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Posted by Sherman in Idaho [24.32.202.166] on Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 15:04:58 :
In Reply to: Re: Jobs and students- a BIG disconnect ot posted by Glen of Idaho [75.172.235.8] on Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 10:08:19 :
Yes, the "not" should be in there. I'll blame my professors for not teaching me to write better.
As for the lawyers, we all need lawyers from time to time, but they are never a creative profession. The best a lawyer can do is prevent you from losing something. They never help you create something new. So in that sense they're the exact opposite of engineers. For that matter, they're more like doctors. Doctors rarely make a healthy person healthier. The best they can do is make a sick person less sick.
With the STEM thing, I just take issue with the idea that the future of innovation in the American economy is somehow dependent upon throwing lots of money at the current educational establishment. There are lots of reasons why we're not innovative any more. Fear of liability means kids can't play with chemistry sets or sharp tools. Military contracts no longer require the prime contractors to maintain large research laboratories (e.g. Bell Labs, David Sarnoff Research Center, etc) as a condition of their doing business with the government. The Harvard Business School model of how to run a company requires throwing out the engineer/founder at the earliest opportunity and replacing him with a Wall Street wizard focused on "enhancing shareholder value". The MBA types have a visceral dislike and distrust of technical people and if they could run a company that could make money without anyone actually designing or building anything, they would prefer it.
Probably the worst thing the lawyers do for innovation is they set up companies whose only business is to buy up a huge pile of obscure, obvious, or unused patents and then shake down legitimate companies for allegedly infringing on them. This contributes absolutely nothing productive and forces young and innovative companies out of business. A lot of big companies turn into "patent trolls" in their dying days, after the lawyers and MBA types have taken over and the engineers have fled.