Mentorship: Is it still around? 8

[ash060]

Just wanted to get other engineers' perspectives about the availability and prevalence of mentorship in the engineering profession. I can only speak for myself, but it seems that it is slowly eroding. When I first started engineering, I never really was given an real direction or advice from a senior engineer regrading the practice of engineering. Don't get me wrong I would ask questions and get answers, but it would be from various engineers in the office and it almost always seemed that I was wasting their time for asking the question. I would pick up little pieces of wisdom here and there, but I never had a mentor, a go-to person that would teach me things about the profession. I became more jaded as I got more questionable responses to my queries. For example, one day I asked my supervisor if I should design a basement wall for at-rest or active pressure and his response was "What is at-rest pressure?", after that I limited my questions and started to grow my reference library because I just stopped believing older engineers.

Besides my second job (which only lasted one year, and I learned more in that one year than any other time in my career), I have never had a mentor. From my observations at other offices, it doesn't seem that I am an outlier.

Am I just a special case or is it a real trend? What is everyone else's experience?

 

[CWB1]

I would think (at 36) you would have picked up all you need to know without mentorship (but again: I don't know that much about the automotive biz).

Thats somewhat of a common misconception by other engineers, not really about automotive but about general ME product design as a whole. Within the auto industry for example, many bounce from engines to transmissions to body structures to other fringe areas, which is kinda like bouncing from residential structures to bridges to geotech in the CE world - a bit of a leap at times. Some moves are easy for a decent engineer with common carryover skills, but there's often a ton of tribal knowledge you won't learn without a decent mentor.

As for on-site contractor vs regular employee, I've always been the later but have been very close to going contract on several occasions. I haven't noticed much difference in the way each are treated by the regular employer, probably bc the same employees go back-forth between the two regularly, however IME contract houses tend to hold their employees to pretty strict hours vs having the usual fairly flexible schedule. I dont know what the going pay-rate for contract employees is, only the contracted rates, but I've never had a contract house flinch when I've told them 30% above my current rate and all I've dealt with offered some semblance of basic benefits. Personally, the only reason I havent gone contract is simply bc I prefer stability to cash. One of my siblings has done extremely well in software programming as a contract employee.