I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not being a self-righteous prick with that last statement regarding Christianity. Deceiving people is against the tenets of many, many religions; likewise, there are a frightening volume of scammers, swindlers, abusers, liars, deceivers, moral pretenders, and downright assholes flying under the banner of Christianity. Just because someone is deceiving folks doesn't mean they're not a Christian, and a statement to that effect is along the lines of why the more evangelical Christian community bugs the shit out of everyone else.

Not sure how you made the leap from 'technology designed to make its employees more efficient' to robocallers.

From my understanding of TFA, IQor does customer service type of stuff. So, sophisticated knowledge bases, good front-ends for customer service tools, flexible processes, etc. can all be examples of tech that makes a customer service group more efficient (there's much more). Robocallers wouldn't even apply (the only automated piece of the called is, sometimes, the greeting).

Did I miss something?

Except for the fact that a lot of the 'marketing dweebs' at tech companies are engineers.

Just sayin'. Your product management/marketing folks at these firms are often very plugged in to the tech side of things (I should know, being one of them).

For the record: I've got a BSEE myself, working on the MBA.

The thing about master's degrees is they're generally most effective when you have a fair idea about what you want out of them. Are you looking to broaden your expertise? Focus on a particular topic? Change careers altogether? That will help you choose the right program (school, full-time vs. part-time), the right course of study, etc. You'll be much more motivated and enthusiastic, and you'll get more bang for your buck (and it ain't cheap).

Go get a job, earn some money, work a bit (and don't stress too much about the 'harsh economic climate'). You'll learn a lot about what you want and don't want in a career, what type of work makes you happy, what management style and company you prefer, etc. You'll also have some fun building your life and putting some money in the bank (it's quite rewarding).

Look up in about 2-3 years and see what you think of graduate school at that point. See where you really want to go/what you want to do. Most of the engineers I've known get master's degrees to manage groups or move into senior or even principal design positions (though the later leans more towards a PhD, in bigger companies). Some have done it to shift industries (e.g., telecom to biomed). Depends on what you're after, and you won't know that right out of the undergraduate gate.

Try and get it done before marriage and kids/partnering up. As a collegue once told me, three drinks down: 'changing the world is doable after a wife and kids; it's just a helluva lot harder.' You'll have more energy and focus, and it's easier to live a poor grad student's life when there's no one else to be responsible for. If the timing doesn't work out that way, don't despair, just talk it out with the wife/partner.

Above all, just enjoy it. Life's too short to stress it overmuch.

On the iPod: depends on what you all a 'good' player. There are other players that more feature-rich, slimmer, have better capacity, and are cheaper. Yet why do they sell like hotcakes, this iPod?

I worked at VZW for 1.5 painful years. You know what I found? 80% of cell phones sold today are shit. Feature bloat, cheap hardware, bad at making calls, cumbersome UIs. LG phones were the only ones that really stood a chance (VZW ended up adopting a universal UI based off LG's work) - even then, too many buttons, not innovative. So I question your statement of 'REALLY good competition' and would instead call it 'mature.'

So how do you shake up a mature market with entrenched players? Develop something disruptive. Apple's good at doing exactly that kind of thing, and that's what they appear to be doing with the iPhone. You can make all sorts of disparaging remarks about the keynote, question the timing, harumph about the cell phone market, but I think it boils down to a few things:

1. Their products are excellent from a sense of key feature inclusion (i.e., little to no bloat) and usability.

2. They are not newbies - they're a multi-billion dollar consumer electronics company. And increasingly, that's the kind of product cell phones are turning into. To say they can't roll with the likes of Moto and Nokia is ignoring who they are and what they do.

3. They hit the right timing in the market for the release of such a phone. The evolution of cell phones into multi-function devices and the increase market for smartphones and other 'intelligent' products have converged into a magical point of market timing (otherwise known as an 'inflection point'). This is a great time to throw this hat into the ring.

The market is ripe and if they put a good product into the market with a good partner (AT&T, don't fuck this up), they have a solid shot, for the same reasons the iPod succeeds in the market that it does. We'll see.

Thanks for thinking of me, first. Have a great day.