I disagree with Richard.

One can always cultivate passion. Finance, banking and sales are also forms of engineering (depends on how you look at them :) ).

All things equal, you will make more money in an industry where you work closer to the money. You may be the best engineer but you will earn less than the average banker (just look at salary info released when they pegged ministers' pay to the top earners in 6 professions). So why not boost your chances by simply getting into the right industry at the start?

Someone gave a good example above - if you are basking music, no matter how passionate or good you are, you are highly likely to have mediocre earning power.

Not everyone can be the top earning engineer, but if you work hard you get a good shot at being an average banker or bank ops employee. And you will be better off than working as an engineer.

Seriously, someone like Richard is rather rare. Possibly more than 2 decades of product development in BMW automobile, claim to know so much with many good contacts. He should start an automobile company in Singapore and hire Singapore engineers who are passionate in this field to do R&D. Open a small plant to do prototype testing, with the mass production to be done in factory in malaysia or indonesia.

Who knows, singapore will have it's own automobile brand, just like malaysia have their proton. In this way Singaporean engineers can get to do hardcore engineering as well.

If we talk about outliers like Richard, we might as well encourage Singaporeans to be actors or Singers and tell them that they need to venture out of Singapore to Hollywood/taiwan/China so that they can be a star and earn their millions.

I think being an engineer now has lost the prestige of yesteryear. Most engineers have to be contented with a 5-7k salary when they are in their mid 30s. They used to be the top 5 professions but now their pay is the average pay of a graduate in mid 30s.

Yes, an okay actor can earn half a million in Hollywood appearing in B-rated dramas and doing endorsements for less well-known products.

Worse thing is once hit mid 30s, lucky ones career & pay stagnate, unlucky ones get busted.

Many engineers have a second career driving taxis. Some make 4k a month and are quite proud of it.

Not true lah. Those are outliers too.

Just take life sciences as a more realistic example.

About a decade ago, all the brightest students had only 1 thing in mind - to study life sciences and work in the billion dollar industry headed by Philip Yeo and funded by the government.

Now, just look at the empty buildings around one-north, the tiny budget allocated to A*star, Philip Yeo's new career, and the thundering silence on the great life sciences experiment in Singapore.

I think there are still one or two very PASSIONATE life sciences scientists here. Once in a while they'll announce some "breakthroughs" in the papers, but most of the passionate life science graduates are working in totally unrelated fields or peddling medical stuff to neighbourhood GPs and at best restructured hospitals, while their business graduate counterparts enjoy the good life making good money working in banking and finance.

You wanna be passionate, you better be passionate in the right field!

I study engineering, was very passionate in aerospace, worked as lowly paid engineer. Happened that i am also very passionate about fine things in life - German built cars and piano, landed property with a nice garden, swiss watches
To achieve these, I left and join IB - now enjoying riding Mercs, playing Schimmel grand, and relaxing over a beer in my garden. I believe all these would not be possible working as engineer, well at least not in singapore.
Uncle Richard advice is only applicable if the engineer is based in Germany or in US - let be realistic, and dont romanticize the notion of engineer being well appreciated and paid in singapore