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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not, there are already large swathes of people that get engineering degrees because it is a good paying, stable, respected job. Probably 1/3 of my graduating class would have said their primary motivation for getting an engineering degree was the solid salary.

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Historically, the solid pay and good prospects have been a primary driving criterion for people going into engineering. The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" is the new phenomenon, not the other way around.

> The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" is the new phenomenon

The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" are (as a broad class, not every specific instance) largely PR faces created for marketing purposes by and for people who want to make lots of money, and know that having some kind of compelling mission (even if that "compelling mission" might change to something radically different later on) is important both for attracting customers and for attracting investors.

Employees, too.

Or as HBO put it, "making the world a better place through minimal message-oriented transport layers."

I mean, I don't want to mock it--it's challenging stuff, and makes a lot of money. It's the optimism that's a total culture shock to me. What I consider the traditional engineering attitude is the exact opposite--conservative, pessimistic, "don't fix it if it ain't broken."

Here in Brazil it's been a trend, more and more people going into engineering so that last year it was the undergraduate course with most applicants. And we have A LOT of law schools, probably more than any other country (no joke). Why so many going into engineering? Simple, there's a shortage and a job is almost guaranteed if you're a reasonable engineer, and the pay is good.

And it's not like these people are useless. I knew a guy like this in college, and he eventually settled into a decent job. Not everybody needs to be passionate about their work.

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