This discussion was conducted with a few friends of mine who studied engineering at the University of Pretoria but decided to leave the field of engineering and pursue other careers.
At first, it seemed as if there must have been a problem with Engineering as a career choice within South-Africa but as we carried on chatting, we realised that engineering is a way of thinking that can be applied to any field dedicated to solving problems.
Timestamps Discussion engineers leaving their work:
Time Stamps:
0:00 - Introduction
3:04 - Kaja's story
7:14 - Matt's love for robotics
12:06 - Matt's decision to start his masters
17:00 - The difficulty for a lot of companies to innovate. - Nana's story
26:21 - Brendan's story
32:31 - Big companies minimize everything
35:46 - Marcel's story
46:48 - Engineers are problem solvers
53:10 - Matt's transition from work to studying full time
1:00:02 - A short summary from the first hour of conversation
1:01:43 - High labour costs in Europe
1:03:57 - The importance of degrees within other industries
1:13:31 - How engineers fit in finance
1:18:12 - How Kaja became a programmer through Kaggle
1:31:54 - The relevance of doing a masters degree
1:39:37 - Engineering as a solid foundation
1:41:53 - Would we go back to the traditional engineering industry?
1:55:00 - How other nations control the narrative
2:05:47 - How can governments play a better role for SA to be innovative
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Summary:
- Robotics will take over the world.
- Covid'19 thought us a lot about how to be remote.
- Analysts talk about moving from an industrial or informational age to a networked age.
- Big companies have a lot of stagnation.
- Downtime is huge in big companies.
- Work/Life balance is super important.
- Engineering is not a discipline it is a way of thinking.
- In a big company, all the opportunities are taking away from young engineers that want to learn to the head guys.
- Within traditional engineering industries, you're not always get rewarded for your hard work.
- With the fundamentals of engineering, you can solve any problem.
- Engineers are problem solvers, as an engineer you can do lot's of different types of work as long as you will solve problems.
- Engineers are finding other industries to apply their knowledge.
- Critical thinking helped a lot and being able to look at problems without the emotional side of things.
- Studying engineering sets you up for so many aspects of your life.
- We all need to come up with our own job titles.
- The job you are working on now won't exist 20 years from now.
- The grass is not greener outside of South Africa, the other countries control the narrative.
- South Africa needs a big change to grow as an industrial.
- South Africa can learn from the Netherlands if we talk about entrepreneurship. There are so many businesses and you are able to take a risk because if you lose your job, the government will pay you 70% of your salary.
- Privilege isn't just financial.
- South Africa not issuing a stimulus cheque may be a good thing.
- First world countries have a government that provide a safety net, 3rd world countries don't have that safety net.
- Engineers always have their degree to fall back on. They have their own safety net.
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