Oh, the horror!

As I try to apply the Bible to my life, I've come to know the dignity of all honest labor, with the exception of professions intrinsically sinful--you know, things like prostitution, drug dealing, being a hit man, or being a corporate manager.

I took a career aptitude test.

You guessed the result. No, nothing associated with the Mafia, Columbia, or Bill Clinton, thankfully, but how humiliating! Even stranger, my current (former?) profession was one of the lowest ranked professions in the survey--though (at least when management allowed me to do my job) I've actually enjoyed the engineering I've done.

Now read that last sentence carefully, and you might figure out why I scored so well for "management" but not "engineering." Many big companies seem to prefer to use their engineers as "glorified technicians," allowing them to play all day in the lab, but not to participate in decision making based on their work. Hence, an engineer who actually likes to, say, create something and see it get to market is going to get stifled.

And so I think that the survey would do the same thing with Edison, Kettering, or any of a host of others--and we wonder why our country is losing its technical edge. Corporate structures seem to be designed to allow those with the least technical skill (upper management) to call the shots for those with the most.

Thankfully, it seems that entrepreneurship is another way of describing what I saw on the career survey. Even so, I didn't need caffeine to keep going this afternoon because of the shock.