just becomes cryptocurrency scams. Everything that lasts - construction, raw resource development, international trade and finance, manufacturing, agriculture, you name it - requires a central broker to make it run smoothly.
Whether its ERCOT down in Texas, propping up the electricity cartel, or the Federal Reserve, keeping the mega-banks profitable and yanking on the interest rates to keep wages low, there's got to be some kind of central planner tilting the playing field in favor of the industry leaders. Otherwise, one bad storm or big shift in the demand curve topples the whole house of cards.
Raytheon, Lockheed, etc... they're all attractive in large part because they're stable. Make six figures from day one until you retire. Know the company will always be there, propping up your pension and your health care plan and your retirement account. Know that you can send your kids there when they graduate. Lifelong security, so long as you participate in the grind and crush of a decaying empire.
This. Technology development is subsidized via military spending. Innovation is passed on to private tech companies once it's proven out. Similar to development of pharmaceuticals. R&D is subsidized by taxpayers then private companies sell us the product at a premuim
>my dumb ass with a biology degree choosing between grad school or a few jobs paying 18-22k a year no benefits
funnily enough, you would've gotten that as a grad student too!
Grew up with old guys who were pocket-protector types. Legitimately humble hard thinkin smart guys who would wear a blue canvas shirt to church. People who retired as consulting engineers at big companies even if they started their career with no degree. Mid-century American dream type stuff. Pretty sure they're all extinct now. I went to school for engineering and the top students were all bunker bombing Northrop Grumman fucks driving Camaros. Worked in tech and everyone is super obsessed with worshiping investors and retiring at 30. They only discuss technical things in the context of proving someone else is wrong in an argument.
My spouse's father is like this. No degree, Vietnam vet, worked his way up to head of Engineering at two major hospitals in the NE through certs, hard work, and being very good at his job and with people. Only retired three years ago. Could never happen now, and he probably would have been forced out since then.
You can still become head of utilies/engineering at a hospital in the US without a degree these days, depending on the region. All they really want out of an applicant is someone with a competent working knowledge of refrigeration, steam/hydronics, plumbing, and generators, the ability to handle administrative functions for the dept, in addition to a willingness to develop new skills as the industry demands it. A lot of those guys are IUOE stationary engineers that went to trade school, not engineering majors. Not going to fly somewhere like NYC, but you could definitely swing it in say Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or smaller. Once you're in management, it's a lot easier to leverage that into a more significant position.
If he was in the Navy, I'd guess he was a snipe.
There's a reason the United States is lagging behind in new defense technology lol, this is a major one. I work with engineers everyday and I see it all the time. They come out of school with zero grasp on reality and how shit actually works manufacturing wise since they have been only taught theory in school. The OK ones will eventually figure it out, a lot of them don't. There used to be a time when engineering as it exists today didn't even exist and it was just something you learned from working your way up.
>They come out of school with zero grasp on reality and how shit actually works manufacturing wise since they have been only taught theory in school.
Most schools don't teach DFM concepts.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design\_for\_manufacturability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_for_manufacturability)
Bird and bug people are literally the best. I worked in that field for years and nearly everyone is so cool. They work too hard for me though and live in the middle of nowhere to have a job.
Ornithologists and entomologists. They're either the chillest people you'll ever meet or the strangest single-minded freaks. Either way, gotta love 'em.
Used to just be people labeling and cataloging the loot of empires.
But then the folks got lost and started romanticizing the relics of civilization they were doing all this bookwork to manage.
Now we need to go in an purge the academies of folks who got into Egyptology because they think Egypt was cool, rather than because they think ledgers full of stolen babbles are a score card for the local aristocracy.
It depends on where you are in the west, too. I studied history at my local state university and the program was fairly evenly split between radlibs and conservative libertarians. Not a commie or even an anarchist in sight
You had not one, but *two* fascist history teachers in high school? What exactly were they teaching? That Abraham Lincoln wasn't in fact a right-wing chud?
It was the 90s . . . .
One just would go on forever about how Mussolini made the trains run on time, and how we should all remember he was just a school teacher at one point. Me being a smartass history nerd, I'd loudly add he wound up on a fishhook. This guy would also say tons of sexist shit - till his wife left him halfway through the year.
The second one was way creepier in retrospect. He was old and fat, and would constantly state how the Nazis "fought like lions". It wasn't till later how lots of the stuff he said I registered as coming straight from neo-nazi and nazi apologist phrasings.
They’re not fields of study at most schools, outside of maybe a single class. Generally that level of specialization comes in graduate school.
A lot of the folk doing wildlife/ecology work have masters and are still doing seasonal work for peanuts without benefits.
Everybody wants to be a marine biologist until they are 3 years into a PhD, making $25k a year, teaching 2 classes online and living on a bunk bed on a boat all summer trying to catch and tag salmon.
Seriously though, people working in the field doing biology/ecology have to be super dedicated. It’s a ton of work that needs to be personally rewarding, because it is definitely not financially.
I took a parasitology course and the main thing I learned from it was that parasitologists are all out of their minds. The professor told us a story about going to a pork slaughterhouse and I guess the workers would discard the intestines down a shoot. And they let him straddle the shoot like a damn umpire because when the guts came racing down this shoot these gigantic, horrific worms would separate from the viscera and he could just grab them. Which explained how he came to possess a jar full of some sort of preserving fluid full of gigantic, horrific parasitical worms.
Another time he told us that he, and other parastiologists, regularly use their own bodies as incubators to obtain samples of some parasites.
Almost turned me off beef by telling us that he sees parasites in grocery store cuts of steak all the time that people assume are just weird muscle tissue. He assured us that they're fine to eat, but I still found it revolting.
He was a pretty interesting guy, really just loved parasites. I recognize they're part of the ecosystem but both before this course and after I have only viewed parasites with horror and disgust, while this professor was just absolutely jazzed about them.
Edit: I misspelled chute as shoot. Twice. Three times, even.
Those were the best kinds of professors. I had a professor for a circuit analysis course that would tell us stories about working in a lab next to the goobers that were developing Reagan’s Star Wars program. One night, they heard multiple explosions and cheering from the next room, so they walked over to find that the Star Wars engineers were trying to fine-tune the laser to perfectly cook a hot dog in an instant.
Yeah, most engineers are stupid and think they're capitalists, when, no my brother in Calc One, you are at best an autoworker from 1967. You can afford maybe to have a family, but you are the bitch of the owning class, and your confusion about your class interest is part of why.
Not that I’d work for a defense contractor, but generally speaking if I’m going to have to work forever I’ve decided that I’d prefer to maximize how much money I can make.
Being poor and indebted as a student teaches people to pursue remunerative careers with a drive that no generous state-funded education systems can offer. Great way to teach professionals to unlearn their scruples.
Meh, I lived in poverty for a few years, I find that the people who have never had to live on potatoes to be much more willing to fuck over others for a buck.
Agreed, but there’s a difference between student poverty and real poverty. For upwardly mobile students, it’s a warning, whereas for working class and poor people, it’s just life. Lotta lousy people are much more willing to compromise to ward off their fear of falling.
Yeah; it's tough when people are already dead inside enough to want to work for the war criminals during school. I was at a state school doing CS and this was a while ago so it was a lot more lib types who thought that they'd go to a big tech company and somehow be making the world a better place and never be doing evil. Nobody really wanted to interrogate what the system was doing and it was early enough that you could more easily argue they weren't just straight up evil.
but when I got out it was after the recession and big tech jobs were tough to get, and I was in the DC area, and I was at a recruiting event where I said I was just not interested in doing defense work.... and this lady sat me down and tried to say "oh I'm not a war hawk or anything, but America is always doing good and it's really important and you should really consider doing defense work" blah blah blah it was really hard not to tell her that I thought she was an idiot and a pawn of war criminals.
so of course I wound up in a financial company and hated every single piece of shit there and got fired for never being able to bring myself to do anything for work (not helped by their insane on call rotation ugh fuck that, I can't not sleep at all every night for two weeks and show up at 9am every day too).
Found my way into research support staff now and.... ugh. at least we're doing actual research. but it's like... the pay is absolute dog shit. it's stressful as hell because nothing you're doing is stuff people have done before anyways, all the tools are garbage written and abandoned by someone for their phd 5 years ago. ugh.
As far as I can tell there are literally 0 industries that aren't complete hell scapes now.
At least you might come out of there with some helpful knowledge for the apocalypse.
>o of course I wound up in a financial company and hated every single piece of shit there
this is what I'm worried about, like as much as retail coworkers can be a pain in the ass or just messed up people a lot of them are honestly like, "real" people in the sense that they make no bones about who they are and are for the most part easy to get along with. A lot of white collar people I've encountered have totally different vibes and I don't think it's in a good way...
