Engineering in Singapore?

Read a very interesting article on Salary.sg regarding engineering in Singapore. It worries that Singapore is increasingly becoming “high cost, low tech”, and that careers in engineering in Singapore is losing out to business, finance and accountancy careers. It follows on a long discussion on that site of how engineering is a dead end career, and how President’s scholars in the past two batches are not doing engineering.

I recall visiting friends in NUS and SMU over the summer break, and the general reaction to me telling them I was now an engineer was one of “what?!” Many of them were studying business (or some combination thereof), and a great many harbored ambitions of going to work in a finance or banking outfit. The remaining lot either wanted to be doctors or lawyers, and some perceived engineering subjects as somewhat of a “dumping ground”. The few technology startups I saw were staffed by mostly foreign students.

It was in general a huge difference from what I was used to in Silicon Valley, where engineers are in the greatest demand by startups and corporations alike. Singapore’s push to become a financial hub has created jobs in the banking and finance sectors, but perhaps we have not yet developed a “dependable” technological innovation industry that makes us less suspect to the vagaries of global finance. The earlier Solow, and later Romer and Jones model of economic growth unanimously point to productivity growth (either through technological innovation, or more efficient allocation) as the key driver of sustained economic growth. Singapore arguably has a limit to which it can further reallocate its resources; thus technological innovation may remain Singapore’s long-term option for the future. And innovation does not mean research- it means research that can be spun off into start-ups (e.g. Google, etc) or sold as commercial technologies.

At this point it is interesting to look at another country which has done so. Israel, a country of relatively similar circumstances, has one of the largest technology industries in the world, as this fascinating article writes (it also includes a reference to Singapore, in a not-so-positive way). A quote from the article:

Israel’s economic growth has not been based on easy credit or a real estate boom, but on the technology-driven productivity gains that economists believe is the key to sustained economic growth.

Interesting stuff. Perhaps Singapore’s future lies away from her entrepot past- where the country’s fortunes were made on her being a hub for business, trade and finance- and instead lies in producing ideas, the new goods of the global economy.