Its a common line of thinking when one is navigating engineering school- "engineering is a good foundation, but it doesn't pay enough in the long run." Engineers typically have some of the highest starting salaries for graduates, and yet the pay curve generally flattens out by the time they hit mid-career. This trend can keep away prospective engineering students, but more importantly it causes engineers to plan career pivots before they even enter the profession.
When an engineer becomes dissatisfied with sluggish pay increases, the traditional next step is to jump ship and go into management. What engineer hasn't said at some point, "maybe I'll go back and get an MBA"? Engineering management, project management, product line management, or, for the more extroverted engineers, sales is an option. These are all valuable roles, but it typically causes the engineer to disengage his mind from the technical problems he had been working on during his early career, and which he presumably wanted to work on considering he decided to study engineering in the first place. With so many hard, technical problems to solve in the world, why are those equipped to solve them being driven away?