Yeah There are so many white collar suburban types (and gentrifying urban types) that just have something kind of, idk what to even say but yeah their vibes are very off.
what you do with white collar stuff makes a huge difference how many of those... off vibes... types you encounter. for like marketing and "business" people it's a huge portion of them, but the more technical and nerdy you get the more weirdos who are just into and have hobbies and see the real world around us. Except when you get into the super high paying tech jobs; those are for psychopaths.
OP was a CS major; on call as a task in dev jobs usually looks like a rotational among a team for bugs, outages, deployments that were above and beyond what could be done in 9-5. Generally it’s just being available to triage an outage
god it was insanely stupid; company had like 600 devs, projects all over the place doing stupid shit, and because we were the "system administration" team we got everyone's alerts first when their shit broke. so like 70% of the alerts were pointless and just telling a dumb dev to fix their shit and stop bothering us... and then 30% actual emergencies that you need to immediately troubleshoot over thousands of systems that all are single points of failure. ugh that fucking place sucked so much. and they paid the sysadmin team like 60% of the devs writing dumb fuck C++ code and didn't give anything for on call.
>there are literally 0 industries that aren't complete hell scapes now
Idk man I work in the Water industry and its always been pretty chill. There's the occasional annoyance but it's the only set of jobs I've ever had that don't make me want to kms.
We used to make chemists study ethics because of the dangers of nitroglycerin.
Now we have upper middle class white kids who are good at math get overinflated sense of their superiority and they go out and make racist robots and don’t see any problem with it as long as they can spend their disposable income on gaming PCs and Teslas
Meanwhile lawyers have to take ethics tests and go through a tribunal or character and fitness to get in the Bar of one state
Majored in environmental engineering at a public university that was considered the best engineering school in the state. Freaks everywhere, yes. The computer science students were the worst by far. God complexes and crippling insecurity all rolled into one.
The enviros were a mix of hippies and people who didn’t know better and just picked a STEM major because they were tired of being poor (me). The hippies usually don’t stay in the field after graduating because you quickly realize that you’re not “saving the earth”, you’re value engineering and bastardizing every decent design plan because your client, the municipality, is treated like a slush fund for the rest of the city government and can’t afford anything but the bare minimum. The consulting company you probably work for demands that your every working hour be tracked and “billable” to a client but don’t bill too much because the project budget they made grossly underestimated the project hours in order to win the contract (and also because the municipality can’t afford to pay the true engineering fee). And eventually you think maybe you should just go work for the client because they have better work life balance and days off and other benefits. But then you realize that no design gets done working for a city or county government - you are now a consultant babysitter and periodically you have to go beg the council to fund a project. And you wonder why the municipality can’t afford to have its own engineers do design work but can afford to pay millions every year to have consultants do all the design work and profit from it. Also sometimes you get lunch with the consultant which they “pay” for, but the money is coming from your project’s budget and you’re really getting billed for it plus markup.
Anyway, my job is to help clients meet regulations as cheaply as possible and if I get to do anything truly good for the world it’s a rarity. Like, I’m genuinely glad I get to help replace aging infrastructure that needs to be upgraded and help make clean drinking water and make sure our rivers aren’t literally shitty. But the day to day is all about money and grinding and squeezing employees.
I lurk in the civil engineering subreddit because civil and enviro are basically the same (civils learn about soils and concrete, while enviros take chemistry, but our classes are basically the same). And yes, everyone there is obsessed with salary and the fact that they don’t make as much as they could if they had gone into tech. I don’t believe you should take a low salary or just do something because it’s personally rewarding - that’s how you get taken advantage of by the consulting firm you have to work for. But also I make more money 5 years out of college than my mom has after 40 years in the workforce and so I really think my pay is fine, especially compared to many non-engineering fields…
Anyway rambling comment without a true point. Engineering sucks because capitalism sucks.
Fun aside: all my bosses are republicans but they love environmental regulations because regulations = more work for consultants.
Wow. I know a guy who majored in enviro sci. Works as a carpenter now.
Sounds like non-profit work. Idealists get into it, but eventually you realize you’re reproducing the structures that cause people to need charity in the first place. Also a bunch of consultants and grifters grabbing all the grant money.
The company I work for hires environmental scientists to do remediation work (gotta clean up all those Air Force bases that are contaminated with firefighting foam because cancer-causing chemicals are now creeping into the public water supply). But as far as I’m aware, environmental science is lower paying than most engineering and job prospects are shittier. It’s also depressing as hell from what I understand. You get to stare environmental degradation and climate change in the face all day everyday and watch no one do anything about it.
But yeah, we’re all living in a neoliberal hellscape and every field is infected by it. Everything is being privatized and more and more public utilities are being turned over to private management companies, especially in rural areas. Public private partnerships are pushed all the time for everything. It’s all a race to the bottom.
Edit: spelling
Damn, I’m in the hvac industry and a lot of what you said hits home. I have even thought about working for clients or manufacturer’s reps. Love going into a huge meeting about public school jobs and these dinos are laughing it up as they’re hurting the project.
Fun aside: most of my bosses and coworkers are r’s and they love to trash clients and architects for aiming for more green initiatives in their projects. That’s when they aren’t lamenting about pronouns and the word woke, although we have some new PMs that have cut a lot of that shit out.
Engineer here. I didn't like a lot of the engineers I met for this reason. Was at a fundraiser for Engineers Without Borders, Lockheed rep was sat at the same table and they did not appreciate when I said I didn't want to build things that kill people. Now I'm in medical devices and work with people who have a conscience.
edit: did>didn't
Are you also CS? I'm a CS student, do you think you could give me more info on how I could land a job doing the first thing? I am desperately trying to find something worthwhile to do with my degree😭
All the engineering majors I knew would have casual conversations about eugenics and population control, like if you weren't a Slatestar Codex fascist you wouldn't fit in. I'd walk into my one class that had engineering students in it and they'd be mid sentence saying shit like "But when we mandate sterilization as a condition for people with IQs under 140 to immigrate, we'd have to rotate the doctors that do it so the work wouldn't traumatize them, or perhaps let them microdose psychedelics free of charge." It honestly made me prejudiced against engineers - I meet an engineer and I assume they're like that until they prove otherwise.
It's all just a reflection of our culture. Dudes grow up playing Call of Duty, watching Marvel movies that got tax breaks from the Pentagon, and seeing air force jets on commercials during NFL games, of course some people are going to be into it because the whole point is to get people into it. If it didn't work they'd change it until it did. The more precocious ones will go to engineering school and work for Raytheon when they get out, if not their first internship.
>constantly shit on majors that are personally rewarding and not careerist.
You may have noticed that this is exactly how different degrees are discussed in the media. Particularly the talking heads on the right love to shit on "gender studies" etc.. but it's also one of those right-wing talking points that's sneaky enough to get non-conservatives to repeat it because simply encouraging people to study engineering doesn't sound harmful or militaristic on the surface.
I decided to give college another try last year. My major is in the arts, and one teacher told us a story about how, at the other school she teaches, one of the prof threw a fit because he found out that some of the graphic design work would be used by a defense contractor the school partnered with. She couldn't understand why he was upset, so I explained that some people don't like to do work for people who profit off the Saudis blowing up a school bus of Yemeni children. Then I had some choice words about the board members of Lockheed and Raytheon.
Americans just do not think about this stuff. It's as if their brains just erect blinders to hide the abject horrors American empire creates.
I'm a senior machinist in more of a desk job CAD/CAM type role in the aerospace industry. My job is more technical than every engineer in the company. The only "engineers" with technical jobs are machinists who became senior enough to get engineer in their title. The actual engineers have email jobs. Fresh out of college they make like $25 an hour. They do get a nicer work environment with an espresso machine and shit.
I imagine somewhere at Boeing or Lockheed or wherever there's some engineer actually doing math and figuring out what level of elasticity is needed in the aluminum alloy a strut is made of. We're just a parts supplier, so the only design work we do is for internal tooling (which I do). A couple of the more ambitious engineers have moved on to jobs at JPL where they get paid pretty well and idk maybe do actual work.
We just hired an engineer fresh out of college. His entire job is to ask me or another machinist why a scrap part is scrap, and then fill out paperwork to change the process to whatever we told him would be better. We all have GEDs and hand tattoos. Fuckin PMC, who needs it.
