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Comment by gerikson | Hacker News Reader

My reading of British popular culture is that having an elite disdain for maths and engineering is not disqualifying.

The engineer, while appreciated, is not admired in Britain.

Engineering is not glamorous here at all, which I think is a shame because it's a productive, generative, job, with good qualifications needed, and it has a good earning potential. It's much less sought after than working in "marketing", yet probably on average a better job in many ways.

Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful.

> Engineering is not glamorous here at all, which I think is a shame because it's a productive, generative, job, with good qualifications needed, and it has a good earning potential.

Big focus on money here.

Being an engineer is also:

   - rewarding in its own right (you *build* things)

   - an achievement to be proud of

   - a way to have a long lasting net contribution to society with - usually - little moral downside

I'd put these ahead of any financial reward.

crypto enters the chat

>Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful.

I think that is a fairly recent change, it certainly wasn't the case when I started my career in the eighties.

British elite culture privileges spivs, gamblers, bullies, and opportunists. Intelligent competent professionals capable of critical thinking make the people in power nervous.

In addition to my engineering degree, I also received a token degree in mathematics from the university where I studied.

It seems that this is a vestige of the past when the university was established and the only way to include engineering as a subject of study was to classify it as a subdivision of mathematics.

Although the university is not currently based in the UK, there was a time when it did not permit Catholics to enroll as students either...

It reads very much the same in France. The average pay for a Business School graduate is 5-15% higher than that of an engineer.

While that might be the case France has an excellent math culture at the research level. There's a lot of French folks in the Deep Learning community. LeCun, François Chollet among others, and France has won 13 Fields medals, way ahead of anyone but the US (at 15). France probably has the strongest math community in Europe.

I'm not as charitable as you are. Chollet left for the USA, LeCun for Canada.

France has an extremely small, but great math community via the ENS/Sorbonne/X schools, but it hardly reflects on a larger trend -- general education. The topic isn't the culturing of a select, few elites, but the education of the larger population.

"At research level" is the keyword here. We've both the second highest number of Fields medalists and a frankly low score at the 2018 PISA evaluation (especially in comparison to other European countries). The maths education in secondary and higher eduction is somewhat elitist, in the sense that it's not suited for all kinds of students.

source: https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm

I'm pretty sure on an apples to apples per capita basis France has many more Fields medeals per 100K population than the USofA.

It's not even about engineering. Culturally people who would be embarrassed to say "oh, I can't really read properly" have no issue with saying "I can't work out percentages".

> The engineer, while appreciated, is not admired in Britain.

"In Britain" is a bit general; but in the circles of senior politicians and civil servants in Westminster, it's likely accurate.

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