Are you an engineer at all?? 38

[MIStructE_IRE]

I’m not sure about you guys, but lately all I’m doing is risk assessments, reports, meetings, presentations, dealing with public bodies and dealing with nonsense. Its been months since I’ve done any actual engineering!

The job has become so over regulated I feel like engineering Itself is now maybe 25-30% of my job! I’d consider myself a good designer, and this level of admin and red tape has me considering jacking it all in and going to do something else..

How are things in your part of the world?

 

[CivilSigma]

If I had it to do over again, I'd move to a growing urban centre and camp outside of a premier firm doing tall work until I tricked them into accepting me. Speaking to only the markets that I know something about, and surely leaving out a lot of players:

Are you saying I through my current job and move to Vancouver hehehe.

I usually use Indeed, Glassdoor jobs to search for open positions. Do you guys recommend something else?

 

[KootK]

I usually use Indeed, Glassdoor jobs to search for open positions. Do you guys recommend something else?

All that stuff is too passive if you really mean to steer your career with intention. Figure out who you want to work for and get yourself and interview whether they have an advertised posting or not.

 

[CivilSigma]

All that stuff is too passive if you really mean to steer your career with intention. Figure out who you want to work for and get yourself and interview whether they have an advertised posting or not.

Pardon my lack of experience. But how do you go about doing that?
I've thought of sending letters before. Do I contact recruiters on LinkedIn for example?

I really don't know how to go forward. I thought getting an M.Eng would help, but so far it hasn't.

 

[KootK]

Pardon my lack of experience. But how do you go about doing that?

1) Identify a company that you'd like to work for.

2) Call their office and ask to speak with the human resources department.

3) As for an informational interview.

4) If they won't interview you, indicate that you'd like to send a letter over expressing your interest in any current or future openings.

5) Ask who the letter in #4 ought to be addressed to.

6) Send the letter -- a paper letter -- on some high quality paper and with zero spelling or grammatical errors as verified by your mentor/teacher/colleagues/mom.

7) Rinse and repeat annually until you get a job or the firm in question gets a restraining order.

8) Accept that, while you're able to will many things into existence, your powers are limited and sometimes you'll not get what you want.

9) Move on to the next desirable employer.

Showing some moxie, a proactive mindset, and a little perseverance can go a long ways with a potential employer. Certainly, it can help to differentiate you from the zillion other, MSc endowed candidates out there hoping to land their dream jobs via email/IM. It's a courtship dance; let potential employers see your enthusiasm and how you go about getting things done when you mean to make something happen.

Some employers will be intensely annoyed by this approach; others will be intensely flattered and highly impressed. Embrace the latter and say to hell with the former as they weren't ever going to be of any help to you anyhow.

 

[XR250]

I have always thought about proposing that you would agree to work for free for a probationary period in order to prove oneself.

 

[dik]

I'd be really suspicious of any company that would welcome that... best to look elsewhere.

Dik

 

[1503-44]

Working for free, even for probation? Man that's worse than what they used to call scab labor". Making the rich man more rich? No thanks. Not even a fair labor or fair market practice. I would suggest that someone considering that should first take a self respect class. It would be obvious to me that they didn't even respect themselves or their own work that they put into obtaining their education? Why would that be? Was it too easy, they cheated, or they partied all the time while daddy paid the bill while others did their work for them. They'd definitely be the low bidder and we all know to what that refers. Their working for free would also disrespect the hard work of all of us and all the other engineers around them. It just brings us all down. Why would you do that. Never think about that again. EVER. As I always say, No thanks! I prefer to go broke drinking beer at home. You couldn't even eat doing it. It's what they call a "NO BRAINER". BTW, Rich Man also understands very, very well that he GETS what he pays for, even if it was as little as possible.


“What I told you was true ... from a certain point of view.” - Obi-Wan Kenobi, "Return of the Jedi"

 

[phamENG]

I get what XR250 is saying. When I graduated, there was no job market in my area for structural engineers with no experience. Not even an internship. No design/consulting firms were hiring. I wasn't quite as proactive as what KootK suggested, but I did cold call most of the firms and sent unsolicited resumes. I got a lot of "thanks for asking" if anything at all. I was fortunate enough to find a building products manufacturer who needed an in house designer and, so, I got the coveted "Structural Engineer" on my resume and caught the attention of one of the smaller firms the next time around.

