Do engineers really make better spouses?
divorcedebbie.com
divorcedebbie.com
Yeah, us software engineers are renowned for our communication skills.
1.Certain professions attract certain personality types so you won't see a lot of extroverted social people choosing engineering as their profession
Extroverts social as they are will always have more options and are less likely to stick around if things get sour.
2.Financial stability means that even if the woman is unhappy in the relationship she is more likely to stick around because it offers stability.
Why do you think all the girls always have a boyfriend even if their not that into him.
Society tells them you're a looser if you don't have a boyfriend so they always keep one around that doesn't mean their not willing to upgrade though :)
Edit: I analogize for generalizing and saying engineers are all men it is mostly true however as pointed out in the comments below not in all cases however I cannot say anything about the reverse case.
No need to get offended over every little thing.
> don't care enough to pay attention
Surprisingly, it doesn't matter how much you care.
There's so many assumptions made in that sentence...
1) Women care about money more than happiness
2) Engineers are awash with money
3) Women aren't engineers
4) Men are engineers.
The higher your income, the higher your debt load - and this is caused by easy access to credit, social conditioning to chasing the dream, climbing the ladder, bigger house, more expensive cars - because you deserve it! You work hard, you deserve to play hard too and who cares your income doesn't stretch to that, here's a credit card, you can have as much money as you need... as long as you can afford the minimum payment for the rest of your life. Society conditions you towards using your financial abilities to get into more debt than you can afford to repay and the illusion that because you have a high income, you can afford to repay it every month in full... and then as long as I pay most of it... and then at least keep up the minimum payments... and then well, this one's not due until the end of the month, so I'll live on this card and I'll pay the minimum payment and keep this card for emergencies... and then an emergency crops up and hey, I'll just pay my hydro bill with this card instead of paying cash and I'll use the cash to pay my credit card off and the cycle escalates until you lose your house.
Just because you're an engineer and just because you have a high gross income doesn't mean you have the financial wherewithal to maintain a stable financial life.
So yes, none of the assumptions here stand up to scrutiny.
Spend the money you have not the money you can get.
It's better than paying with a debit card because you aren't on the hook for fraud. I learned this lesson the hard way.
Literally any installment credit will be better for credit-building than the vast majority of revolving credit individuals have access to.
CCs are far superior to debit cards in almost every way. If you don't possess self-control, maybe that sentence doesn't hold true. There are a number of disadvantages to using a debit card where a credit card can be used instead.
With virtually everything around you lying "Go on, spend it, it's good for the economy, you deserve it, it'll make you feel good and fill that pit of emptiness you're trying to fill, credit is better, you need credit, you need to build credit." coupled with the fear ads of "Bad credit, no credit! We've got the solution for you to get it!" and companies that are impossible to deal with without a credit card - I'm looking at you hotels, flight companies and car rental places!
Society makes it painful at every turn to live without a credit card and then when you do find a way, people look down on you like you're somehow a freak of nature, shunning the natural order of things.
Ugh...
There are a number of benefits to using credit cards that cash doesn't have:
1. Build a credit score
2. Fraud protection
3. Related to 2, but if I lose my card it's not a huge deal, cancel it and get a new one. If I lose 300$ cash, it's just gone.
4. Rewards! ( 1-3% back on 20K spending per year is a few hundred bucks )
5. Extended Warranties. Often times, you can get an extra year or more on warranties through your credit cards. That's why I put my new kitchen appliances on my Amex.
6. Free loans! I re-did my kitchen last year at about a 10K cost. Although I had the cash to do so, I instead signed up for a new card with 18 month 0% interest. That gave me another year and a half of saving before paying that off, so it's less of a hit to my balance at once. IMPORTANT I would not have done this if I did not have the cash to pay this off at any point in time.
It's really, really simple too - just pay off your statement balance in full each month and you'll never pay interest. I can count on one hand both how many times I've paid interest, and how much I've paid in interest. All of them were due to my own screw ups with scheduling payments ( off by a day - oops! ), however I've benefited far more from the cards than I've ever paid out. In most of those cases, the banks waived the fees anyway since there was a track record of 3-5+ years of never missing a payment, always paying in full.
