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If paying rent, mortgage and food is all that matters, why not just pay people to dig ditches and then pay them to fill them back in? Why go through the rigamarole of engineering at all?

If we accept that we should be productive, then it seems easy to justify that engineers should be working at good, well run companies producing real value for society.

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In theory I agree, companies should be productive.

In practice having worked in financial services and ad tech, at high salaries in each, it was absolutely the equivalent of intellectual digging of ditches for pay. The only job I ever had that felt productive was in academia, and the pay was off the charts low.

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