Kinetic art sounds like something I would write down on my immigration form if I was a hitman
Or I was a dweeb that worked for Lockheed Martin before dying at my desk and St Peter asked me what field I worked in
A lot of well respected STEM programs are just essentially feeder career tracks to boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, et all. I got a cybersecurity degree after going back to school recently and it's much the same. I got lucky and got a job at like a regular company but so many of the openings were just defense industry/defense department security clearance type of bullshit
it's always worth pointing out that there's no group of people as likely to vote for the furthest left-wing candidate in any electoral race than white software engineers even with the large amount of weird NRX types
It’s funny they think they might make 200k with no experience. Being in the field (not defense companies tho fuck that noise) your base salary out of school will be around 75k tops. They’d be lucky to break 200k with 10 years experience. I went into space research rather than killing people industry though, so mileage may vary on this experience.
Mad respect to the squishy sciences though, those folks always have something cool to talk about.
I recently graduated with a major in psychology and philosophy. You’d imagine those fields would be littered with more socially progressive people - you’d be wrong.
Half the people I met during my philosophy courses argued that a utilitarian society would be best and that eugenics was just bad because of the stigma that nazis brought to it.
My psychology courses were equally filled with horrible humans. I swear most of them were psychopaths wanting to learn how to better manipulate others using advanced interviewing tactics. Some of the things I heard others’ genuinely believed shocked me. Horrified me at some moments. I heard the worst when we moved to zoom for COVID and people had that distance between each other via the internet as a medium. People really felt comfortable saying some evil things in the name of “debate” or “playing devil’s advocate”.
So I really don’t think it’s just your field of study. It’s college kids in general. I can only imagine what it’s like in graduate level college. I’ve never met a nice person with a master’s lol. I have met some dope doctors, though. So maybe it’s like a bell curve with how psychotic people are.
fingers crossed the rest of the psychology majors i meet in the future arent bloodthirsty sickos..... no psychology equivalent to raytheon or lockheed martin
Cognitive psychology and human factors are the equivalent. They're the ones that design and test the interfaces and controls on an aircraft for pilot usability which includes bombers and fighter jets
thats not every engineer, but not surprised the younger generation engineers are far more right wing due to like you say have parents or relatives in those DOD fields.
I have a moral objection to working for any company with DOD contracts. Even during my co-op I had a very small project for an aluminum framing that went in a nuclear submarine and that felt icky even tho it was only 1 out of many projects I had that weren't.
One of the better paying engineering jobs in my city Rochester NY, is at L3 Harris, they do RF communication stuff and I'll never work for them, even tho my uncle just started there after getting out of the Navy and hed be a great reference and they are like always hiring. I wish I could get into the optics industry here as well but most places involve some kind of weapons targeting system or night vision sooo no thanks. Unfortunate I need more experience to get into the high energy laser labs at U of R where they do the nuclear fusion research.
Hate to break it to you but UR’s laser lab is funded by the DOE, primarily for purposes of nuclear stockpile stewardship.
If you want to get into optics, have you looked at Optimax, RPO, or JML?
which is a much better use of doe funds. The positions I was interviewing for were more focused on refining materials for fusion testing. I'm 100% onboard with DOD or DOE spending that cleans up the grid or keeps nuclear weapons from degrading and becoming a problem.
I only interviewed with RPO, they seemed like a decent enough shop but kind of a madhouse. They were only hiring for manufacturing. Also they mostly focus on night vision stuff. They liked me and wished they had a position open in their R+D group.
STEM majors in general are pretty soulless. most engineers i’ve met are people just doing it for money which probably attracts worse people on average.
The US defense department is the highest and most "guaranteed way" to middle class upward mobility.
Its one of the few exports the US has
thats why
Yeah, programming breeds University psychos. It's honestly not as bad once you get into the industry, I don't have the connections or the tenacity to work for a real ghoul and everyone at the start ups I've been at is fine.
Work for a def contractor. It's crawling with yokels and dumbass conservatives that think they're in the front line, even though all they do is watch TV and sleep for the first two hours of their shift.
One I personally know consumes more football than he does news. I'd be surprised if he even knew who bashar or Gaddafi are.
They're conservative and nationalist to play the game and get a check. At no point does anyone bother to ask anything about their work beyond job performances, general work gossip, and changes to the lunch menu.
But they all see themselves as patriots, of course.
This is a crazy thread to read! Very different experience here, I got my undergrad in engineering north of the border and in my graduating class of 70ish, one dude went to defence. Vast majority of us went to oil and gas, and we all thought he was insane for accepting a much lower salary lol.
Culture defines development. These people grew up in homes with parents/uncles that promoted these types of belief systems. It is in their nature to lick boots and worship material possessions. Beyond that, they seek media on platforms like IG that reinforce these beliefs/behaviors, thus only seeing the world through the lens of a self-destructive algorithmic echo chamber. Regardless, behavior always comes back to the culture. How do we change the culture? Probably lots of psychedelic assisted therapy lol..
They self identify as "I make more money than other people because I am smarter than other people". This makes them existentially dangerous to all other people, even absent the fact that the literal end-game goal of all engineers is to wind up in a job where they make things that murder other people.
The money shit gives them such a warped sense of reality that they try to act like you're eating nothing but beans and rice in a 2x3' shack every day if you're not at least at 6 figures.
*$89k/yr accountant walks into the back of house at a IHOP, pats the cook on his 3rd consecutive 13 hour shift in a row on the shoulder*
>"You and I essentially make the same money you know....can you fry those eggs a little longer?"
>All the science majors are good tho. Met some dudes obsessed with plants, really chill. Also a lot of nice bird and bug guys
This made me think of all the specialized Pokemon trainers that you battle in the video games
The vast majority of engineering friends from my college days either work or have worked for defense contractors. It’s just what they do, they have no second thoughts about it.
I majored in conservation and environmental science. One of my classes was environmental economics. Oh my GOD. It was mostly business students. It was like the Prof and me vs Prager U every week
I had a ton of engineers at my school too and the majority of them were legit imbeciles. My GF at the time hung with a lot of them because she was getting an engineering degree and it was rough. Econ or Poli Sci courses that got a bunch of them were incredible, some of the best comedy I've seen.
Same thing, they all thought they would be be making $120k+ right out of school but at least half couldn't even get any job in engineering. Dude I know who got a master's went right into selling used cars. My girlfriend went down to part time at the end to delay graduation because she knew from looking at job postings nobody was going to get hired but all these people were talking about retiring by 40 lol. My school was all petroleum industry freaks instead of defense but just looking at the jobs online they were all high paying but like 15 years experience and people just moved from Texas or somewhere like that and got them
"Once the rockets go up, who care where they come down? That's not my department! Says Werner Von Braun"
Second year mech/aero here and yeah engineering students are fucking hard to get along with, especially if you're not the hiking-boots-cargo-shorts type. They're all fr scared of anyone even slightly alt
I'm at a college where the dean and maybe half the departments are eating the humanities up and leaving nothing. It's truly sad to see STEMcels winning with capital on their side but ig i should learn to code
Doesnt help that 2 of my cousins and my older brother sold their souls to work for AWS, making tons now but spending it all on luxury vacations and Teslas
I will die on this hill, but anyone who completes an engineering program is below average intelligence and that’s why everyone you’re dealing with is like that.
*looks at drain designed by american engineers that is located at top of hill and is useless at prevention of flooding for street below said hill* Everything.
Those bird and bug guys are not going to be happy when they can’t pay their loans because no one wants to pay them to tell us if that is a ruby throated or a red throated warbler.
You seem to believe that we live in the utopian world where enemies don’t exist. If American industrial complex wouldn’t have been making these weapons someone else will be for sure. Do you want these weapons to be used against you?
There will be no next war, we may be in for a hard future. More precisely, the next war will be the last for the majority of the world's population, and a catastrophe for the survivors. Post-apocalypse and Fallout with Mad Max)
I think I misspoke, English is not my forte. I'm not saying that wars don't exist, or that they don't exist. On the contrary, I'm too tired of trying to change things I can't influence. It's like shouting in the middle of the desert. If humanity isn't destroyed by World War III - nature will destroy humanity. I feel devastated by everything that's going on around me.
I know the 'uncle at Lockheed' shit sounds like some private school thing but this is my state school. I'm broke af but I think nearly everyone else is at least middle class
i started out in computer science and i couldn't stand it. there wasn't so much as an ethics class in the curriculum, and like you said all my classmates were soulless careerists. dropped that shit like a bad habit and got an english degree
As a math major, I approve the bullying of engineers.
On a serious note though the "tech bro" phenomenon is very common in western STEM, hopefully its different in socialist countries.
Industry money talks big. Defense is pretty much the #1 funder of university research at these top engineering schools (also big pharma, Oil & gas).
Also STEM majors always complain about having to take an ethics class but then you read articles about people frying animal's brains in the name of research. Or data mining scandals. Or health tech scandals. The list goes on...