If you'd paid cash you could have got a better deal from suppliers by negotiating cash discounts and nobody would be aggregating your information or tracking your purchases to target advertising to try to further their way into your wallet. If you'd paid the $10K up front, which you had the cash to do so, what did you do with that $10K? Did it just sit in your bank giving you an illusion of a bank balance or did you invest it to make some return to justify putting it on credit and putting off until tomorrow what you could have paid for today? You purchased this kitchen effectively putting a lien on that money, it's no longer yours... but having it in your account still gives you the illusion that it is. It only takes something unexpected happening and that money that's not yours [which is still in your account] is easy to dip into for an emergency with the expectation that you'll pay back into it another day when you can afford that - a day that never comes, until that kitchen you've been enjoying for the last 18 months and now can't live without needs paying for...
It's ridiculously easy to get sucked into the trap of cycling one debt after another and then you're stuck with your only options being: Sell everything you own to pay it off, claim bankruptcy and start again from scratch or strive for a higher paying job, putting yourself under extra stress... and for what? The ability to raise your debt load. It's not really much surprise, the entire capitalist economy is built on debt, without it, there would be no economy. The U.S. currency is loaned (at interest) by the Fed to the U.S. Government, so debt goes right to the very foundation of the entire economy. So it's an ever perpetuating cycle.
There are rationalizations on both sides of the fence. For the record, I'm not dead against credit, I'm just saying that for every rationalization that can be offered to use credit, there are equally many reasons to avoid it.
While it may be entirely feasible to get along your entire life without financing a car by either purchasing used cars or inexpensive new ones, for 99% of people ( including myself ), it's extraordinarily difficult to purchase a home in a reasonable amount of time ( 10-15+ years saving required for a barebones house most likely ).
You could argue that prices are like this due to the easy availability of credit ( see 2008 or the problems with student loans/college prices ), but that doesn't change the reality that some things are extremely expensive and for nearly all people will require some type of loan. At that point, not having a good credit score will cost you dearly in much higher interest rates.
As for my kitchen, the reason you gave it exactly the reason that I did it. Although I did net an additional 100$ or so in interest over the course of the year as well due to it being in my savings account ( yay!...kinda? ), the primary reason was in the event of an emergency. Any emergency that would require an additional $10,000 is likely to be medical, family, or loss of job related. Since I have insurance, that means that the most likely scenario is family or job related; in either instance, the availability of cash to help a member of my family out or pay my mortgage for 6 months would be more important to me than the costs associated with financing that card for a period of time. In addition, I would still be able to pay the card off by selling a bit of stock, however I wanted the additional liquidity by having cash on hand. I don't make decisions like that lightly; all of those scenarios were considered before I decided to go the 0% card route.
As for a house, it definitely doesn't take 10-15 years if you think outside the box cultured by our society.
I was making about $12/hour before I finished my CS degree. I had no debts and some money in the bank because I had no real expenses.
Now I make about twice that, but I got my own place with my fiancee and raked up far more debt (on top of student loans) than I can afford to pay at my current salary. My quality of living has actually been decreasing.
Does this mean I have more financial problems than I did before? No, not really. I have plenty of options now that I didn't before. In the worst case scenario, I can declare bankruptcy and start from scratch, where I'll have no debts (aside from student loans) and still have twice the income I would have otherwise, and be able to find a maintainable quality of life significantly higher than I would have with the lower income.
A low income doesn't mean you have less problems, it means you have fewer options and have to simply accept a worse outcome.
I was forced to care about financial issues over my own happiness.
Money matters. Money matters to everyone.
Now, my SO and I are both a bit "broken" individuals, so it's not like we're perfect by any stretch of the imagination.. but i'm certain that without a constant push for communication and a lack of "letting things stew" that we would be in a far worse state at best - and at worst, broken up.
Disclaimer: I'm not trying trying to say that my relationship is somehow more thanks to my efforts.. sometimes i feel like my push for communication can be a fault.
Regardless, it's one of the things i obsess about - being clear and open with each other.. and it's the things i obsess about that i define myself by. I wouldn't be surprised if this personality trait (obsessing about rules/structure/"healthy"-behavior) was more common in engineers. Though, the data seems impossible to meaningfully correlate.
Perhaps these same skills translate into relationship stability? If something isn't working, try tweaking things.
Or maybe our attention to detail just makes us better in the sack. :D
The fact you're not great at vocalising your feelings on the spot (something I am definitely not good at) shouldn't be a barrier to communicating. You just have to find an approach that works for you.
Routinely software engineers need to give presentations to customers, have to collaborate with other disciplines, and provide clear written and verbal communication.
