Of course, the definition of hands-on has changed drastically in the past 20 or 30 years. Designers in the 1970s and 1980s still built prototypes out of parts they could see with the naked eye. And when those prototypes didn't work, they attached oscilloscope probes to suspect points until they found the source of the problem. Those days are fast becoming a fond memory.

For the past 10 or 15 years, at least, "you couldn't debug a system into working," says John Mashey, a former chief scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., in Mountain View, Calif. When you're building on silicon, the first chip out of production has to "more or less work," he adds, maybe not at the full speed or with all the functions intended. But if the chip doesn't do most of what it was designed to do, a project will lose months getting to market while waiting for a new fabrication cycle. So design now means endless rounds of simulation and modeling. And design engineers effectively become programmers as they type the "source code" representing their circuits into the tools that will ultimately generate a layout.

Where designers once built, breadboarded, poked, and probed, they now simulate. And almost all of the modeling, analysis, and synthesis that designers do, Riordan points out, would be unthinkable without the nearly two orders of magnitude by which computing power has increased in the past decade.

As Moore's Law continues its relentless advance, engineers who build systems—whether chips or boards—seem to be doing less and less actual design of circuits and ever more assembly of prepackaged components. Circuit designers are working with bigger and bigger functional blocks, assembling them with increasingly powerful tools, and getting further from both the messiness and the simple satisfactions of working in the real world.

IMAGE: BETTMANN/CORBIS

COLD WARRIOR: In 1960, an electrical engineer at a Radio Free Europe transmitting station in Munich, Germany, analyzed broadcast signals. The work was part of these stations' constant struggle to be heard over Soviet-bloc jamming efforts, which cost an estimated US $35 million—roughly double the cost of running the stations.

Mashey points out that for a system on a chip, or SOC, designers don't even lay out blocks of circuitry. Instead they stitch together CPU blocks, network and video interfaces, cache memory, and other pieces of intellectual property from multiple vendors—each with software instructions that handle the detailed interconnections—to create a custom chip for a set-top box, a toy, or a smart refrigerator. Designers may put together complex systems containing billions of transistors without ever seeing a physical circuit; to the designer, the chip or populated circuit board is merely a collection of files stored on a desktop computer.

Although such an abstract, project management-style view of engineering may be what the future holds, it could well leave current generations of engineers behind. Some technologists have always embraced management; others (such as Riordan) have taken on management tasks only reluctantly. If managing becomes what engineers do, might a very different kind of person make up most of the engineering population? The NAE's Wulf doesn't think so: he politely scolds his interviewer for parroting the old stereotype of engineers as gizmo-focused loners. As long as engineering involves using technology to make new things, he argues, that's what engineering types will do, even if it involves work that looks like a combination of anthropology, marketing, and project management.

Some engineering schools and departments have been bowing to these trends for years. Rosalind H. Williams, director of the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society, helped oversee the institution's curriculum retooling in the second half of the 1990s. She suggests that assembling parts from disparate sources and cobbling together abstractions makes engineering more akin to project management than to design. Some of the changes in MIT's curriculum were designed to prepare engineering students for management-related careers. Others, like the addition of biology to the core curriculum, respond to changes in the world where students will live and work.

Already, she says, many of the roughly one-third of MIT students who major in electrical engineering and computer science, or EECS, view it as a sort of technical liberal arts degree that prepares them for a wide range of technical and nontechnical jobs. Indeed, after earning their undergraduate degrees, about a quarter of MIT students go directly into jobs in finance or management consulting.

One crucial problem, Michigan's Ulaby says, is giving students a sense of the potential breadth of their field without sacrificing solid training in its fundamentals. It takes time for students to absorb the mathematical rigor associated with the material, he says. With demand for both a broad perspective and a rigorous grounding in an ever-enlarging set of core subjects, it is not surprising that the four-year engineering degree is under pressure, as it has been for decades. Wulf, for example, states flatly that the four-year engineering degree should not suffice as a first professional qualification. A. Richard Newton, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, proposes that students take a fifth year tackling real-world problems far from home to improve their practical and cultural understanding of their discipline's role in society.