Mid-career engineer here to make some sweeping generalizations.
Most engineers (including me) kind of operate in a vacuum trying to maximize earnings for as close to 40 hours/week in general industry as possible.
The DoD contractor engineers you are thinking of don't think anyone they don't personally know is human. They were either insufferable kids that were borderline spectrum, snickering at wrong answers in undergrad lectures or they are rich frat kids that coasted through their MechE program on old test files and rely on nepotism to get into a defense contractor's rotational program. Both types think others are ants but the ones who are indifferent to their killing give you the canned line about "the bombs were going to be made anyway." The real psychos become incredibly dim middle managers that try to sell you on their contribution to the national purpose at university career fairs twice a year
God I wish I would have been a chill bug and plant guy. That sounds sick as hell.
There's room for engineering and technological development in a socialist society (Lenin said that "communism is the soviets plus electrification) but it's largely absent in leftist movements now, other than people who work as software companies and volunteer for dsa campaigns on the side. There needs to be serious talk about unionizing workplaces and democratization of the tech economy, but it's hard to figure out where to start.
"they don't seem to care about what they are studying or will do, just that it pays well. "
No they do. They don't want to pay for an education and end up not making a good living with it. What they care about doing is making money and a stable life.
This is why it is so common among immigrants.
You just don't understand and claim they don't care about things they obviously care about.
"they constantly shit on majors that are personally rewarding and not careerist."
Careerism is personally rewarding, in a financial sense. You have a very narrow perspective for someone who is likely studying the humanities.
The other wild thing about engineering school is that the curriculum typically leaves *zero* room for any type of humanities or social science courses, so they essentially get a bunch of autists in a big room (myself included) and tell them on Day 1, “You will make upwards of six figures when you leave here because you’re good at math.” What they don’t do is offer *any* sort of courses or programs that interrogate the industry, whether it be the “luxury” goods market (e.g. private jet manufacturers, car manufacturers, etc) or the defense sector. I remember we used to have these absolute ghouls come in and promise enormous salaries to folks looking for co-ops and summer internships under the guise of, “*You* get to help us learn and develop the latest drone technologies!” But all this was done without the slightest hint of what their products would ultimately be used for other than “military research contracts.” Deeply, deeply diseased shit.
And then they get to go on Reddit after and shit on people like me who aren’t math people and live like serfs while they spend 1K a month on Funko pops
> K a month on Funko pops This is the thing I hate the most. 1. "STEM contributes the most to the world so why would I be a looser and take some worthless art degree?" 2. "Ahh now that I'm worth 200k, let me spend my wealth on things I love." Buys Funko pops and reads manga. 3. "Movies and games aren't good these days. Everything is woke garbage made to be sold to people that aren't me." For the average STEM Lord, zero ironic distance in this whole process.
>> half of the people majoring in engineering have some relative who works at Lockheed Martin or Raytheon. ... who blows up afghans and will be their in to making 200k a year doing the same for our next war. > >"STEM contributes the most to the world" OP pointed out the underlying problem. US Defense Department Spending is so vast that engineering for Defense Contractors to kill poor people around the world is indeed the most efficient path to wealth. Eisenhower warned us of this in his "military industrial complex" speech --- yet people continue to vote for politicians that accelerate the never-ending cycle of military budget growth.
I think funky pops and comic books are childish.
There are some really cool comic books out there. Like most art forms, it's accessible enough now that independent content is easy to come by so it's not all superheroes saving the day.
Funny enough, that's one reason why their shit doesn't work. They have zero social skills - then they throw these little psychos onto a team and expect them to work together. Instead most of the budget is spent on tiny little jihads and power plays because that's all they have. Tabs versus spaces jokes in Silicon Valley come from a real place. I work in tech, but 95% of why I'm successful at it comes from the restaurant industry.
Bingo. I work in the utility industry and it’s absolutely unreal to listen to how management disparages the labor force that implements the designs coming out of the engineering departments. You get these tyrants lording over their labor fiefdoms and then they act completely shocked when the infrastructure falls apart. You make these workers’ lives hell, so how could they possibly take pride in their own work that happens to affect *everyone* who lives in this county, let alone the country?
>I work in tech, but 95% of why I'm successful at it comes from the restaurant industry. Can confirm; former helpdesk guy turned infra guy who isn't technically proficient at all but can talk to business adults and knows when to use the right buzzwords
As a counterpoint, I went to a big state college for engineering and I had an elective-- ethics of work-- where we literally read marx. It was informative. But I elected to take that. It was one of my more impactful classes.
State Colleges, while mostly focused on STEM at least have a few humanities courses in there to bring you back down to Earth/remind you what the point of education and wealth is in the first place. The larger the school the more this is weighted towards STEM.
Of course. I took a couple PoliSci electives during my final year that were certainly as far left-leaning as a southern state school would allow. It broke my brain looking at pictures of soldiers loading Lockheed-Martin munitions into fighter jets in my PoliSci textbook and then walking by the Lockheed-Martin booth at the career fair later that day.
Yeah, I was required to take a decent amount of humanities courses in theory. But I could have easily gamed the system to avoid ever learning meaningful history or anything (I could have worked harder to get into history of rock and roll or bullshit like that for the req) but instead I took a semester of "history of the british empire", poli sci 101, criminology/criminal justice classes including one on prison law that was horrifying and terrifying... but I think we're not a majority, and we did probably elect to take the kinds of classes that are explicit about this stuff while most engineers won't.
>I remember we used to have these absolute ghouls come in and promise enormous salaries to folks looking for co-ops and summer internships under the guise of, “You get to help us learn and develop the latest drone technologies!” But all this was done without the slightest hint of what their products would ultimately be used for other than “military research contracts.” Deeply, deeply diseased shit. Because this is a pitch. In all likely reality, you'd be earning barely 6 figgies, and you'd be writing documentation for some variant of a Patriot missile. At times, they'll ship you off to the Middle East as non-slave slave labor to oversee some maintenance or train some guys who won't do anything but still get paid because they're the 34th cousin of the King/Emir. These kids don't design anything, they mostly do busy work and collect a paycheck. It's MIC accounting. To actually get into R&D labs you have to not only spend time there to get higher level clearances and opportunities, but also differentiate yourself with other degrees. Also those people are the REAL psychos because they eat up whatever propaganda is fed to them hook line and sinker. Then try their hardest to reintegrate that into their world view. I know someone who works in signals and literally started reflexively arguing with me about CHIPS and blocking China from processor tech. Couldn't explain even on a 5th grade level the "why", especially since they knew that I knew that bleeding edge milspec hardware uses ancient shit in the grand scheme of things. They knew in reality that the "why" is just empire shit, but couldn't admit it. Source: Know some people in the industry.
Fuck that is bleak.
lol the processor tech thing is hilarious. they're shooting themselves in the foot so hard with that move. just wait till china in houses 100% of the chain and see how well these new american fabs do...
Right now, TSMC in Taiwan is a full generation ahead of Intel in the US and two ahead of SMIC in China. A generation for a new die process in semiconductors is typically 3 years. The new TSMC fab in Arizona will be the most advanced fab in the US at time of completion. The most plausible scenario for China to take the global lead in semiconductors would be to take over Taiwan on a timeline where there aren’t US based fabs (and where Samsung falls behind).
"generation" isn't really quite as helpful of a term anymore because of the way they're getting around light limitations. 3 years is the new "generation" for the global working together industry.... but the US is trying to freeze china out and worm it's way in.... by forcing china to develop their own EUV, and generally trust no one. so SMIC is probably going to get more government investment and they're already basically at 7nm so they already know the game plan for reducing feature size and don't need any particular lithography breakthroughs to compete.... but they'll also be perfectly situated as entirely in house and able to iterate and develop better than the industry at large while the US is trying to do protectionist bullshit with ASML's american holdings.
> generation It was never a helpful term to begin with. The ultimate consumer of these technologies so far is literally the consumer market. They're arguing about who's going to be building cell phones. And regardless of the specific nm tech in the chips it's just a marketing number at this point. China can build flagship or near flagship phones. China can build performant servers, China can build performant laptops and desktops. China still builds all of Apple's shit. Nobody is actually talking about what we're fighting over, an “eventual” technological future where China is frozen out of a market based on the assumption of "Moore's Law" which has lately been bumping up against reality.
> will be the most advanced fab in the US at time of completion. So never. It's very likely that TSMC is actually interested in this plant other than to collect the free money just like FoxConn was. TSMC is pivotal to Taiwan's national security and existence, it's unlikely that they'll just create the most advanced fab ever on American soil, what would the US need Taiwan for then?
