Engineering Humility

It wasn't too long ago when I could walk by and chuckle at the curious art that sometimes littered my walk past Kroeber Hall during those special days of display. This chuckle was one of the few luxuries afforded by we engineering majors.

To poke fun at the art student who squanders his college days sculpting postmodern oddities and signing urinals was the most natural manifestation of the technical arrogance that was our birthright as engineers.

To ridicule the English majors whose literary prowess would do little to save them from lives as librarians and high school English teachers. To poke holes in the starry dreams of the mass comm major whose fantasies of becoming a major news anchorperson eventually fizzle into a reality of reporting on high school sports for a small-town newspaper. To suppress a laugh upon meeting the art history major who had best prepare for a questionable living as a masseuse.

These were all sources of a smug self-satisfaction that arose naturally among those in the solid sciences during a time when promising employment was believed to be bundled with the diploma on graduation day.

Those days are over.

The coveted, high-tech, high-paying jobs that were once knocking at the engineer's door have jumped ship and washed up on the shores of India, China, the Philippines and other developing world players who now mass produce higher education like the trinkets we used to only know them for.

A new crop of skilled workers, ripe for white-collar work in everything from computer programming, to accounting, to even molecular biology and routine R&D, has risen to accept depressed wages from U.S. transnational corporations, who are doing whatever it takes to make a profit in the emerging cutthroat free trade of the global economy. Ten thousand dollars a year goes a long way in Bangalore.

The brain-dead manufacturing jobs of the "good ol' days" left U.S. soil in the ‘80s when U.S. companies realized it's cheaper to manufacture cars and clothes abroad than to pay even minimum wage at home. "Knowledge jobs" were thought to be irreplaceable and thus safe. Owing to fast digital communication and cheap transport, this is no longer the case.

"You will see an explosion of work going overseas," said Forrester Research analyst John C. McCarthy, who predicts upward of 3.3 million white-collar jobs will leave the country by 2015.

Many of the globalizing information technologies that make this outsourcing possible had their origins in the United States.

The irony is bittersweet. Globalization, the crowning triumph of capitalism, has completed its inexorable creep around the world only to sneak up and nip us from behind.

The free market system that convinced we in the tech fields that we were made for better things encouraged an education that claimed superiority over those in the humanities.

But where did these engineering types get it in their heads that they were better than their letters and science peers? Apparently something more is taught in engineering than just engineering.

I don't remember much about getting started in my major, but at my designated "engineering CalSO" I recall a talk about organization of the university. During this discussion, my bioengineering adviser drew a large schematic breakdown of UC Berkeley into its respective colleges on the chalkboard.

Then, after talking briefly of the few humanities requirements for the major, she drew a huge ‘X' through the college of letters, a mocking gesture that drew cheers and laughs from the new rank of engineers.

We were later given a talk by a poster child for the department who awkwardly stood before us to answer questions about his engineering experience. After looking at the required classes for the major, I asked if the few credits allotted for humanities allowed him to achieve a well-rounded education.

A brief hesitation, then his clever response: "I think I'm well-rounded. I took math and chem and physics ..."

The vast lake of high-paying jobs, rumored to be lavished on us by high-tech companies eager for new blood, is drying up. Now all that remains is the employing equivalent of a muddied pond, enjoyed alongside arts and studies majors who have long acclimated to its brackish waters and unpredictable depths. Now they laugh at us.

And they have every right to do so.

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