This type of thinking is, I believe, the same mentality that keeps women out of STEM career paths. Just because you have a small sample set that leads you to believe we are poor communicators, do not broad brush it and assume most software folk are as inept.
But more seriously, software engineers are merely the loudest of all engineering professions. Hardly the end-all and be-all. A significant portion of software engineers, never even had a scientific education(programming doesn't have to be scientific, though it can be, and almost every programmer calls himself a software engineer).
> This type of thinking is, I believe, the same mentality that keeps women out of STEM career paths.
i'm probably going to get a lot of hate for saying that, but
... no offence, you just pulled that out of your ass. people don't generally know what professions are like until they actually start working in them. Law is arguably way more racist, sexist and whatnot, but that doesn't stop women from doing it. The same goes for banking. It's just better marketed in central european culture.
and if you're going to make such an argument be sure to include the socioeconomic background that is relevant to that statement.
i personally had to witness the culture clash, when all the persian part of the family was encouraging a girl on how she's going to be successful doing her engineering studies and all the german part of the family saying she couldn't do it and she should instead just study language. incidently iran is also the country where 2/3s of the stem graduates are women and they recently passed laws for male quotas. when i say family, it includes aunts/uncles/cousins and even friends of the difference social backgrounds.
Not once in the entire discussion did anyone consider the potential work environment, the study environment or anything of the likes, nor would they even know. It was just a difference in mentality. The only people truely capable to make qualified statements on the matter were people that watched her teach math to friends high school friends.
And yes, I know, empirically proven doesn't mean it applies everywhere, but then the same applies to your statement.
EDIT: i kind of knew, but so much hate and not even a comment to justify. so, one just started learning angularjs and has now become a frontend (software) engineer and may now not only speak on behalf of the entire engineering population of the globe, but also on behalf of stem in general. that's at least questionable don't you think?
Which is exactly why stereotypes are so harmful because it puts people off ever trying and learning differently. Your story just reinforced the point, people often make judgements about careers based on stereotypes not actual data so it's detrimental to our industry to encourage these stereotypes.
Such people can't be called engineers then. I find it amusing when I see titles such as "JavaScript engineer" or "HTML engineer", etc.
> ...and almost every programmer calls himself a software engineer
This seems to be a culture in the USA mainly. From what I have seen, Canada is much more strict about having the proper credentials to be able to call yourself an engineer.
It is amusing indeed, but for a different reason — because "iron engineer" or "rubber engineer" (in case of hardware engineers) would be just as amusing.
The lack of formal scientific education doesn't mean that engineer in question doesn't have the exact same amount of knowledge — it merely means that he chose other ways to acquire it.
> A significant portion of software engineers, never even had a scientific education
I'm not sure that I follow. What is it that you consider a "scientific education"? where do you get your significant figure from?
>... no offence, you just pulled that out of your ass.
I was not stating any statistical evidence, just a belief I have that if you cast a particular field in a negative light, claiming that a majority of people in those fields are poor communicators, that anyone might avoid that field, which I would imagine includes women, so perhaps I should have abstracted away a bit.
> i personally had to witness the culture clash...
I don't discount that cultural or familial background does not play a role in where a person ends up in his or her career, nor did I claim that work/study environment cannot play a factor. But stereotypes, both positive and negative, can have an impact on anyone's perspective on any field.
As to your Dilbert comment, I'm assuming you're trying to be funny or use some sort of straw-man to discredit my statement? Good job, you did it.
<edit: missing some carriage returns>
...and knowing your place in the social hierarchy is irrelevant. Knowing how to speak such that your place in the social hierarchy is blurred enough that everyone assumes you're at their level is the most useful approach. Not having people look down on you because you're socially beneath them, but also not having people write you off because they feel you think they're below you. Being a good communicator is being able to stand head to head with the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation and discuss your ideas with the respect of equals in terms they can understand, and also speak with the homeless person on the street with the respect of equals in terms they can understand.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal"
Believe this, I mean truly believe this and treat people with the respect this statement garners and the rest is easy. You are not above anyone else in the social hierarchy and they are not above you. That huge mansion they live in and the country club they belong too were purchased with the money. Their access to money doesn't make their life more valuable than yours. You hold different jobs because you have different training, social conditioning and peer groups. So I think there is little value to knowing your place in the social hierarchy. All it does is serve to allow society to write your destiny. Is that what you want or would you prefer to write your own destiny?