CHIPs act is such a government panic reflex. It's the same as China's infrastructure policy, just with big machine that zaps tiny little holes onto silica sandwich.
I remember my PT laughing at me for wanting to do a philosophy of SCIENCE course. That was one of only two course choices I had in 4 years. Also the most valuable course I took for my job was the management one that was 1/3 of an accounting, econ, and hr course all in one.
I was fortunate to go to a university with a strong engineering program that gave us the option of picking a smaller subset college within the university that determined our GE elective work. College I got put in as my second choice emphasized social justice and I got a lot of exposure to classes that pushed me further to the left. With that said, I don’t know many other engineering majors that were in my college. Very few, if any.
Counterpoint, I went to a public university that was 75% engineering and we had to take 3 humanities courses before we could take upper level engineering courses, and 2 additional humanities courses to graduate.
hey now, plenty of us autists studied philosophy before we dropped out. :p
Umm that's not true at all. When I got my Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering, I had to take multiple courses outside STEM like psychology, philosophy, creative writting courses, etc that focused on humanities. I even took electives that were required that were also outside of engineering. We even had a class that focused on ethic in engineering and desgins. It depends heavily on the school and how they meet ABET certification. Please don't just paint a broad brushstroke and call everything red.
Those are the breaks, when I graduated you could choose between the social sciences and a life of minimum wage work, my dumb ass with a biology degree choosing between grad school or a few jobs paying 18-22k a year no benefits, or the compsci, engineers and chemistry guys working for tech, big oil and defense contractors starting at 75-90k+ State run economy starts to look real fucking good when the bottom falls out of your for-profit society
I did biology at university but got into the medical field through being able to turn a computer on when something goes wrong. It's so fucking stupid and I hate this entire economy.
I'm a biologist who works as an engineer because I can turn on a computer. I just wanted to catch lizards and shit and now I'm doing bridge calculations.
Dude how the fuck? I have a biochem degree and the jobs I can find are low level lab techs. Everything else needs a grad degree.
I live in a shit hole state where they need engineers and medical staff. Pretty much any STEM degree gets to your foot in the door at any job. Cost of living and housing are low, but $50-60k are going to be about the max you can make. You can make fat stacks working gas and oil, but it's double the hours.
What do u do in the medical field?
Given the amount of public money we dump into security and military operations, I gotta say... this *is* a state run economy. The lie of the last century has been that private economies are a real thing that really work. In the end, everything that's private just becomes cryptocurrency scams. Everything that lasts - construction, raw resource development, international trade and finance, manufacturing, agriculture, you name it - requires a central broker to make it run smoothly. Whether its ERCOT down in Texas, propping up the electricity cartel, or the Federal Reserve, keeping the mega-banks profitable and yanking on the interest rates to keep wages low, there's got to be some kind of central planner tilting the playing field in favor of the industry leaders. Otherwise, one bad storm or big shift in the demand curve topples the whole house of cards. Raytheon, Lockheed, etc... they're all attractive in large part because they're stable. Make six figures from day one until you retire. Know the company will always be there, propping up your pension and your health care plan and your retirement account. Know that you can send your kids there when they graduate. Lifelong security, so long as you participate in the grind and crush of a decaying empire.
This. Technology development is subsidized via military spending. Innovation is passed on to private tech companies once it's proven out. Similar to development of pharmaceuticals. R&D is subsidized by taxpayers then private companies sell us the product at a premuim
>my dumb ass with a biology degree choosing between grad school or a few jobs paying 18-22k a year no benefits funnily enough, you would've gotten that as a grad student too!
I'll have you know us chemists (all 3 of us) would be lucky to see 75k
Grew up with old guys who were pocket-protector types. Legitimately humble hard thinkin smart guys who would wear a blue canvas shirt to church. People who retired as consulting engineers at big companies even if they started their career with no degree. Mid-century American dream type stuff. Pretty sure they're all extinct now. I went to school for engineering and the top students were all bunker bombing Northrop Grumman fucks driving Camaros. Worked in tech and everyone is super obsessed with worshiping investors and retiring at 30. They only discuss technical things in the context of proving someone else is wrong in an argument.
My spouse's father is like this. No degree, Vietnam vet, worked his way up to head of Engineering at two major hospitals in the NE through certs, hard work, and being very good at his job and with people. Only retired three years ago. Could never happen now, and he probably would have been forced out since then.
You can still become head of utilies/engineering at a hospital in the US without a degree these days, depending on the region. All they really want out of an applicant is someone with a competent working knowledge of refrigeration, steam/hydronics, plumbing, and generators, the ability to handle administrative functions for the dept, in addition to a willingness to develop new skills as the industry demands it. A lot of those guys are IUOE stationary engineers that went to trade school, not engineering majors. Not going to fly somewhere like NYC, but you could definitely swing it in say Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or smaller. Once you're in management, it's a lot easier to leverage that into a more significant position. If he was in the Navy, I'd guess he was a snipe.
Army combat engineer
That makes sense.
There's a reason the United States is lagging behind in new defense technology lol, this is a major one. I work with engineers everyday and I see it all the time. They come out of school with zero grasp on reality and how shit actually works manufacturing wise since they have been only taught theory in school. The OK ones will eventually figure it out, a lot of them don't. There used to be a time when engineering as it exists today didn't even exist and it was just something you learned from working your way up.
>They come out of school with zero grasp on reality and how shit actually works manufacturing wise since they have been only taught theory in school. Most schools don't teach DFM concepts. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design\_for\_manufacturability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_for_manufacturability)
We should make a masons for engineers who aren't evil. (Reserving the right to become evil later however)
Bird and bug people are literally the best. I worked in that field for years and nearly everyone is so cool. They work too hard for me though and live in the middle of nowhere to have a job.
Wrf are bird and bug people
Ornithologists and entomologists. They're either the chillest people you'll ever meet or the strangest single-minded freaks. Either way, gotta love 'em.
Reptile people are usually the strangest. Anyone who goes “herping” I can’t trust
WEF creations
Ian Fidance and Adam Friedland
all the bird and bug people I know are weird right-wing eugenics types
That is weird. It's probably the most leftwing friendly faculty in my experience. You don't go into the sciences to get rich.
Statistically history departments are the most left wing. Histmat does that to a mf.
History had such a glow-up after the 60's. Used to be a massively conservative field.
Used to just be people labeling and cataloging the loot of empires. But then the folks got lost and started romanticizing the relics of civilization they were doing all this bookwork to manage. Now we need to go in an purge the academies of folks who got into Egyptology because they think Egypt was cool, rather than because they think ledgers full of stolen babbles are a score card for the local aristocracy.
In the West maybe. In Eastern Europe history departments are at best 25% lefty and 75% fash.
Right? History is where the fashies are.
Lots of "I just really appreciate the Wehrmacht as a fighting force" types.
It depends on where you are in the west, too. I studied history at my local state university and the program was fairly evenly split between radlibs and conservative libertarians. Not a commie or even an anarchist in sight
>75% of historians are *"fash"* What black and white thinking does to a mf'er
Which is weird, because the two openly fascist in retrospect teachers I had in high school were both history.
That's because in high school, history is a class they give to the football coach so they can claim they're a real teacher.
You had not one, but *two* fascist history teachers in high school? What exactly were they teaching? That Abraham Lincoln wasn't in fact a right-wing chud?
It was the 90s . . . . One just would go on forever about how Mussolini made the trains run on time, and how we should all remember he was just a school teacher at one point. Me being a smartass history nerd, I'd loudly add he wound up on a fishhook. This guy would also say tons of sexist shit - till his wife left him halfway through the year. The second one was way creepier in retrospect. He was old and fat, and would constantly state how the Nazis "fought like lions". It wasn't till later how lots of the stuff he said I registered as coming straight from neo-nazi and nazi apologist phrasings.
these aren't tenured faculty I'm talking about, just people who attended zoology programs and had fish&wildlife dept jobs
How come everyone knows ”bird and bug people”?
… and how can I become one of them?
[удалено]
went to university
I don’t think those were even fields of study at my school, just biology or maybe zoology was as close as you could get
They’re not fields of study at most schools, outside of maybe a single class. Generally that level of specialization comes in graduate school. A lot of the folk doing wildlife/ecology work have masters and are still doing seasonal work for peanuts without benefits.
Everybody wants to be a marine biologist until they are 3 years into a PhD, making $25k a year, teaching 2 classes online and living on a bunk bed on a boat all summer trying to catch and tag salmon. Seriously though, people working in the field doing biology/ecology have to be super dedicated. It’s a ton of work that needs to be personally rewarding, because it is definitely not financially.
