Core Engineering Degrees v. Noncore Engineering Jobs

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Many people complain that graduates from mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and other “core engineering” branches take up jobs in IT, banks, consulting firms, and other “noncore engineering” sectors.

This is not a new rant – we covered this topic as far back as 2015 in Core Engineering Covets Top IIT Talent But Does Top IIT Talent Covet Core Engineering?.

But the controversy over the “brain drain” from core engineering degrees to noncore engineering jobs is scaling new heights of late, as you can see from this venting by a former Director of IIT Delhi in the Times of India article entitled Engg not just about computer science and IT. Can we stop this mad rush?.

These “Braindrainistas” miss two points:

  1. There’s very little new stuff happening in core engineering industries. Automobiles still run on ICE / EV technologies invented 100 years ago. Soda Ash is still produced by the Solvay Process invented in the 1860s.
  2. Most core engineering industries are heavily automated and need very few engineers. This was already true of some core industries like chemicals when I graduated in Chemical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1985. A senior in my department did his internship – then called “Practical Training” – at a leading petrochemicals plant in Mahul in the then Bombay. Set up in the 1960s, it had around 3,500 employees. After graduation, he joined the company’s latest, state-of-the-art factory at Thal Vaishet just outside Bombay. The new facility had 3X production capacity but, because it was heavily automated with an array of equipment, instruments and discrete control systems, it employed only 200 people. Since then, there has been an increasing use of robotics, manufacturing execution system, ERP, cranes, dumpers, excavators, and other technologies, as a result of which the level of automation has significantly increased in other core engineering industries like discrete manufacturing, construction, and so on.

The best of engineering talent is not keen on working for core engineering sectors due to the first factor.

Because of the second factor, second- and third-rung engineering students are not able to find enough jobs in core engineering sectors.

On top of that, IT, banks, and other Day One prima donnas pay more than double the salaries of core engineering industries.

A combination of these factors has caused the brain drain to IT, investment banking, and other noncore sectors that are less automated and need a lot of human workers.

I was recently reminded of this on Twitter. Referencing the current controversy over moonlighting in the Indian IT industry, gold medalist and Twitter user @harishvihu lamented that he was stagnating in his mechanical engineering job for over a decade whereas fresh software engineers get more than one job immediately after graduating that pay higher than his current job after 15 years. Citing very little prospects of advancement in his field, he was seeking my help to switch to IT.

While Braindrainistas portray a rosy picture for core engineering fields by bringing up drones, renewable energy, and so on, they conveniently gloss over the fact that these fields are technology-intensive and a bulk of jobs they generate are … wait for it … for coders.

If you dig deep into the aforementioned article, you might get the feeling – as I did – that it is self-serving.

There’s nothing new about brain drain. The first signs of it emerged 40 years ago when Infosys, TCS, and Wipro were Day One companies in campus placements at IIT Bombay before I graduated in 1985. It was frontpage news when I wrote Core Engineering Covets Top IIT Talent But Does Top IIT Talent Covet Core Engineering? seven years ago.

The former director of IIT Delhi is using brain drain as a smokescreen to hide his anxiety about the insane amount of vacancies in core departments at many engineering colleges.

Change-resistant academicians probably buried their heads in the sand like ostriches and ignored the trend all this while until they can no longer turn a blind eye to it now since it has started threatening their fiefdoms and sinecure jobs.

When I called out chemical process plants for being heavy users of instruments in AWS Snowmobile: Because Data Is Still Transported Physically, I caveated that there could be exceptions.

I was thinking about the crude oil warehousing facility featured in PARDON THE RAVENS by Alan Hruska.

Over a billion dollars of oil is siphoned off from this warehouse in New Jersey and replaced with sea water from the neighboring Atlantic Ocean. When the auditors report the loss, the company’s shareholders sue the company for securities fraud à la Matt Levine Everything Is Securities Fraud. Viscosity and density gauges would have easily spotted the fraud since sea water has different viscosity and density compared to crude oil. However, to the dismay of the company’s lawyers, the warehouse didn’t have such gauges. Instead, it relied on humans using 20 feet long dipsticks. Since dipstick measures only level and not viscosity or density, the theft went unnoticed for years.

Going by my aforementioned experience with refineries in India 35 years ago, I couldn’t believe that a chemical plant would use dipsticks in this day and age. I reached out to my batchmate to do a quick reality check. The ex-Head of Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Bombay conceded that, while sophisticated gauges to measure level are very much in vogue, many chemical process plants still use dipsticks since they’re cheap.

The next time somebody tells me that they’re stagnating in a core engineering job, I’ll refer them to plants like these that still seem to using humans galore!

The mad rush for computer science and IT has worked out well for students and employers alike. It has created the vibrant Indian IT Services industry that’s worth $250 billion in annual revenues and half a trillion dollars in valuation and sizeable investment banking and consulting businesses in India.

While it might pose an existential threat to core engineering departments in universities, it’s for academicians to wake up and smell the coffee and do whatever it takes for them to survive the brain drain.

I see no reason for the mad rush to stop.