I like to think that I have some pretty good communication skills, and that they make me a better programmer.
You can have excellent communication skills, but there is this 'nerdism' that comes from being totally into computers, and that renders people away from social skills, I feel the OP meant that. So you having pretty good communication skills is an exception rather a norm
If you hang out with people you perceive as more intelligent than you (which may or may not be true, it's a biased perspective), then you're more likely to evaluate yourself as less intelligent than you'd like. If you then evaluate yourself against people you perceive as less intelligent than you (which also may or may not be true, again a biased perspective), you're more likely to bolster an impression that you're more intelligent than you are - which again, may not be true.
So do people always agree with you? Do you perceive these people as more or less intelligent than you? Do they always agree with everyone? Do you perceive their ideas as valuable as yours?
It's hard to evaluate your own communication skills... because no matter the metric you use to attempt to evaluate them, your interpretation of the metric is biased in one way or another.
And particularly horrible ones:
Parent murder + no prison, Divorced parent murder + no prison.
"Divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it's true because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce. That would be sad. If two people were married and ... they just had a great thing and then they got divorced, that would be really sad. But that has happened zero times."
The quality of marriage is neither binary nor one-dimensional, it varies over time, and most importantly, can be influenced for the better or worse.
Its graph over time is also also not monotonic decreasing.
I fear that some marriages get divorced at a local minimum.
He was shocked to find, that of these marriages that were the least happy, something like 20% went ahead and got a divorce anyways, but, of the other 80%, their happiness scores were no different from the general population.
Moral of the story, perhaps people are a little too quick to pull the plug on a marriage.
Law enforcement has it's own issues that are quite independent of most other occupations.
Quite a few of the engineering professions have 50-60% the divorce rate of the national average, but after accounting for the above three covariances it's not quite as striking (putting them at 60-90% of expected). Agricultural engineers are still way down at 12% of expected, but they don't list the N for non-LE occupations.
Here's the actual article, but it's behind a pay wall. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11896-009-9057-8
Google scholar has a link to a publicly accessible version: http://faculty-course.insead.edu/popescu/UDJCore/2010/handou...
More seriously, people with engineering backgrounds tend to be analytic and may have made more logical choices prior to marriage, that result in longer lasting relationships. I think that that problem solving mentality could also contribute.
Everyone's an engineer in one way or another - that's just who we are as people. Just because the stereotype tends towards "engineers" (traditional meaning) being into mechanics, logic, programming, structures etc. doesn't mean that everything can't be viewed this way.
The popular guys at school and politicians are social engineers. Footballers look to solve the problem of helping their team to win. Dancers and bartenders look to solve the problem of how to get people to spend/tip the highest amount of money they can. We look to manipulate logic to get machines to do what we want. Others may look to manipulate emotions and perspectives to get people to do what they want - i.e. spend more money, help them earn more commission. It's all engineering in one way or another.
So to assume that we make more logical choices prior to marriage that result in longer lasting relationships might be a touch narcissistic. We are no different than anyone else, it's just that we're machine nerds. Other people are people nerds, football nerds, modelling nerds, advertising nerds, music nerds, history nerds, science nerds, food nerds etc. They all have problems they're trying to solve and they all use their problem solving and logical skills to solve them, everyone a nerd in one way or another.
To typecast "engineers" (reading between the lines) as desperate does us a disservice. Everyone suffers from self image problems in one way or another - you can thank the media for that courtesy of beauty magazines, wrinkle cream, modeling mags, diet mags, a constant barrage of advertising telling you how to solve body problems and look better to get that hotter partner who also suffers from poor self image problems. You may suffer from poor self image of your perception of your lacking social skills (you really just never had the social training for how to talk with people) but want a hot model type. She may have poor body image because the beauty magazines make her feel ugly and you're all she can get blah blah blah. It's all quite nauseating really.
We all live in this Venn diagram of people we're attracted to that would make good life partners. The intersection of which is where we'll find long term relationship satisfaction (I'll refrain from calling that happiness, because the relationship isn't the whole picture of happiness)... but nobody knows where the intersection is and that's the joy of life. When you're not true to your Venn diagram, it's painful. When you are and you find someone who intersects with yours in the right way, it's amazing.
Great, so we expand the word to mean anything, lets just toss the word out because its meaningless at that point.
