Is engineering boring? 10

[BoredEngineer]

I graduated two years ago with a Mech degree and I found school to be both fun and challenging. I loved it. Since then I’ve held two full time jobs (one with the government and the other a large defense contractor doing CAD) and I’ve found both to be unchallenging and boring - I end up finishing my work after an hour or two, then beg for additional work and ultimately stare at cubicle walls. After a couple of years of this, I’ve become awfully frustrated. I understand that I'm young and I have ALOT to learn, but I've looked around at the senior engineers and their work doesn’t seem all that exciting… Maybe this is engineering?

I would like to get my hands dirty -see what I’m good at and what I suck at. I would like an interesting, challenging and technical engineering job, but I don’t how to go about finding one without job hopping. It seems horribly inefficient for all involved. Any advice on where to go from here? Do I continue taking jobs and hope that one clicks? Go back to school and get into R&D?

 

[GregLocock]

Driving the prototype with my suspension in? Not boring

Fighting a new concept in subframe isolation through, and proving it is works? Not boring.

Delivering an innovative product, on time, with better performance than promised? Not boring.

Being bored at work? Very boring.

Oddly, you are the only person who can decide to be bored.





Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[Lion06]

My job is very exciting and interesting. I'm sure this is partially because I only have 3+ years experience and am still learning a lot. My position also exposes me to such a variation of analysis and design issues that it's difficult to get bored.

There are only really 4 materials - concrete, steel, wood, and masonry (I'm sure I'm leaving something out and someone will point that out), but the manner in which they're used and understanding the behavior NEVER gets boring.

Another way to prevent boredom is to make spreadsheets (complex ones) and make sure they're as idiot proof and fool proof as possible - this will exercise your mental muscles.

 

[rtmote]

I like StructuralEIT's advice very much! This is exactly what I do.

I had a budget of ten months, with another colleague to complete the piperack design on a major project. We completed it in two months and we knew management were not interested in hearing that! So we invented a new project for ourselves in a spreadsheet design. It was great and innovative work.

If you can find a "partner in crime" you'll find even more tremendous opportunity to learn.

Like yourself, I struggled in my first two years after university and found the culture shock of the drawing office too sedentary and boring. I quit and went back to university. When I left and came back into the profession, the jobs were better, more interesting but more so I had more ideas and more confidence.

If you have a hankering to learn more, then learn more now.

Robert Mote

http://www.motagg.com

 

[Waidesworld]

I graduated as an engineer in 1992 and have since held a variety of different engineering jobs, from bill collection (small firm) to project design and management, to sales to Quality Manager and now am a Business Development Manager or GSE as I prefer to call it (Glorified Sales Engineer). During my slow periods I learned and now know tonnes more than I did in college and it's all relevant. So hang in there. If you wanted boring, I am sure you could have become an accountant where you stare at figures (that aren't yours) all day.

drawn to design, designed to draw

 

[Twoballcane]

You are the only one who can choose to be bored in engineering, so decide not too. There are plenty of issues just in Eng_Tips, learn and explore on how to solve them. For MEs there are a host of general, dynamic, and thermal issues. Can you help solve them? Some can be solved by college level analysis.


Tobalcane
"If you avoid failure, you also avoid success."

 

[monkeydog]

I don't think the engineers working Aries think it boring.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/ares1x/status.html

But it all depends on your outlook.
Two designers in the same group were asked what they were working on: The first one said "A bracket to put a p-clamp on"; the second said "The next generation moon rocket".

 

[msquared48]

Personally, Mining or Geotechnical Engineering would be boring.



Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

 

[controlnovice]

Get out of the Government and the private industry that gets projects by government.

Well, getting out of industry that's funded by the gov't is going to be harder to do in the States.

______________________________________________________________________________
This is normally the space where people post something insightful.

