I think engineers really underestimate the value of their work.
An engineer's impact on a single person might be low, but at scale, it can add up to a lot.
As noble as being a doctor is, their individual contributions can never scale beyond a few people.
While I am at it, can someone explain why being a doctor needs a person to go through 4 years of undergrad in field completely useless in their domain ?
> The entire raison d'être of capitalism is that it's supposedly meritocratic
Not it is not. It may be sold to us like that, but it is more like : "Those who succeed in Capitalism, do so only by the means of their merit....and the infinite privilege or luck that might have instead put them there. "
> An engineer's impact on a single person might be low, but at scale, it can add up to a lot.
> As noble as being a doctor is, their individual contributions can never scale beyond a few people.
Nonsense. If you only scale into saving hundreds of users a few minutes each, you're maybe approaching one lifetime, and that's assuming that your time saving actually improves those users' lives. The vast majority of engineers don't scale beyond that.
Meanwhile, some doctors absolutely make contributions that scale, such as finding cures or vaccines, preventing spread of infectious diseases, or discovering ways to detect diseases earlier. Looking at percentages of world population, the black death killed more people than any of the FAANG companies have users, and that's only one of the diseases cured by the discovery of penicillin. If antibiotics resulting from penicillin didn't exist, it's quite reasonable to guess that more people would die of bacterial infections than FAANG has users.
The smallpox vaccine? A test for detecting HIV? Quarantining the Ebola outbreaks? Each of these saved millions of lives.
And let's not forget that the highest-scale engineers are pretty hit or miss as far as whether the way their work touches lives is even positive. Big pharma isn't innocent, but I don't think anyone would argue we should get rid of them entirely. In contrast, it's pretty unambiguous that the world would be better off without Facebook, and each of the AANG companies has some pretty large negative effects on i.e. small businesses, worker rights, attention, privacy.
In short, you're just comparing the highest-scale engineers to the lowest-scale doctors, and assuming that what engineers are doing is as positive as what doctors do.
> Meanwhile, some doctors absolutely make contributions that scale, such as finding cures or vaccines, preventing spread of infectious diseases, or discovering ways to detect diseases earlier.
and many engineers have invented machines that have saved millions of lives.
Let alone the fact that most of the things you mention were discovered either by academics or pure science researchers.
Doctors : Medical scientists :: Engineers : Physicists & mathematicians.
Doctors aren't doing the inventing. They are applied practitioners of their profession. The sycophancy around worshiping doctors is one I can never get my head around. Sure, it is a difficult job to learn and an essential part of any system, but just being the medical profession doesn't give a doctor any moral high ground in their choice.
Being in India, the biggest contributors to saving lives have been policy makers. Funding access to clean water, electricity and roads are far bigger life savers than someone who can do surgery. Google is probably saving more lives by letting doctors web search symptoms, than entire families of hospitals.
I have no delusions about my work. I do it because I like it. I would still do it if it was live saving, or completely irrelevant to society at large.
But, raising certain professions to an innate moral high ground makes no sense to me. Be it doctors, fire fighters, veterans or first responders. If a person needs continuous approval from society to do their job, then they should not be doing it in the first place.
That being said, I will always give every honest job a minimum level of respect and appreciate both hard work and tenacity. So, I am not advocating for being an ass to doctors. However, I respect those values, not some innate virtue of their profession.
An engineer's impact on a single person might be low, but at scale, it can add up to a lot.
As noble as being a doctor is, their individual contributions can never scale beyond a few people.
While I am at it, can someone explain why being a doctor needs a person to go through 4 years of undergrad in field completely useless in their domain ?
> The entire raison d'être of capitalism is that it's supposedly meritocratic
Not it is not. It may be sold to us like that, but it is more like : "Those who succeed in Capitalism, do so only by the means of their merit....and the infinite privilege or luck that might have instead put them there. "