Believe me, though - I contemplated volunteering just to get exposure and a little bit of experience. I knew that my production value was going to be next to nothing for the first few months at least while I learned my way around, so I wasn't opposed to getting "paid" in experience while giving them very little in the way of profitable work.

Ultimately, I'm glad I didn't do that for many of the reasons ax1e and dik stated - but I'm also now a structural engineer with a license and a solid career. Had I not "made it," would I be regretted not offering to volunteer myself? Probably.

 

[1503-44]

Don't regret it. It wouldn't have worked out anyway. It's a recipe for bad feelings that would eventually come from realizing that you had been taken advantage of when you were most vulnurable. Employers that would do that are guilty of the same thing as sex trafficers, crack pushers, etc. Taking advantage of their power over others. You would eventually learn that, resent it and leave as soon as you could. Been there, done that. I was in a similar situation one time after the oil price crash in '87. I returned from a foreign assignment and thought I needed a job immediately, so I took the first one. Not for free exactly, but for cheap, and it was a crap company that had been in bankruptcy proceedings for the previous 11 years out of the 15 of its existance. It was TransTexas Gas. The locals called it Transylvania Natural Gas. Why? Because they sucked the blood out of everyone that went near them. They fired people for things like allegedly "leaving a bag of cement out on the lease site" and yes, "steeling toilet paper", but we deduced that it was someting more like the guy was going to become vested in their "retirement scheme" within a few weeks or so, etc. etc. The drilling and pipeline crew foremen were talkng "job security" money from their crews. What a mess. We said that they paid us every two weeks, because if they paid us once a month, we would have gotten enough money together at one time to buy a full tank of gas (it was a rather remote place) and get the hell out of there. It came to me quickly that it was going to be a short term, bad gig at best. ... with little hitting the table except my head. I got out ASAP, but times were so bad back then it took a couple of years to get back to Houston, where I still was paying for my long vacant house, unmarketable due to the 80% vacancy rate prevailing in the burbs at the time. The only good thing about it all was the experience I got working there. I was the only engineer for the entire gas gathering and transmission system that was producing more natural gas than Exxon was at the time! I single handedly ran everything but the drilling ops. Bought used equipment, compressors, meter stations, dehydrators, seperators, pipe, from all over to hook up locally and even moved a compressor station from Kingsville to Laredo and got it working again. Worked my A off and never fotgot anything I learned. I thank them for that, but nothing else. I can't imagine what doing that for free would have been like. Be happy that you didn't go there.

“What I told you was true ... from a certain point of view.” - Obi-Wan Kenobi, "Return of the Jedi"

 

[SteelPE]

Working for free, even for probation? Man that's worse than what they used to call scab labor". Making the rich man more rich? No thanks. Not even a fair labor or fair market practice. I would suggest that someone considering that should first take a self respect class. It would be obvious to me that they didn't even respect themselves or their own work that they put into obtaining their education? Why would that be? Was it too easy, they cheated, or they partied all the time while daddy paid the bill while others did their work for them. They'd definitely be the low bidder and we all know to what that refers. Their working for free would also disrespect the hard work of all of us and all the other engineers around them. It just brings us all down. Why would you do that. Never think about that again. EVER. As I always say, No thanks! I prefer to go broke drinking beer at home. You couldn't even eat doing it. It's what they call a "NO BRAINER". BTW, Rich Man also understands very, very well that he GETS what he pays for, even if it was as little as possible.

I don't want to make this political, but there was a recent president who loosely suggested the work for free as an intern approach to getting a job.

 

[IRstuff]

So, this is a good example of an analysis of alternatives (AoA) exercise. I see at least 5 possible alternatives:
1> work for free, or low salary, but directly in the field of interest
2> work in nominally related field, e.g., in the trades
3> take additional classes in your field
4> work at home on a "project"
5> work in an unrelated field

Then, the question is which of these alternatives will give you the best shot at a job in the field you desire. I've rank-ordered them the way I see them as panning out, but others might have a different opinion on that.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

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[1503-44]

Just be sure you know it will be short term one way or another.

