OPINION • Jan 06, 2021
Too many ENGINEERS!!
Ever wondered why everyone you know is a goddamn engineer, at least by education. I have been wondering for a long time. If everyone is an engineer, then what’s the point. There are times when I was wondering whether I am an engineer myself. A capitalistic society thrives based on the balance of different goods and services produced by people. I know that’s true, that’s why I believe we will be having serious problems. And, in all honesty, I have been a victim of that problem. But let’s skip on my sad story, and move on to why this is happening in the first place.
Answers for these kinds of profound questions can be often found by digging out history. Most of these problems are inadvertent, unanticipated trickle downside effect of something that happened a long time back. The good thing is that India (As a democratic country) does not have a long history.
If you did not know, India used to socialist. The Gandhian ideology for the Indian economy was to be based on rural enterprises. And they did not give a shit about the rest. So, any industry that ought to be approved to manufacture anything were tight regulations. Only very few industries were privatized. A Big chunk of it was still under government control. The government even reserved the right to deny a company from producing a product. So, big companies like Tata, Birla, or Maruthi didn’t have any real competition. When competition is absent, innovation dies; because there is no real need for it. So, they had no real need for full-fledged product development, that require an interdisciplinary approach.
At the same time, the government realized they needed quality engineers to build India after the British exit. So, they established IITs and other government-funded universities, that were supposed to create good engineers, to rebuild the country. And it worked. There was a huge demand for engineers; both from the private sector and the public sectors. We needed the engineers, a whole lot of them. The government also established NIDs, NIFTs, and IIMs. There was a demand for designers, architects, and MBAs too, but not a lot more than the supply for these institutions. Because no company needed competitive advantage over anyone, there was no real need for innovation. And as a consequence, not a lot of demand for Designers, PhDs, and MBAs. So, students then were dissuaded from getting into design, arch, or MBA. But for engineering, people knew the demand, and engineers were revered because of their exclusivity. In a typical high school class, all the smart kids go to Engineering colleges and the rich kids & service minded kids went to medical colleges. That’s practically how it worked. So engineering was envied. When India was de-centralized in the 1990s, this belief was already ingrained into Indian people and seeing the demand, education entrepreneurs jumped in to cash in on the demand. The medical market was difficult to penetrate because of tight regulations, so the victim was Engineering.
Despite the increasing demand for the other professional vocations, people were barely noticing it. Since the highly envied and lucrative engineering degree is more accessible to everyone. And it created a vicious cycle creating more and more engineers, way more than the market can take in. This stuffing created the problem of an oversaturated market. This is economics 101; If the supply is much higher than the demand, the price plummets. Somehow, the IT field is taking in the bulk of engineers produced, at least from the premier colleges, and that is not even happening in the Mechanical sector. There are a lot of jobless mechanical engineering graduates from IITs and NITs, let alone my college (PSG Tech). Economics is actually psychology in disguise. People get desperate because of the lack of jobs. It gives leverage to companies. They can easily underpay you and you are in no position to negotiate; because you are desperate.
The ramifications of this problem do not end with just employee exploitation or joblessness. The character of the nation changes. Let me elaborate. As I mentioned earlier, you need a multi-disciplinary approach to innovate. You need to have people with complementary skill sets. If a whole bunch of them are engineers and there are not a lot of people who specialize in other vocations (Design, Business, Management, etc), where the innovation is going to come from. India is already branded as a manufacturing country; manufacturing needs a lot of engineers. The worst thing about this is that we are actually proud of that moniker. I always thought of it as a pejorative. It is the other countries saying that you cannot “create” shit. Build what we create. You should see it as an insult too.
The next engineering is probably the programming sector. Look at how many people are entering the programming sector now. White hat Jr is one of those companies that want to cash in on the fickle allure of programming that exists today.
Some time back, possessing an engineering degree means that he/she is competent in analytical and problem-solving skills, and can "build" something. The latter is more important. Even in the IITs, more than 30% of them are getting into management consulting. But now getting into an engineering college and getting a degree is as easy as completing NFS most wanted; we all think that it was difficult, but we all know, deep down, that it was easy. Think about this. What does a 12th pass certificate mean now? I don’t think it means anything since everyone has it. The same with an engineering degree now. And Just like that, the engineering degree lost its value. But engineering skills and knowledge does not lose value, and if you are an engineer to the core, you can probably survive.