Engineering is just the art of manipulating pieces of a puzzle [whether that be things or people] to serve a solution to a problem. What does that leave unaccounted for?
Anecdotally, one of the most athletic people I knew in school ended up double majoring with a 4.0 in mechanical and chemical engineering. I never went to a school where there were over-the-top movie quality cliques. Our athletes were also our 4.0's, who where also our popular kids, who were also our geeks. So be who you want.
An engineer needs to be able to get past the marketing blather and dive deep into communication to figure out if a 15 volt rated capacitor will or will not short out and if it does how to prevent a house fire or about 1e6 similar engineering analogies, and how does the related ESR of the cap impact circuit performance etc etc.
Its not a huge analogy jump to seeing past a spouses likely very positive "marketing" message and analyzing all their forms of communication to figure out if a long term commitment to that specific implementation of "spouse product" will result in horrific crash and burn or perhaps it can be proven to work.
I looked thru the ranked list of engineers with an eye toward "long term sustainability" and "ease of do-overs" and was totally unsurprised to find the nukes and CivEng and ChemEng with the best stats and software engineers not doing so well. There are some outliers like the naval architects which I'm guessing is some kind of life-work balance thing, ship engineer going on a multi month cruise might lead to marital problems, or making a career of emergency flights out to some international port to supervise exotic structural or engine repairs might impact lifestyle at home quite a bit.
There is also stability of income and quality of life that comes into play. When there is stability in the professional field, an engineer has more time to dedicate to his family. That is a gigantic luxury in itself.
In general, I have found that intelligent men are more difficult for women to manipulate.
Not to say that it doesn't happen or that it's not possible, merely that it's more difficult and when it does happen, it tends to be less effective.
Locomotive engineers and operators 15.77
Stationary engineers and boiler operators 16.99
Operating engineers and other construction equipment operators 18.97
The "blue collar" engineers have a substantially higher divorce rate than most of the "white collar" engineering professions, but the transition by percentages compared to the those preceding them in the list was a lot smoother than I expected.
The days of blue collar folks making less than white collar folks as a class has been dead for a couple generations, but the belief lives on...
Engineering has primarily been a male dominated environment and you work alongside other men.
Dancers and Bar Tenders (as mentioned in the overview) not so much.
1. Higher income. Like, substantially higher income. 2. Later marriage. People don't tend to get married in college, and I expect to find that people who get married early have higher divorce rates than average.
This is, I know, a weak argument at best, but I would toss out as something to ponder that perhaps there's a higher incidence of analytic types to dissect and improve their relationship.
...or simply inclined to remain with the status quo. You decide.
Honestly, with money being one of the leading causes of divorce, I would say a reasonable assumption is just that engineers make more of it and are more likely to spend what they do have wisely.
And have a low chance of suddenly getting laid off, and good chances at quickly finding new employment (at least compared to the vast majority of jobs).
You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, and while we're at it, check out the FFM [1], it's got stats and everything!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
In any case, it was thrown out there to see what sticks. "What makes a relationship work" is hard to measure at best. But I have to think, just as the article makes some generalized assumptions from some rough figures, there might be a correlation to other rough observations, even if they don't hold up to scientific levels of scrutiny.
tl;dr: I don't think any of what's being discussed is able to be isolated as a defining factor of what makes marriage successful. But it's interesting to speculate.
The most common educational backgrounds to lead to a later life career switch in my limited observation is either teaching or banking/finance.
It is not particularly informative to know that boiler operators and construction operators have higher divorce rates than aerospace engineers.
And what looks to be a slideshow presentation on the matter: http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Research%20-%20Forensic/SPCP%...
Engineers are more likely to take a pragmatic approach instead of a sentimental "Oh no! He/She doesn't have exactly the same taste in vacations/home decor/friends/whatever, we must not be soulmates after all!"
On the other hand, dancers and choreographers are very likely to be dancing or choreographing with someone other than their spouse, at a very close physical distance to very fit partners who are nearly always the opposite gender. Jealousy and infidelity probably both play a part there. Same goes for bartenders -- the chances somebody comes to my engineering firm looking for a hot date? Not much, but a bar? That's a little more likely.
And lastly, I had to chuckle at agricultural engineers. All I can picture is a guy designing a combine, alone, in the middle of a cornfield. Good luck meeting someone ;-)
The thought I had about agricultural engineers is that they would tend to be much more religiously conservative than other types of engineers.
#FML