I definitely agree that the idea of unconstrained “invention” is not well supported in society, but the hypothesis makes me go “huh?”
Science discovers new knowledge; invention creates useful machines, chemicals, processes, or other products; and business produces and distributes these products in a scalable, self-sustaining way.
Is the place you use the word “invention” not engineering? For most types of engineering, undergrad students are taught science for two years (it is new knowledge to them), they’re taught how to usefully apply that knowledge for a year and a half, and then they have a final semester or two explaining how that knowledge can be used to achieve some business goals.
In other words, “career that applies scientific knowledge to make up stuff” seems to be engineers.
When I ctrl+f-replace “inventors” with “engineers” in my head, I personally see your career path theory making more sense given that engineers do have a career path, which is mostly to become well-degreed technicians, financiers, or tenture-track-warriors. They ought to becoming inventors, but the existing paths divert them.
All (most?) invention is engineering, but a lot of engineering is not invention.
Boeing employs many airplane engineers, but they don’t really invent new planes. Facebook employs many software engineers but isn’t inventing much in software. Both are doing product development engineering—which is fine and something the world certainly needs a lot of, but it’s not the same thing.
I think anyone who wanted to be an inventor would train as an engineer. So the education/training part of the inventor career path is there. But it falls apart after university.
Facebook employs many software engineers but isn’t inventing much in software
React, Jest, and GraphQL (among many other projects that I’m less familiar with) were created by Facebook, many of which heavily altered the way that people do programming in the relevant domains. Without knowing what exactly you mean by “inventing” in software, I think you’d have a hard time arguing that they’re done none.
Many of the large tech companies have similar contributions, depending on what sort of work they’re doing. It’s not even just large tech companies—a number of much smaller companies I’ve worked for have some level of open source contributions, which often are representative of “invention”, and arguably a lot of the actual products that companies create could be described as “invention” as well.
Without a further explanation what you’d consider an “invention” vs not, it’s hard to say whether or not there’s any “there” there with your original point.
I definitely agree that the idea of unconstrained “invention” is not well supported in society, but the hypothesis makes me go “huh?”
Is the place you use the word “invention” not engineering? For most types of engineering, undergrad students are taught science for two years (it is new knowledge to them), they’re taught how to usefully apply that knowledge for a year and a half, and then they have a final semester or two explaining how that knowledge can be used to achieve some business goals.
In other words, “career that applies scientific knowledge to make up stuff” seems to be engineers.
When I ctrl+f-replace “inventors” with “engineers” in my head, I personally see your career path theory making more sense given that engineers do have a career path, which is mostly to become well-degreed technicians, financiers, or tenture-track-warriors. They ought to becoming inventors, but the existing paths divert them.
A large part of this may be that there is increasing pressure on CEOs to focus on short-term earnings at the expense of long term earnings.
All (most?) invention is engineering, but a lot of engineering is not invention.
Boeing employs many airplane engineers, but they don’t really invent new planes. Facebook employs many software engineers but isn’t inventing much in software. Both are doing product development engineering—which is fine and something the world certainly needs a lot of, but it’s not the same thing.
I think anyone who wanted to be an inventor would train as an engineer. So the education/training part of the inventor career path is there. But it falls apart after university.
React, Jest, and GraphQL (among many other projects that I’m less familiar with) were created by Facebook, many of which heavily altered the way that people do programming in the relevant domains. Without knowing what exactly you mean by “inventing” in software, I think you’d have a hard time arguing that they’re done none.
Many of the large tech companies have similar contributions, depending on what sort of work they’re doing. It’s not even just large tech companies—a number of much smaller companies I’ve worked for have some level of open source contributions, which often are representative of “invention”, and arguably a lot of the actual products that companies create could be described as “invention” as well.
Without a further explanation what you’d consider an “invention” vs not, it’s hard to say whether or not there’s any “there” there with your original point.
Fair enough, I might consider React/GraphQL inventions. (Jest doesn’t seem that fundamentally new?)
But how much of Facebook’s engineering effort went to inventing React/GraphQL? 1% Surely less than 10%.