I have junior engineers working under me and I am also responsible for mentoring our summer interns. While I am sure my employer expects me to tow the company line, off the record I am very honest with my advice for the junior guys, and one thing I stress is to consider not spending too much time at your first job right out of school. How can you figure out what you like and what you really want to do if you don’t actually go and do it? I also feel that the best way to get a promotion, additional responsibilities, and most importantly, more money, is by changing jobs. It is very easy to get pigeonholed. If you were the summer intern and you have been hired now that you have your degree, guess what? Most of the folks in the office are still going to think of you as the summer intern. I once worked with a guy who was a lab tech that got his engineering degree at night school. Guess what? Even though he had his degree he was still treated like he was just a lab tech. He had to leave the company after being there for 15 years in order to get to do real engineering work.
I will also second what was mentioned about attitude earlier. I make no bones about the fact that the tasks I assign to the new guys are crap work that I don’t want to do, but that somebody has to do them. I tell them to think of these assignments as a test, and they are being “graded” on their ability to get the tasks done correctly, with minimal guidance, on time, and all the while having a good attitude. I remind them that successful completion of this “test” will lead to them being assigned bigger, more interesting tasks, and that eventually they can be responsible for entire projects. We had one kid right out of school that had an attitude problem. He thought the work I was assigning him was beneath him, and while he never came right out and said it, it was plainly obvious in his behavior. He really screwed himself because since he thought these menial tasks were beneath him and he never really put in the effort to learn to do them correctly. So not only did his attitude stink, but most of the tasks he was assigned were done wrong. He is no longer with us, and frankly I was glad to see him shown the door.
I will add a final bit of advice: Before deciding if you want to try and get more responsibility and interesting work at your current employer, or find a new job, you need to take a long hard look at the structure of your existing company. Is there a career path at your current employer? Does advancement depend on somebody else leaving or retiring? Keep in mind that if you work for a very small firm, this might be it. Ten years from now you will still be doing the same tasks you are doing today and your only chance to move up is if someone above you leaves and you can fill their position. This was the negative side I saw to the only small company I worked for. There was really no interesting work going on and little room for advancement. So I left, which gets me back to what I said in the first paragraph about trying different things. My first job out of school was for a large defense contractor. I didn’t like being just a number. My next job was the total opposite, I was one of only five engineers in the entire company and I saw no future, so next move was to more of a medium sized company that had an engineering department of about 50 people. This is where I found that I enjoy a medium sized company because they tend to have the career opportunities of a big organization, but they are small enough that you can be more than just a number.
