Opininons of engineering status? 11

[sbozy25]

Ok, this has been eating at me for some time now, and has just come to a boil this morning. Unfortunately, ventint to my boss does me no good, so I will vent to all of you and see what you think.

I work in a small engineering/quality office. My boss is a degreed engineer with 30+ years of engineering and quality experience, as such he is a dual duty manager over engineering and quality. I am the only other degreed engineer we have. In the engineering office there is one other guy who has never taken a college course a day in his life, but has been in the department for 11 years now. Then in quality there are 2 people with manufacturing experience but no college experience.

Here is my beef, the guy I work with continually refers him self as an engineer to customers and others we work with. He had his business cards made up to say product engineer III, I believe he did this because mine say product engineer II and he wanted to apear to rank above me. Granted he has 11 years of experience, but I have a very strong 4 year accredited degree, as well as 2 years automotive experience, 1 year pressure vessel design, and now 1.5 years here. I have seen the sallary sheets for our department and I make 20k+ more than him and have better bennifits and vacation. Also, when our boss is out, I am his proxy to step in as department manager.

This morning we had a big confrontation because our boss is gone for a week and he put a sign on his door that manufacturing was to see me if they had any issues. Well this "engineer" blew up at me and got all mad about how he is left out of everything. I politely tried to explain to him that just knowing algebra, and plugging numbers into excel does not make you an engiener, but that just made him mad.

Am I wrong in my view? I mean I view an engineer as someone who has put in the grueling time in university, and has the degree to support it. Quality has the same issue, but only 1 of them refer to them selves as an engineer, the other calls her self a technician. I personally think he should call him self an engineering technician, or perhaps engineering estimator (since that is all he does)

Am I off base?

 

[KENAT]

As I posted in response to Twoballcane 12 Mar 08 15:34 the Chief Stress Engineer at my last place in the UK (Aerospace/Defense) didn't have a degree and wasn't Chartered (PE).

He did have a HNC &/or HND (can't recall which) and had done an apprenticeship but no degree.

He'd started out at Folland (as in the Gnat) as I recall.

KENAT, probably the least qualified checker you'll ever meet...

 

[TenPenny]

HgTX, as others have said, all of your suggestions were required as part of my degree, except geology, but them I'm a Mech. We also were required to take 'Law for Engineers'.

For my 'humanities' courses, I took the logical route - Management/Industrial Relations, and basic Accounting. They seemed to be the most logical additions to an engineering degree.

 

[Lion06]

I think part of the problem is that the term engineer is thrown around so loosely, that many people think anyone can be an "engineer" and, as a result, we lose a bit of status with the general public. As someone pointed out earlier, anyone can get an idea of what to do based on what's been done in the past (and maybe it will work for a while), but that is building, not engineering. You have to know what to check and why, not just throw some sizes at something and think it will work - because it probably will for a while, but probably will not when subjected to forces that it should have been DESIGNED for.

Kenat- I understand that your chief streess engineer was a great engineer without a degree, but I would venture to say that he is the exception, not the rule.

Why is it that anyone can put enginer behind their name? Not anyone can say they are a doctor (in an actual busines setting), or a lawyer.

 

[calguy07]

haha, HgTx, doesn't matter if you took those classes or not, you'll likely forget everything you learned in them by the time you graduate anyway...the only thing that even remotely sticks is the engineering concepts that shows up over and over again in coursework. i too took everything in your list (except speech, which for some reason wasn't required only for me out of every other eng. grad).

i think universities already go way over board with the non-tech. requirements. seems like they just want an extra year of tuition out of you. we've already done the history, foriegn languages,etc. in high school so why the overkill?? if anything, they need to focus more on workplace skills specific to your major. how many threads on these boards talk about dealing with people at work, or bad bosses or cubicle ghosts, or dealing with different personality types or getting along professionally with people you don't like or work environments that are less than satisfactory, etc..universities just don't prepare you for what's out here.

 

[Gymmeh]

calguy,"they need to focus more on workplace skills " maybe that is why they make us take gen-ed classes????
So we learn how to play nice in teams with people not as smart as us, like a pluralism project on the discrimination towards people in fraternity’s and sorority’s that takes three all-night-ers to make a 10 slide .pp presentation.
We can deal with getting told what to do by less qualified superiors, like a professor with a superiority complex that got their PhD in "communicating with your inter-self" which gets offended when you point out a clear mistake which they make.

 

[mechmama]

I also took those classes HgTX recommends, excluding tech writing. We had a Comp 101 requirement, but I took it for college credit in high school. I also took 3 years of college Spanish in high school, so was exempt there. Statistics, C++, Econ (macro or micro), and speech were required. I also took pyschology 101 and biology 101.

To me, this doesn't seem excessive. And contrary to others' opinions, I think your education does stay with you, engineering or not. Perhaps if you snooze through the courses and scrape by on your homework it won't, but I can still write coherently, give a speech, explain why we're screwed with high inflation and low interest rates, statistically analyze data sets, and speak enough Spanish to get un-lost in Mexico. I can't tell you a lot about psych or bio, but I sure understand most medical information I read. I found my bio class to be helpful, too, since I took some biomechanical engineering classes.

I don't see a large amount of value in courses like Human Sexuality or Star Wars as Literature, but some basic gen-ed or humanities courses aren't going to kill us.

 

[IRstuff]

Sure they can:

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People are not stupid, at least not all the time. When they need to know the difference, they do.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[calguy07]

Gymmeh, that's what i was trying to get at and would have explained it a bit better before if i hadn't been rudely interrupted by the work i actually had to get done..lol.

 

[KENAT]

Structural EIT, I always use the stress guy as my example because his job position best showed off his abilities. However I've worked with several others.

My first boss had come from a UK government dockyard and had actually been the head of the apprenticeship training scheme there (I guess like being a senior lecturer at community college or something). He'd also forgotten more about stress analysis and other things than I learnt in uni. He too didn't have a degree and nor was he chartered.

There were several others with similar qualifications etc that In my opinion were more than entitled to use the title engineer.

It may be a cultural thing or something, in UK defence for guys in their 40s or older it really wasn't unusual for Engineers to have come through a formal apprenticeship with HNC/HND (I guess a bit like an associates degree for you unfamiliar with the terms) rather than Uni.

In the US I've only met maybe one guy that didn't have a Bachelors/PE that I would have though could reasonably claim to be an engineer. He would never claim it, he's too modest, but I'd say it wasn't unreasonable barring any legal implications.

KENAT, probably the least qualified checker you'll ever meet...

 

[HgTX]

My point, in part, is that not everyone gets all of that in high school--and most of my list was not on the curriculum of anyone I know from the U.S. (of those I've had this sort of conversation with, of course), except the foreign language part, and even that is not a universal requirement. I'm all for placement tests to get rid of any requirements, whether it's Russion or vector calculus, that the student already has covered.

It's stuff everyone should know, and if you've been through a stats class or an econ class, even if you can't sit down and solve a problem set, you have a basic understanding you wouldn't have had without it. I didn't even get into what engineering classes outside of your particular specialization should still be required (for instance, I had to take a basic circuit theory class, and that was a good thing).

I was listing the minimum non-engineering classes that should be part of an "engineering-only" curriculum. A lot of the people who are products of a nominally engineering-only curriculum chimed in to say they'd had those classes, which is great. I know a lot of engineers who'd prefer a program where it was nothing but math and science and engineering classes, and I just don't think that would be a good idea, even if it might be easier.

Hg

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[SomptingGuy]

Hg,

I wasn't promoting the engineering-only curriculum, just describing it as it is here to try to explain why our engineering degree courses are shorter than some in other countries.

- Steve