Leave the engineering to engineers. That's all i can say.

A few good quotes on engineers, lol, of course i have to make my profession look good mang.
Thus be proud my fellow EngGoons and hold yourselves to high standards of skill and conduct. There are good reasons why we suffer for 4 years of uni and then 2 more for professional practice.

Engineers are underpaid slaves. Seldom have the opportunity and inspiration to revolutionize technology...

The pioneer are only a few heads in the industry. Most of the technology advancement were developed by institution like university. Nowadays, engineers are just machine operator. 

its up to the engineering student to be "picky" and willing to take the risk of going after technically challenging jobs rather than to choose the easy way and go into fringe engineering jobs such as sales engineer, project management, glorified technicians etc.

R&D, design, consultancy, site engineer (resident engineer) is where most of the technical challenge are.[U]

and another trend is that not many engineer end up as technical super-experts, as most eventually moved on to less technical roles such as managers, directors, etc that offer more pay.

Yea.... But does that mean engineers that work at maintenance and operation don't deserved the recognition? They put ideas into reality, though they are just operating it.

my lecturer defines an engineer as someone who does design work. some good maintenance engineer actually learn from doing maintenance and tweaks the system and modifies it to be more easily accessible, less breakdown, faster servicing, etc.

compare that to some maintenance who only follow schedule and basically acts like a drone.

same goes for operations. increased production rates with less scraps etc.

i have yet to find a sales engineer that does any significant design work (i may be wrong, as i dont know everything )