Want to work for free? Join the Peace Corps. Win-win.

“What I told you was true ... from a certain point of view.” - Obi-Wan Kenobi, "Return of the Jedi"

 

[phamENG]

ax1e - thanks for sharing your experience. It's certainly a good example of the potential pitfalls of taking this approach and anyone reading this exchange would be a fool to ignore it. I don't think anyone is suggesting that it be done for along period of time, though. Unless daddy's an investment banker with a soft spot for an engineer who can't hack it, you're going to have to prove your worth quickly and fight for your due pay.

 

[1503-44]

Welcome. Yeah, maybe a bit of a rant, but "forewarned is forearmed".

“What I told you was true ... from a certain point of view.” - Obi-Wan Kenobi, "Return of the Jedi"

 

[IRstuff]

Every job is a learning experience; a former company had an internal joke, "XXX University, where you learn what not to do."

The trade-off is do you want to work in your field, at a low pay and crappy working conditions, and hopefully learn useful engineering, or work at a similarly low pay in a random store or restaurant and let your engineering skills lie fallow?

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[KootK]

1) I view the phenomenon of unpaid work as nothing more than a natural condition of supply and demand, just like high paid work and low paid work.

2) I suspect that the supply of structural engineers who want to work on mega-building mass tuned dampers all day every day far exceeds demand.

3) I have it on good authority that many, if not most, of the premier skyscraper firms are actually quite sweatshop-ish at the junior and intermediate levels. You work like a dog and can't make any real money until you make partner, usually with an $80K buy in. This makes sense given #2.

4) Suppose that WSP New York called me up and said "Hey KootK, we'd like you to come to NY for a year and spend all of your time doing performance based design of mega-structure outrigger systems. You in? The only problem is that we've got some other guys willing to do it for free". I would, in all seriousness, offer to pay WSP $50K of my own money and get my ass out there. I understand the supply and demand value problem because I'm part of it.

 

[phamENG]

Meanwhile, many of us can make a comfortable living scraping the proverbial engineering gum off of society's shoes. It's not glamorous, but I get to have dinner with my wife and kids every night!

 

[KootK]

This is to drift even further into the philosophical but I've come to the personal conclusion that enjoying your work will, for most, come down to learning to enjoy your clients and enjoy helping them with their problems. Certainly, that is the key to business success. That, combined with with being excellent at whatever it is that you wind up spending your time on. This has been a perennial struggle for me as I'm one who has always wanted far more from the profession than I've been able to extract from it in a technical sense.

The book below was a great help to me in shifting my perspective to something more practical and sustainable. The title is unfortunate as it's not actually about getting what you want. Rather it's about learning to want what you've got by getting awesome at it, just like Sheryl Crow recommended way back in the 90's: Link. It's all just a repackaging of classic stoic principles.

Still, with the benefit of career hindsight, I can clearly see that it is possible to get more of what one wants out of a career by thinking strategically at the outset and never, ever being passive about what you ask from life, work, or anything else. I'd do it a little differently if I had it to do over again which is why I recommend the strategies that I do to our younger colleagues. At the same time, I'd never counsel anyone to let their own happiness, or the happiness of their family, be frustrated, delayed, or otherwise contingent upon relatively trivial career BS. I would move to NY and my wife would be cool with it because she knows who she married. But then, after my selfish tour of duty was up, I'd find a way to reassemble the clan and keep pumping real money into the retirement and education accounts.

 

[CivilSigma]

Well Said KootK and PhamENG.

I feel like chasing that glamorous design job will cost me financially (moving to a new city, etc.) and be taxing emotionally and psychology. I still live at home, and it will also hinder my family's well being.

But at the same time the thought of it so damn exciting. I feel like my destruction will by my own doing lol.

 

[phamENG]

It will cost you, but it may also reward you. Remember, there's no chance of success without the risk of failure. By living at home I'm guessing you mean with your parents. In that case, you're probably young enough to take this chance and, if it doesn't work out, you'll be none the worse for wear. If you can survive a year or two with one of the mega-firms and learn a thing or two, you'll have a pretty nice resume to take back to a provincial firm. Or maybe you'll rise to the top of the heap and make a name for yourself as one of the great structural engineers of the age.

Whatever you choose, good luck to you.