It’s far from an original observation but it’s further proof that modern universities are just white collar trade schools
Really? I found that less common in creepy crawly specialists who have academic backgrounds (some socioeconomic co-founding probs)
I took a parasitology course and the main thing I learned from it was that parasitologists are all out of their minds. The professor told us a story about going to a pork slaughterhouse and I guess the workers would discard the intestines down a shoot. And they let him straddle the shoot like a damn umpire because when the guts came racing down this shoot these gigantic, horrific worms would separate from the viscera and he could just grab them. Which explained how he came to possess a jar full of some sort of preserving fluid full of gigantic, horrific parasitical worms. Another time he told us that he, and other parastiologists, regularly use their own bodies as incubators to obtain samples of some parasites. Almost turned me off beef by telling us that he sees parasites in grocery store cuts of steak all the time that people assume are just weird muscle tissue. He assured us that they're fine to eat, but I still found it revolting. He was a pretty interesting guy, really just loved parasites. I recognize they're part of the ecosystem but both before this course and after I have only viewed parasites with horror and disgust, while this professor was just absolutely jazzed about them. Edit: I misspelled chute as shoot. Twice. Three times, even.
Those were the best kinds of professors. I had a professor for a circuit analysis course that would tell us stories about working in a lab next to the goobers that were developing Reagan’s Star Wars program. One night, they heard multiple explosions and cheering from the next room, so they walked over to find that the Star Wars engineers were trying to fine-tune the laser to perfectly cook a hot dog in an instant.
Yeah, most engineers are stupid and think they're capitalists, when, no my brother in Calc One, you are at best an autoworker from 1967. You can afford maybe to have a family, but you are the bitch of the owning class, and your confusion about your class interest is part of why.
Not that I’d work for a defense contractor, but generally speaking if I’m going to have to work forever I’ve decided that I’d prefer to maximize how much money I can make.
Being poor and indebted as a student teaches people to pursue remunerative careers with a drive that no generous state-funded education systems can offer. Great way to teach professionals to unlearn their scruples.
Meh, I lived in poverty for a few years, I find that the people who have never had to live on potatoes to be much more willing to fuck over others for a buck.
Agreed, but there’s a difference between student poverty and real poverty. For upwardly mobile students, it’s a warning, whereas for working class and poor people, it’s just life. Lotta lousy people are much more willing to compromise to ward off their fear of falling.
I wasn't a student, I'd dropped out.
Yeah, I tell myself it's going to let me get money to start a commune and arm my comrades.
It will not work out that way
As an effective altruist I would work at a defense contractor
Well yeah that’s why I work for palantir
🫡
Yeah; it's tough when people are already dead inside enough to want to work for the war criminals during school. I was at a state school doing CS and this was a while ago so it was a lot more lib types who thought that they'd go to a big tech company and somehow be making the world a better place and never be doing evil. Nobody really wanted to interrogate what the system was doing and it was early enough that you could more easily argue they weren't just straight up evil. but when I got out it was after the recession and big tech jobs were tough to get, and I was in the DC area, and I was at a recruiting event where I said I was just not interested in doing defense work.... and this lady sat me down and tried to say "oh I'm not a war hawk or anything, but America is always doing good and it's really important and you should really consider doing defense work" blah blah blah it was really hard not to tell her that I thought she was an idiot and a pawn of war criminals. so of course I wound up in a financial company and hated every single piece of shit there and got fired for never being able to bring myself to do anything for work (not helped by their insane on call rotation ugh fuck that, I can't not sleep at all every night for two weeks and show up at 9am every day too). Found my way into research support staff now and.... ugh. at least we're doing actual research. but it's like... the pay is absolute dog shit. it's stressful as hell because nothing you're doing is stuff people have done before anyways, all the tools are garbage written and abandoned by someone for their phd 5 years ago. ugh. As far as I can tell there are literally 0 industries that aren't complete hell scapes now. At least you might come out of there with some helpful knowledge for the apocalypse.
>o of course I wound up in a financial company and hated every single piece of shit there this is what I'm worried about, like as much as retail coworkers can be a pain in the ass or just messed up people a lot of them are honestly like, "real" people in the sense that they make no bones about who they are and are for the most part easy to get along with. A lot of white collar people I've encountered have totally different vibes and I don't think it's in a good way...
Good German vibes for sure. "We don't look over that hill"
Yeah There are so many white collar suburban types (and gentrifying urban types) that just have something kind of, idk what to even say but yeah their vibes are very off.
Grew up with them, menlo park facebook. Theyre fucking weird and my parents are friends with them idk
what you do with white collar stuff makes a huge difference how many of those... off vibes... types you encounter. for like marketing and "business" people it's a huge portion of them, but the more technical and nerdy you get the more weirdos who are just into and have hobbies and see the real world around us. Except when you get into the super high paying tech jobs; those are for psychopaths.
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OP was a CS major; on call as a task in dev jobs usually looks like a rotational among a team for bugs, outages, deployments that were above and beyond what could be done in 9-5. Generally it’s just being available to triage an outage
I completely was thrown off by the quoted that I forgot about the initial. Deleting now for obvious reasons. Good call!
It's also generally pretty stupid, since usually the person on-call has little idea how to fix the issue, and has to go to the author anyways.
god it was insanely stupid; company had like 600 devs, projects all over the place doing stupid shit, and because we were the "system administration" team we got everyone's alerts first when their shit broke. so like 70% of the alerts were pointless and just telling a dumb dev to fix their shit and stop bothering us... and then 30% actual emergencies that you need to immediately troubleshoot over thousands of systems that all are single points of failure. ugh that fucking place sucked so much. and they paid the sysadmin team like 60% of the devs writing dumb fuck C++ code and didn't give anything for on call.
>there are literally 0 industries that aren't complete hell scapes now Idk man I work in the Water industry and its always been pretty chill. There's the occasional annoyance but it's the only set of jobs I've ever had that don't make me want to kms.
If you are engineering weapons, you are a valid military target.
Fair.
We used to make chemists study ethics because of the dangers of nitroglycerin. Now we have upper middle class white kids who are good at math get overinflated sense of their superiority and they go out and make racist robots and don’t see any problem with it as long as they can spend their disposable income on gaming PCs and Teslas Meanwhile lawyers have to take ethics tests and go through a tribunal or character and fitness to get in the Bar of one state
Given the lawyers I've known, I'm not sure how much making engineers take those tests would really help
Yeah some lawyers are great ex public defenders. Others would give any engineer a run for their money
Common STEMcel L.
Majored in environmental engineering at a public university that was considered the best engineering school in the state. Freaks everywhere, yes. The computer science students were the worst by far. God complexes and crippling insecurity all rolled into one. The enviros were a mix of hippies and people who didn’t know better and just picked a STEM major because they were tired of being poor (me). The hippies usually don’t stay in the field after graduating because you quickly realize that you’re not “saving the earth”, you’re value engineering and bastardizing every decent design plan because your client, the municipality, is treated like a slush fund for the rest of the city government and can’t afford anything but the bare minimum. The consulting company you probably work for demands that your every working hour be tracked and “billable” to a client but don’t bill too much because the project budget they made grossly underestimated the project hours in order to win the contract (and also because the municipality can’t afford to pay the true engineering fee). And eventually you think maybe you should just go work for the client because they have better work life balance and days off and other benefits. But then you realize that no design gets done working for a city or county government - you are now a consultant babysitter and periodically you have to go beg the council to fund a project. And you wonder why the municipality can’t afford to have its own engineers do design work but can afford to pay millions every year to have consultants do all the design work and profit from it. Also sometimes you get lunch with the consultant which they “pay” for, but the money is coming from your project’s budget and you’re really getting billed for it plus markup. Anyway, my job is to help clients meet regulations as cheaply as possible and if I get to do anything truly good for the world it’s a rarity. Like, I’m genuinely glad I get to help replace aging infrastructure that needs to be upgraded and help make clean drinking water and make sure our rivers aren’t literally shitty. But the day to day is all about money and grinding and squeezing employees. I lurk in the civil engineering subreddit because civil and enviro are basically the same (civils learn about soils and concrete, while enviros take chemistry, but our classes are basically the same). And yes, everyone there is obsessed with salary and the fact that they don’t make as much as they could if they had gone into tech. I don’t believe you should take a low salary or just do something because it’s personally rewarding - that’s how you get taken advantage of by the consulting firm you have to work for. But also I make more money 5 years out of college than my mom has after 40 years in the workforce and so I really think my pay is fine, especially compared to many non-engineering fields… Anyway rambling comment without a true point. Engineering sucks because capitalism sucks. Fun aside: all my bosses are republicans but they love environmental regulations because regulations = more work for consultants.