 

[rowingengineer]

Don't think I agree with you on this one msquared, did a stint as in a geo firm for about 3 months, some of the best fun i have ever had, mind you i was on drill rig duty. For all those that haven't had the experience, basically "drill rig duty" is you follow a drill rig around the outback recording bore logs. Sounds boring, but the drillers that i met all had great personalities and there was always a good story to be heard between drilling, or a practical joke to be played, normally on the sister drill rig.

Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud. After a while you realize that them like it

 

[ykee]

rowingengineer, sounds like you thought that drilling was anything but boring -- I guess to the rest of us non-drill rig jockeys drilling is boring, ah well its all different terminology at the end of the day!

 

[GregLocock]

Having said that, working on a tube all day doesn't suit everyone, there are certainly engineering jobs that have to be done that would fill me with a desire to get out of Dodge. Which is exactly what I did, twice.

Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[btrueblood]

Snort. Greg, yer killin' me.

Small companies work for me, I like wearing lots of hats and staying busy.

Big companies have their R+D divisions, though, which operate a lot like small companies do. Find out what group does this in your mega-corporation, and ask what you can do to get a job in their group. I whined as a new MS, and eventually got to work on more cutting-edge stuff. But you learn to live and die by the budget axe then, as others have pointed out. Can be scary when the layoffs are imminent.

 

[BigInch]

Boring? You should have been there BI. (before internet).

Start trying to see what you can get away with. Take on all resposibilities you can find. Look for forgivness, rather than permission.

**********************
"Pumping accounts for 20% of the world’s energy used by electric motors and 25-50% of the total electrical energy usage in certain industrial facilities."-DOE statistic (Note: Make that 99% for pipeline companies)

http://virtualpipeline.spaces.live.com/

 

[SomptingGuy]

There was a chap in these fora a while back who came clean about his experiment of doing absolutely nothing, to see how long he could get away with it. Like George Costanza in the Seinfeld sitcom and his under-desk bed.

- Steve

 

[GregLocock]

One trick, which has been alluded to a couple of times, is to take some boring task (say working out the correct way of designing a pair of bearings, to pick one particularly annoying example), and then do it so absolutely and completely that you don't ever need to think about it again. Anyone asks you, give them your procedure. The downside is that you risk becoming the goto guy for tricky problems. Well, that ain't boring.





Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[Crompto29]

Learn Visual Basic with Excel.

In my spare time I improve spreadsheets. Pressure Vessel, ASME, PD5500 etc.

The equivilant software costs £10,000 for a yearly license. If I go contracting I wont have to worry about that license.

Design Spreadsheets to be as perfect as possible and then add any required Visual basic addons to top it off.

 

[Waidesworld]

Greg,

At the risk of being the go to guy there are always these little projects that you have to get around to when times are slower. I spent the time on setting up the drawing templates and working with marketing on the new catalog for the company. Neither required a big rush but when done, they saved a hell of a time. Sometimes accounting would come looking for similar things like designing a new form for whatever and you have two choices...be the go to guy and do it for them or simply point to the software and give them your template to get them gong themselves. I usually do the latter. Then when it's 90% done I will help them tidy it up in my spare time.

drawn to design, designed to draw

 

[plasgears]

From the beginning of my career, I have found ways of codifying my work to facilitate later analysis. New additions to the group picked up on it, and it helped them come up to speed.

Later on I wrote articles for publication, wrote work instructions, and continuously tried to clarify methods of analysis. The boss appreciated this because it allowed less qualified engineering people to perform efficiently.

[I had to slap the hands of salesmen who tried to engineer products, something they were not qualified to do. One salesman had the audacity to sell the most expensive approach to customers until I got that under control.]

Engineering is not boring. In the Army, officers used to say 'when time allows, improve your foxhole.' Keep busy.

 

[mtu1972]

I think it was Nietzsche who said - "That which does not bore me to death, makes me stronger".

GJC

 

[IRstuff]

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/38037.html

TTFN

FAQ731-376