Thursday, January 24, 2008

Is B.Tech, Engineering????

Do you feel that the above heading is incomplete or whether i mistakenly put a coma where there shouldn't be one? Well,. the fact is that i meant exactly what i have written. " Is B.Tech, engineering??". The once synonymous words have completely different meaning now.

This post is not for those who have a gpa of 8.0 or more. This is for commoners like me, the 7 pointers, 6 pointers and the 5 pointers... I am in the final year of my B.Tech and am having a nice time; less number of subjects to learn, lots of free time, a job in hand etc. After 3 months, i will emerge as an "engineer" out of this institution. We all are so proud of being an engineer. But has anyone given any thought about whether we will become an "engineer" on completing our B.Tech??

Software jobs need no such qualification that one has to be an engineer. Just B.Tech is enough. A student who has studied till the +2, can easily do the same job. The interviewer never tests what we have learnt in class. Just whether we have a foundation for C,C++ etc.( If they had started testing that, i would still be jobless). So coming back to the earlier point, are we really engineers once we come out of college? Who is an engineer? The concept of software engineer is a new one. There were no software engineers before 1995. So what happened to people who come out of engineering colleges before 1995? Were they real engineers? Saying one has a B.Tech degree and one is an engineer is different. I, myself, wont qualify for the engineer part. Being in electrical engineering stream, if one asked me to wire up his house, i would promptly say, thats the work of an electrician, not an electrical engineer.

According to a recent study, it was found that the manufacturing industry has started to hike the salary as high as the IT industry. This might become a boost for the manufacturing industry in getting quality people. The IT industry is not permanent but manufacturing industry sure is!!

I return to my original question. Is B.Tech, engineering? As far as the present scenario goes, i feel it isn't. We didnt study four years of electrical engineering just to work as a software engineer, right? OR maybe it is for this particular matter that we took engineering in the first place. What attracted us to this field? In my opinion the one and only answer is the job guarantee and the money. Deny as much as u want, but it is MONEY that fascinated us. I really hate those guys who pretend to have liked the field and then taken this field. Maybe 1 or 2%. Not more than that. I dont hate those who genuinely have liked this field. Hats down to them. But what i feel is that B.Tech at present is just an excuse to waste four years of our life, enjoying it, learning new things, (everything other than academics) learning to smoke and drink, to party, to spend cash on food without a care in the world (all expenses can be added to mess bill, making parents shell out money), to do night outs playing games on lan etc and then come out of college with a job in hand. That was B.Tech.

I seriously still dont know what engineering is...