The engineers strike back

I had an interesting conversation with a young lady today. She was interviewing me about Smart Nation and the recent national drive to get more people into engineering, and all the excitement over Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. She was trying to understand what the fuss was all about.

Do we really need more engineers? Why are we short of engineers?

Some people say that the software industry pays poorly, so no one wants to do software. Yet, others claim that software jobs pay very well. What’s the truth? Does it pay well, or does it not pay well?

I was grappling with this unenviable task of trying to figure out how to explain it all to the young lady who had no background whatsoever, when I had a Eureka moment.

What has happened is that the software industry has bifurcated.

As with all things in life, reality is complicated. It is true that software doesn’t pay well and it is also true that software pays well.

Why? What has happened is that the software industry has bifurcated. On one hand, there are low-end sweat shops that do websites on the cheap; on the other hand, there are high-end tech companies that have funky offices and pay obscene salaries to the software engineers.

Why do the high-end tech companies pay so much? Well, they can afford to. If we look at the revenue per capita for the top tech companies, they are in excess of USD1+ million per head. Even if these companies pay each engineer USD250K, there is still plenty left over. But companies are not charities, so why are these companies willing to pay engineers so much?

I suspect that there are two reasons: (i) these engineers actually help to create the value that can allow these companies to stay ahead of the competition and achieve these revenue numbers; and (ii) to deny their competitors of talent.

So why shouldn’t everyone just go get a Computer Science (CS) degree and work for Google? Why aren’t there enough engineers if the pay is so high?

This is how I explained it to the young lady: think Star Wars.

Photo credit: Hero Complex