In Silicon Valley, there's a theory called the "10x engineer," which holds that the best engineer at a company is 10 times more productive than the average engineer.
What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer.
In Silicon Valley, the average engineer's salary is around a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year, according to a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution — cheap, when compared with the potential profits.
But the average engineer doesn't believe that, so Mr. Selinger has developed a seminar called "Stuff You Don't Learn in Engineering School," which aims to undo ingrained personality traits that have been reinforced by years of technical training.
The average engineer, with a four-year undergraduate degree and a professional graduate degree, will earn $3.5 million -- in a lifetime.
By contrast, the average software engineer, according to compensation database PayScale.com, is $64,376.
According to Glassdoor, the average Facebook engineer earns $130,000 a year.
Poornima Vijayashanker is not your average engineer.
Clearly, anything that could make this chore less daunting for the average non-engineer would be a smash hit.
As the average age of engineers at NASA and its contractors moved from 25to5555 the agency became a white-collar jobs program, dominated by folks most interested in protecting their looming retirements.
