Revenge of the Industrial Engineering and Management Nerds

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For years, I have wondered what practical use many of the mandatory courses in my bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Management have beyond theory, and whether I would ever use any of them in the real world.

The amount of criticism and teasing I received from every direction when I chose to study Industrial Engineering and Management was enormous. Graduates I met told me it was a useless degree, that there’s nothing to do with it, and that I’m just wasting my time because no job would come from it.

As a student at a technological institution, I also learned very quickly that the hierarchy inside engineering school was clear. Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering were the prestigious faculties, and their students were superior to all mankind. Industrial Engineering and Management ranked lower in that hierarchy and was considered inferior to the royalty of engineers living in the ivory tower.

In short, I received tons of fire and was diminished from almost every direction possible. I absorbed it for as long as I could until, at a certain point, I just accepted that we were probably average-minus and, from many other engineers’ perspectives, considered to be at the bottom of the engineering school.

I never accepted that attitude, but I couldn’t argue with classmates who later exited companies for millions or were appointed to highly paid executive positions at companies they had never founded and probably would never have had the skills to build themselves.

I have always said that basically Industrial Engineering and Management is the general studies degree of engineering. We learn a little bit of everything and basically learn nothing. That’s why people often refer to us as jacks of all trades, masters of none.

In Hebrew, Industrial Engineering and Management rhymes with fairy tale and field trip, and as students, we justified every word with our own made-up description of the degree. So you wouldn’t be surprised to know that our leading argument for anything we couldn’t work out was that we know enough to manage all the smart people who actually knew how to do the work.

For years, we were the superstars of one-liners about engineers, and jokes seemed to describe the degree’s disadvantage fairly well. But when we entered the age of AI, I think something changed in our favor. Now, our disadvantage in the job market has become one hell of a super advantage.

At first, I noticed it in small pieces that seemed unrelated and didn’t need to connect. But as more parts connected, it became more than coincidence or pure luck. Maybe it’s our time to climb to the top of the chart and take software engineers off the first-place ranking.

We know enough about mathematics, science, technology, operations, information systems, economics, organizations, and management to understand the language of many different problems, even when we are not the deepest experts in any one of them.