Lately I have been pretty disheartened with my job. I'm a structural engineer with around 6-7 years of experience, and now am finding myself with an ever-increasing amount of responsibility and juggling an ever-growing workload. Work/life balance is a thing of the past. Weekend work is basically a given for me these days. During busy periods, it is not uncommon for me to have to work multiple weekends in a row without a break just to meet project deadlines. Recently, I worked 26 days straight (i.e., 4 standard work weeks and 3 weekends in between). Of course, the reward for all this extra effort seems to be just more work and responsibility. It does not feel sustainable at all. It also does not help when direct managers have a similar workload and seem to view it as a point of pride - hard to complain about workload and work/life balance when it is just the culture at the company.
At the same time, there are others who put in the minimum required effort and consistently underperform, and simply fly under the radar. Rather than deal with this directly, the workload simply gets shifted to others. The workload is so unfairly apportioned in my company that while I am working back-to-back weekends, there are others who are given just 1-2 days' billable work per week.
I also don't believe the situation is better anywhere else. I switched jobs a few years ago and found the new job to be even worse, so eventually decided to go back to the previous job.
The other part of my rant is just about the nature of the work itself. I got into engineering in the first place because I like solving challenging, technical problems and finding creative solutions to these. I was probably a little naive about what an engineering career actually involved when I first started out. These days, I would say that easily 80-90% of my time and mental effort is spent on basically everything other than the core 'engineering' part of my job. Endless meetings, business development/writing proposals, reports, managing (very demanding) clients, invoicing/billing, project management, dealing with bureaucracy, ever-changing project requirements, huge coordination effort with other disciplines/consultants/contractors. None of that stuff is really enjoyable or rewarding to me. When the opportunity arises for some interesting technical work to be done, it is often just handed off to more junior staff with lower billing rates.
When I look at the toll this job takes on me, and the amount of effort and time I've invested to get to where I am in my career, and the sheer responsibility involved, the reward just doesn't stack up. E.g., being a tradesperson with a similar amount of experience pays practically the same as an engineer, at least where I live.
I'm sure my situation is not unique. I've seen other similar posts on this forum. Just curious about how people have dealt with this kind of thing in the past.
At the same time, there are others who put in the minimum required effort and consistently underperform, and simply fly under the radar. Rather than deal with this directly, the workload simply gets shifted to others. The workload is so unfairly apportioned in my company that while I am working back-to-back weekends, there are others who are given just 1-2 days' billable work per week.
I also don't believe the situation is better anywhere else. I switched jobs a few years ago and found the new job to be even worse, so eventually decided to go back to the previous job.
The other part of my rant is just about the nature of the work itself. I got into engineering in the first place because I like solving challenging, technical problems and finding creative solutions to these. I was probably a little naive about what an engineering career actually involved when I first started out. These days, I would say that easily 80-90% of my time and mental effort is spent on basically everything other than the core 'engineering' part of my job. Endless meetings, business development/writing proposals, reports, managing (very demanding) clients, invoicing/billing, project management, dealing with bureaucracy, ever-changing project requirements, huge coordination effort with other disciplines/consultants/contractors. None of that stuff is really enjoyable or rewarding to me. When the opportunity arises for some interesting technical work to be done, it is often just handed off to more junior staff with lower billing rates.
When I look at the toll this job takes on me, and the amount of effort and time I've invested to get to where I am in my career, and the sheer responsibility involved, the reward just doesn't stack up. E.g., being a tradesperson with a similar amount of experience pays practically the same as an engineer, at least where I live.
I'm sure my situation is not unique. I've seen other similar posts on this forum. Just curious about how people have dealt with this kind of thing in the past.
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