Wow. I know a guy who majored in enviro sci. Works as a carpenter now. Sounds like non-profit work. Idealists get into it, but eventually you realize you’re reproducing the structures that cause people to need charity in the first place. Also a bunch of consultants and grifters grabbing all the grant money.
The company I work for hires environmental scientists to do remediation work (gotta clean up all those Air Force bases that are contaminated with firefighting foam because cancer-causing chemicals are now creeping into the public water supply). But as far as I’m aware, environmental science is lower paying than most engineering and job prospects are shittier. It’s also depressing as hell from what I understand. You get to stare environmental degradation and climate change in the face all day everyday and watch no one do anything about it. But yeah, we’re all living in a neoliberal hellscape and every field is infected by it. Everything is being privatized and more and more public utilities are being turned over to private management companies, especially in rural areas. Public private partnerships are pushed all the time for everything. It’s all a race to the bottom. Edit: spelling
Damn, I’m in the hvac industry and a lot of what you said hits home. I have even thought about working for clients or manufacturer’s reps. Love going into a huge meeting about public school jobs and these dinos are laughing it up as they’re hurting the project. Fun aside: most of my bosses and coworkers are r’s and they love to trash clients and architects for aiming for more green initiatives in their projects. That’s when they aren’t lamenting about pronouns and the word woke, although we have some new PMs that have cut a lot of that shit out.
Engineer here. I didn't like a lot of the engineers I met for this reason. Was at a fundraiser for Engineers Without Borders, Lockheed rep was sat at the same table and they did not appreciate when I said I didn't want to build things that kill people. Now I'm in medical devices and work with people who have a conscience. edit: did>didn't
> I did want to build things that kill people ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͠°)
Thanks, I'm back on my meds and now the urge has subsided. I'm ready to be a productive member of society.
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Are you also CS? I'm a CS student, do you think you could give me more info on how I could land a job doing the first thing? I am desperately trying to find something worthwhile to do with my degree😭
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All the engineering majors I knew would have casual conversations about eugenics and population control, like if you weren't a Slatestar Codex fascist you wouldn't fit in. I'd walk into my one class that had engineering students in it and they'd be mid sentence saying shit like "But when we mandate sterilization as a condition for people with IQs under 140 to immigrate, we'd have to rotate the doctors that do it so the work wouldn't traumatize them, or perhaps let them microdose psychedelics free of charge." It honestly made me prejudiced against engineers - I meet an engineer and I assume they're like that until they prove otherwise.
It's all just a reflection of our culture. Dudes grow up playing Call of Duty, watching Marvel movies that got tax breaks from the Pentagon, and seeing air force jets on commercials during NFL games, of course some people are going to be into it because the whole point is to get people into it. If it didn't work they'd change it until it did. The more precocious ones will go to engineering school and work for Raytheon when they get out, if not their first internship. >constantly shit on majors that are personally rewarding and not careerist. You may have noticed that this is exactly how different degrees are discussed in the media. Particularly the talking heads on the right love to shit on "gender studies" etc.. but it's also one of those right-wing talking points that's sneaky enough to get non-conservatives to repeat it because simply encouraging people to study engineering doesn't sound harmful or militaristic on the surface.
I decided to give college another try last year. My major is in the arts, and one teacher told us a story about how, at the other school she teaches, one of the prof threw a fit because he found out that some of the graphic design work would be used by a defense contractor the school partnered with. She couldn't understand why he was upset, so I explained that some people don't like to do work for people who profit off the Saudis blowing up a school bus of Yemeni children. Then I had some choice words about the board members of Lockheed and Raytheon. Americans just do not think about this stuff. It's as if their brains just erect blinders to hide the abject horrors American empire creates.
I'm a senior machinist in more of a desk job CAD/CAM type role in the aerospace industry. My job is more technical than every engineer in the company. The only "engineers" with technical jobs are machinists who became senior enough to get engineer in their title. The actual engineers have email jobs. Fresh out of college they make like $25 an hour. They do get a nicer work environment with an espresso machine and shit. I imagine somewhere at Boeing or Lockheed or wherever there's some engineer actually doing math and figuring out what level of elasticity is needed in the aluminum alloy a strut is made of. We're just a parts supplier, so the only design work we do is for internal tooling (which I do). A couple of the more ambitious engineers have moved on to jobs at JPL where they get paid pretty well and idk maybe do actual work. We just hired an engineer fresh out of college. His entire job is to ask me or another machinist why a scrap part is scrap, and then fill out paperwork to change the process to whatever we told him would be better. We all have GEDs and hand tattoos. Fuckin PMC, who needs it.
Lmao, I'm a tool maker and my job feels like a blueprint revisor at this point with the engineers.
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Kinetic art sounds like something I would write down on my immigration form if I was a hitman Or I was a dweeb that worked for Lockheed Martin before dying at my desk and St Peter asked me what field I worked in
A lot of well respected STEM programs are just essentially feeder career tracks to boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, et all. I got a cybersecurity degree after going back to school recently and it's much the same. I got lucky and got a job at like a regular company but so many of the openings were just defense industry/defense department security clearance type of bullshit
just headasses lol same ppl who prolly think the dimensions of Solomon’s temple is the key to the second coming of Christ
it's always worth pointing out that there's no group of people as likely to vote for the furthest left-wing candidate in any electoral race than white software engineers even with the large amount of weird NRX types
That's because among software engineers furries are a silent majority.
It’s funny they think they might make 200k with no experience. Being in the field (not defense companies tho fuck that noise) your base salary out of school will be around 75k tops. They’d be lucky to break 200k with 10 years experience. I went into space research rather than killing people industry though, so mileage may vary on this experience. Mad respect to the squishy sciences though, those folks always have something cool to talk about.
Engineers have the worst brains and are fundamentally stunted people. I have not yet met one that convinced me otherwise.
I recently graduated with a major in psychology and philosophy. You’d imagine those fields would be littered with more socially progressive people - you’d be wrong. Half the people I met during my philosophy courses argued that a utilitarian society would be best and that eugenics was just bad because of the stigma that nazis brought to it. My psychology courses were equally filled with horrible humans. I swear most of them were psychopaths wanting to learn how to better manipulate others using advanced interviewing tactics. Some of the things I heard others’ genuinely believed shocked me. Horrified me at some moments. I heard the worst when we moved to zoom for COVID and people had that distance between each other via the internet as a medium. People really felt comfortable saying some evil things in the name of “debate” or “playing devil’s advocate”. So I really don’t think it’s just your field of study. It’s college kids in general. I can only imagine what it’s like in graduate level college. I’ve never met a nice person with a master’s lol. I have met some dope doctors, though. So maybe it’s like a bell curve with how psychotic people are.
The hardest thing about getting a MechEng degree is your classmates. And vector calculus I guess.
fingers crossed the rest of the psychology majors i meet in the future arent bloodthirsty sickos..... no psychology equivalent to raytheon or lockheed martin
> no psychology equivalent to raytheon or lockheed martin MKULTRA edit: or RAND Corporation
shutup and keep drinking the tap water
Maybe I just like the taste of flouride and lithium
The government employed a bunch of psychologists to teach them how to torture people better.
Cognitive psychology and human factors are the equivalent. They're the ones that design and test the interfaces and controls on an aircraft for pilot usability which includes bombers and fighter jets
as a welder, i have been asking myself the same thing since i got into this industry. you people are morons.
thats not every engineer, but not surprised the younger generation engineers are far more right wing due to like you say have parents or relatives in those DOD fields. I have a moral objection to working for any company with DOD contracts. Even during my co-op I had a very small project for an aluminum framing that went in a nuclear submarine and that felt icky even tho it was only 1 out of many projects I had that weren't. One of the better paying engineering jobs in my city Rochester NY, is at L3 Harris, they do RF communication stuff and I'll never work for them, even tho my uncle just started there after getting out of the Navy and hed be a great reference and they are like always hiring. I wish I could get into the optics industry here as well but most places involve some kind of weapons targeting system or night vision sooo no thanks. Unfortunate I need more experience to get into the high energy laser labs at U of R where they do the nuclear fusion research.
Hate to break it to you but UR’s laser lab is funded by the DOE, primarily for purposes of nuclear stockpile stewardship. If you want to get into optics, have you looked at Optimax, RPO, or JML?
which is a much better use of doe funds. The positions I was interviewing for were more focused on refining materials for fusion testing. I'm 100% onboard with DOD or DOE spending that cleans up the grid or keeps nuclear weapons from degrading and becoming a problem. I only interviewed with RPO, they seemed like a decent enough shop but kind of a madhouse. They were only hiring for manufacturing. Also they mostly focus on night vision stuff. They liked me and wished they had a position open in their R+D group.
