Value of Young Engineer 10

[FootNMouth]

All,

Every year I get glowing reviews from my project managers telling me that I am exceeding expectations and ahead of the pack in regards to my peers, however I do not feel that this is being adequately portrayed to my boss whom I have never worked with directly. I am basing this on the fact that I have only received standard raises and bonuses as well as recognition. I believe this is largely due to the fact that we are a large company and for the most part, salary and responsibilities correlate with years of experience until you become a seasoned project manager and can bring in work and profit. My questions is, is this standard procedure for engineering firms or should I begin looking for employment elsewhere, where outstanding performance is valued more from younger engineers?

Background: I am a structural engineer with four years of experience working at a large structural engineering firm in the US. I will be sitting for the PE exam this April. I have aspirations to be a great engineer and business man and would not be opposed to venturing out on my own one day.

Thank you for any tips or advice you can offer.

 

[IRstuff]

Certainly, from a purely mechanistic approach to running a business, getting experienced new hires would seem to be, on the surface, the best thing. But, I would caution that this is akin having an affair with a married person, then marrying that person, and expecting a long marriage. It COULD happen that way, but leopards don't often change their spots, so once flighty is typically always flighty.

Your experienced new hires have already shown little compunction against jumping from one company for another, so why would you expect differently in the future, particularly if they now have to do work whose complexity that might be more appropriate for fresh college grads? I would then argue that the cost of those turnovers will be at least has much as it cost to train a new grad, if not more, since the work abandoned by the experienced engineer is often re-done by whoever takes their place, because not everything was clearly documented, NIH, etc.

TTFN
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[allgoodnamestaken]

I would argue that you are discussing something that is not a phenomenon unique to the engineering field. In past decades people have spent decades or perhaps their whole lives at a single employer, earning a pension.

It isn't people who show companies that they won't stick around, it's that companies have shown people that they regard them as disposable and without value. New engineers jumping jobs is as much a function of the way employers treat people, as it is a function of the way people treat their employers.

Why would I want to work for a company that is not invested in my own development?

 

[MrHershey]

Second what allgoodnamestaken said. Just because someone left a company quickly doesn't mean they're disloyal or always looking for the better offer (not that that's even a bad thing, people should always look out for themselves and their family first). Some are, but many aren't. In jumping from company to company they often are also giving up vesting and other benefits that they would get if they had just stayed put. Not to mention the damaged relationships and reputation. So I would hesitate to just assume it's restlessness or disloyalty driving it. Sometimes the fit's not right, sometimes they didn't get to work on what they thought or were told they'd get to. Sometimes they just work for horrible employers who see them as commodities rather than long-term investments and treat them accordingly. My wife works for a place like that right now. She's very much a 'sit tight' person. Loves her routines and rarely gets bored. But she's had her eye out for better opportunities pretty much since a couple months after starting because the company treats their employees terribly and may even be pushing into stuff that could get them in big trouble with the Department of Labor. I know at least one current employees and one former employee have contacted the DOL on them already. I think those of us who are fortunate enough to work for good (or even just not horrible) employers underestimate the prevalence of awful employers. They're everywhere. And you don't necessarily know until you've started. For fresh grads with no other frame of reference it may even take longer.

 

[moltenmetal]

We make money from day one on our co-op engineering students, not just our fresh grad new hires! If you're not managing to do that, you're doing it wrong, or you're in the wrong business. And they do a hell of a lot more than merely routine stuff, though there is an opportunity for learning to new staff in tasks that mature staff find to be tedious- that's a big help for both young and mature engineers if it's managed correctly.

As to the employer optimization that seems to be going on: employers are most interested in people who are between 5 and 15 years into their careers, seeing that as an optimal productivity per unit salary window. Why would you train someone if you can outsource that training cost on another business?

When your business model is to issue proposals and then hire 80% of the people necessary to do the work immediately after winning it, fresh grads are tough to use to a significant extent. That's a bottom-feeder business model where the "business" cranking out the proposals is really just a general contractor of a sort, subcontracting the real work to a bunch of independent contractors who pretend to be employees for a time. Regrettably, that describes many EPCs and similar engineering consulting firms out there- they are shell corporations with a small core of sometimes world-class staff, and an army of temporary cubicle-stuffers who actually do the work for the most part. I'm not blaming them- they appear to behave this way as a result of what their industry has become as a result of competition.

When these folks can't find experienced people willing to do temporary, insecure assignments for little to nothing more than salary, they scream "shortage". Regrettably, government listens too often to the people who try to treat professionals as "just in time" goods that can be purchased from stock when needed. Even more regrettably, these types of businesses are responsible for breaking the transition between graduation and employment in our profession. What really depresses me is that our learned societies and licensure bodies and advocacy groups aren't seizing on this issue and reinforcing the fact that it is a responsibility of this generation of professionals to train the next- it's not just something that's good to do for business reasons when it's convenient.

 

[spongebob007]

Here is how raises work in most companies: At the beginning of the year your boss is given a department budget for salaries that factor in raises. How much he/she gets for raises will depend on how the company is doing, so your boss only has a finite amount of raise money to go around. The result is that if your boss wants to give you an extra percent, he's going to have to take that 1% away from someone else. So fair or not, you can think of it as you are competing against the others in your department for a raise. Even if you are a star performer, your boss may value another in your department more and give them the bigger raise rather than you. As someone else mentioned, large comapnies typically have systems in place that are used to determine your raise, and as a result, the bulk of employees get an average of 2.5%, the better employees get 3%, and the true stars may get as high as 3.5%. My last employer used a formula to determine your raise. In your perfromance review there were a series of key attributes that you were judged on and ranked 1 through 4, with 1 being the best. Your total score was tallied up, and then there was a chart that listed the percentage raise based on your score. To make it even harder to get a big raise, if you wanted to give an employee 1's across the board, you had to visit the VP of HR and justify your case.