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Is engineering as glamorised as Elon Musk makes it seem ?

It seems like he constantly describes it in its glorified forms ; building rockets, making race cars, designing ultra efficient technology..

But is that what it's really like ? Do most graduates end up working in a firm that focuses on a very small component of a bigger project ? To put things into perspective, Space X have 100s of suppliers, and most American Aerospace engineer companies just work to supply space X and NASA with very niche components which would be rather boring to do..

Elon encourages more people to work in engineering yet most wont do the work that he promotes, e.g putting all of the components together to produce and sell the final product.

Am I right in saying this ?
(edited 3 years ago)
I was wondering something similar. There is a lot of diverging opinion on this.

As far as I know, engineers are supposed to focus on design work that meet legal and regulatory specifications and ensure everything is fine and dandy. In this case, being an engineer is more like a cog in a wheel, especially when there may be limited promotion prospects. If you do get promoted, it's usually to a more management oriented role, where you need more people and project management skills than technical i.e. not very likely to be designing rockets, fancy cars, or efficient tech.

Having said that, it can depend on which company you work for. At Google for example, there is usually one day a week where you can work on your own projects and innovate/do whatever you want, outside of your regular role. I suppose Elon Musk was able to get to where he is and is able to say the things he did because he went into entrepreneurship and had that creative liberty to innovate as much as he wants. If he didn't, I very much doubt we would get Space X or Teslas today. i.e. yeah, engineers can do a lot more to change the world and be at the forefront of innovation, but no, you're not likely to get the chance to do so because of the nature of the industry (I'm guessing it's similar with science).

I think what is needed more are stuff on innovation and research. I'm kind of wondering whether it's usually the general science research or engineering research that allows the most innovation.

Irrespective though, with Musk being a qualified engineer himself, engineering does teach you a lot of technical and problem solving skills. A number of the richest people on the planet are engineers in some definition. The level of difficulty of the degree courses and the skills you pick up are more or less invaluable irrespective of which field you go into.
(edited 3 years ago)
Even if you worked for Space X specifically, most of the engineers will be working on small components of a larger project.
I don't think he really glamourises engineering, it just happens that the areas he works in are glamourous.

If you work at Tesla or SpaceX then you will be working on something pretty small which won't be too glamourous, unless you're very high up in the company. And on the flip side, his employees work under insane hours and conditions which make sweatshop work look light, so in terms of work conditions, most engineering jobs far surpass working at Tesla and SpaceX in terms of glamour.

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