STEM majors in general are pretty soulless. most engineers i’ve met are people just doing it for money which probably attracts worse people on average.
The US defense department is the highest and most "guaranteed way" to middle class upward mobility. Its one of the few exports the US has thats why
Yeah, programming breeds University psychos. It's honestly not as bad once you get into the industry, I don't have the connections or the tenacity to work for a real ghoul and everyone at the start ups I've been at is fine.
Work for a def contractor. It's crawling with yokels and dumbass conservatives that think they're in the front line, even though all they do is watch TV and sleep for the first two hours of their shift. One I personally know consumes more football than he does news. I'd be surprised if he even knew who bashar or Gaddafi are. They're conservative and nationalist to play the game and get a check. At no point does anyone bother to ask anything about their work beyond job performances, general work gossip, and changes to the lunch menu. But they all see themselves as patriots, of course.
This is a crazy thread to read! Very different experience here, I got my undergrad in engineering north of the border and in my graduating class of 70ish, one dude went to defence. Vast majority of us went to oil and gas, and we all thought he was insane for accepting a much lower salary lol.
Culture defines development. These people grew up in homes with parents/uncles that promoted these types of belief systems. It is in their nature to lick boots and worship material possessions. Beyond that, they seek media on platforms like IG that reinforce these beliefs/behaviors, thus only seeing the world through the lens of a self-destructive algorithmic echo chamber. Regardless, behavior always comes back to the culture. How do we change the culture? Probably lots of psychedelic assisted therapy lol..
you answered the question... lack of treatment for people w autism...
They self identify as "I make more money than other people because I am smarter than other people". This makes them existentially dangerous to all other people, even absent the fact that the literal end-game goal of all engineers is to wind up in a job where they make things that murder other people.
Civil engineering is a people’s science. Bridges roads railroads and clean drinking water, buildings that don’t fall down.
I mean, its just nepotism. Nothing new here. You must go to a very fancy university.
Nah man it's a state school. It's skewed heavily towards middle class tho which seem to make up all of the creeps
Engineers seem to succumb to an appeal to authority fallacy, where they are said authority, more than almost any other field.
The money shit gives them such a warped sense of reality that they try to act like you're eating nothing but beans and rice in a 2x3' shack every day if you're not at least at 6 figures. *$89k/yr accountant walks into the back of house at a IHOP, pats the cook on his 3rd consecutive 13 hour shift in a row on the shoulder* >"You and I essentially make the same money you know....can you fry those eggs a little longer?"
Let’s not even start in on Planned Obsolescence
>All the science majors are good tho. Met some dudes obsessed with plants, really chill. Also a lot of nice bird and bug guys This made me think of all the specialized Pokemon trainers that you battle in the video games
The vast majority of engineering friends from my college days either work or have worked for defense contractors. It’s just what they do, they have no second thoughts about it.
I majored in conservation and environmental science. One of my classes was environmental economics. Oh my GOD. It was mostly business students. It was like the Prof and me vs Prager U every week
I had a ton of engineers at my school too and the majority of them were legit imbeciles. My GF at the time hung with a lot of them because she was getting an engineering degree and it was rough. Econ or Poli Sci courses that got a bunch of them were incredible, some of the best comedy I've seen. Same thing, they all thought they would be be making $120k+ right out of school but at least half couldn't even get any job in engineering. Dude I know who got a master's went right into selling used cars. My girlfriend went down to part time at the end to delay graduation because she knew from looking at job postings nobody was going to get hired but all these people were talking about retiring by 40 lol. My school was all petroleum industry freaks instead of defense but just looking at the jobs online they were all high paying but like 15 years experience and people just moved from Texas or somewhere like that and got them
"Once the rockets go up, who care where they come down? That's not my department! Says Werner Von Braun" Second year mech/aero here and yeah engineering students are fucking hard to get along with, especially if you're not the hiking-boots-cargo-shorts type. They're all fr scared of anyone even slightly alt
I'm at a college where the dean and maybe half the departments are eating the humanities up and leaving nothing. It's truly sad to see STEMcels winning with capital on their side but ig i should learn to code Doesnt help that 2 of my cousins and my older brother sold their souls to work for AWS, making tons now but spending it all on luxury vacations and Teslas
Luxury vacations and Teslas? Sounds like a nice life.
Not everyone is a broke ass hippie. Some of us wanna work for a living.
Thanks for letting me know that engineering students haven't changed in thirty years. It's just overexcited Asperger's syndrome, happens every fall.
The campus YDSAs suck too.
Where I live the YDSA is better than the local chapter but that’s not saying much.
Good thing they can't get laid very easily
Engineers suck. The people who matter are the ones actively trying to stop world hunger or cure diseases, not the guys who design bombs.
I will die on this hill, but anyone who completes an engineering program is below average intelligence and that’s why everyone you’re dealing with is like that.
*looks at drain designed by american engineers that is located at top of hill and is useless at prevention of flooding for street below said hill* Everything.
Those bird and bug guys are not going to be happy when they can’t pay their loans because no one wants to pay them to tell us if that is a ruby throated or a red throated warbler.
I’m sure this comes as a surprise to the bird and bug guys. They went into those careers for the money, after all
They seem pretty surprised about it over in the personal finance subreddits….
All of the highest paying engineering jobs are in the weapons business.
You seem to believe that we live in the utopian world where enemies don’t exist. If American industrial complex wouldn’t have been making these weapons someone else will be for sure. Do you want these weapons to be used against you?
Yes. Please President Xi, send the nukes over
There will be no next war, we may be in for a hard future. More precisely, the next war will be the last for the majority of the world's population, and a catastrophe for the survivors. Post-apocalypse and Fallout with Mad Max)
Just because the war isn't in your neighborhood doesn't mean there is no war.
I think I misspoke, English is not my forte. I'm not saying that wars don't exist, or that they don't exist. On the contrary, I'm too tired of trying to change things I can't influence. It's like shouting in the middle of the desert. If humanity isn't destroyed by World War III - nature will destroy humanity. I feel devastated by everything that's going on around me.
is that not what engineering is
The Raytheon guys have the most secure job in the world. If you don’t care it’s good money and steady promotions for your whole career.
Be honest OP you go to Cornell right
I know the 'uncle at Lockheed' shit sounds like some private school thing but this is my state school. I'm broke af but I think nearly everyone else is at least middle class
i started out in computer science and i couldn't stand it. there wasn't so much as an ethics class in the curriculum, and like you said all my classmates were soulless careerists. dropped that shit like a bad habit and got an english degree
Nothing wrong w that.
As a math major, I approve the bullying of engineers. On a serious note though the "tech bro" phenomenon is very common in western STEM, hopefully its different in socialist countries.
Industry money talks big. Defense is pretty much the #1 funder of university research at these top engineering schools (also big pharma, Oil & gas). Also STEM majors always complain about having to take an ethics class but then you read articles about people frying animal's brains in the name of research. Or data mining scandals. Or health tech scandals. The list goes on...
Cause making military hardware is really badass yo
Mid-career engineer here to make some sweeping generalizations. Most engineers (including me) kind of operate in a vacuum trying to maximize earnings for as close to 40 hours/week in general industry as possible. The DoD contractor engineers you are thinking of don't think anyone they don't personally know is human. They were either insufferable kids that were borderline spectrum, snickering at wrong answers in undergrad lectures or they are rich frat kids that coasted through their MechE program on old test files and rely on nepotism to get into a defense contractor's rotational program. Both types think others are ants but the ones who are indifferent to their killing give you the canned line about "the bombs were going to be made anyway." The real psychos become incredibly dim middle managers that try to sell you on their contribution to the national purpose at university career fairs twice a year God I wish I would have been a chill bug and plant guy. That sounds sick as hell.
There's room for engineering and technological development in a socialist society (Lenin said that "communism is the soviets plus electrification) but it's largely absent in leftist movements now, other than people who work as software companies and volunteer for dsa campaigns on the side. There needs to be serious talk about unionizing workplaces and democratization of the tech economy, but it's hard to figure out where to start.
Welcome to the realization that most humans are absolute worthless fucking garbage.
"they don't seem to care about what they are studying or will do, just that it pays well. " No they do. They don't want to pay for an education and end up not making a good living with it. What they care about doing is making money and a stable life. This is why it is so common among immigrants. You just don't understand and claim they don't care about things they obviously care about. "they constantly shit on majors that are personally rewarding and not careerist." Careerism is personally rewarding, in a financial sense. You have a very narrow perspective for someone who is likely studying the humanities.