Eric mate the Uk has been "throwing" its engineering legacy away since Brunell died.

yep thats the end game for Gove the reintroduction of grammar schools kids and dumping of working class kids in dead end secondary moderns - not going to be popular when Tory voters when there average kids don't make the cut though - which is one of the reasons the Tories introduced comprehensives in the firstplace.

Back in the 70's they started us at 14 with a CECIL a cut down training language but it was Assembler we had to code it on sheets and send the code off and get it back the next week

I was doing map reduce back in the early 80's :-)

classically there are 3 reasons why professionals join unions Rights Representation and Reassurance

This does not work "personal" contracts have all the power with the employers

Sorry BT speak M&P managerial and professional ie all the technical staff other than the "engineers" or Linemen in US terms

One of the reasons the Unionized Uk telephone system was modernized (well ahead on the US i might add) with no labour disputes was that all the M&P grades who developed the new technology where union members.
The CEO of one of the smaller uk telcos was even an activist in his younger days and I know that a CTO of one of the global telecoms companys was a member of my branch :-)

And presumably have an alarm? At my first place (on campus at CIT) we had a large experimental rig that used freon as the working fluid we had separate alarms for fire and freon release and two sets of firemans breathing gear at the lab entrance) that we had people trained in so that in the case of a leak they could go in and rescue people.

Yes id bet that the Author hasn't worked in a place with a proper "engineering" background making something physical whether with machine tools or a 3d printer is not the same as knocking out some c# or java (the COBOL of the 21st century).

"they make the code interesting" :-) though that was referencing a computed GOTO

Does America not have any equivalent to the Truck acts than ban company stores?

If you think you can replace pr software like Solidworks or Pro/E or MATLAB by getting "industry organizations commission high-quality software" cheaply you obviously have no idea what is involved.

My first job was at just such a place for CFD you think will be cheap - we spent the cost of a small house on a single bit of HP instrumentation gear (this is before they sucked)

I think that is the EU that provides development assistance - and Wales does get support fro larger companies playing the political game why does BT have an engineering centers in Cardiff Belfast and Glasgow?

This is what I was told at British telecom back in the late 90's going through the board for promotion at SE there where approximately 20 or so promotions from se to senior se every 18 months of so in a division that had 60k employees - brutal competition.

I was told by a senior guy that passing the paper sift stage meant that you could do the job technically the board (interview) was to work out the 20 or so of the 400 or so who made it through the paper sift.

Took me 3 goes to pass but there was no role for me that year :-(