Originally Posted by Anonymous

hmm... well there wasn't really a misrepresentation on the first point in the sense that people who go into semicon do make that kind of money. I have quite a number of friends who used to be in the line. in the end they left due to career stagnation, unhappiness with the job, or retrenchment.

To the government, there was a need to fill such job vacancies as it was trying to bring these tech MNCs here. Too often, they don't realize that most of the engineering jobs are really process/service engineering. Can't really expect them to pay much more (to the dissatisfaction of local engineers). Sometimes I wonder if polytechnic engineers would have sufficed. I also wonder if the sector is already slowing down.

Life sciences - I never really believed that this would really take off here. I say this because life sciences R&D is even more upstream than semi-con tech. If we didn't manage to do the tech/knowledge transfer and move upstream for semi-con after all these years, how would we expect this to happen in a large scale for life sciences? I simply don't think we have the requisite conditions to cultivate R&D. We need a critical mass of our best local minds working in this sector and to do this they have to be paid very well, comparable to best paying jobs. I said local because that would help anchor the industry and improve knowledge retention. Somehow I don't trust foreigners to do the research for us. I simply don't think they are motivated to improve our country's technology. Do you see them genuinely making an effort to groom our local research talent? That is putting aside the fact that most of those here aren't even the best. Even if they were successful, most of them would simply leave for greener pastures. Moreover, they won't and can't serve as an inspiration for local scientists. We need them here to make up numbers for now but eventually we ought to rely on our own scientists to do the work -IF we really want this sector to thrive here. We also need these foreign companies to be willing to transfer their technology to us. Our local scientists need to have the leeway to explore new ideas. All these aren't happening and I don't expect any changes any time soon. In the mean time, our best minds are going for medicine, banking and law for obvious reasons.

Try to do a switch if you don't have many commitments. I'm doing the same by via further studies.