Would you do it again?- Hind sight and engineering- 22

[jackboot]

I graduated with a Mechanical Engineering Degree and obtained a PE.

If someone knows the answer to this question please tell me:

Why does it seem that everyone is making the same amount of money whether one is in engineering or in some other profession?

Realize I love my profession, and I love the science behind what I do, and I watch Discovery and NOVA like most people watch a football game. But Engineering was a very hard degree to earn - my friends in other majors did not have to do half of what I did to earn their degree.

I help high school students from time to time and I am asked would you recommend engineering as a degree choice.

My answer: Only as a degree; it will provide the foundation for any other secondary education you can dream of (medicine or law). I can't bring myself to say - go engineering you will never regret it.

I find it discouraging that friends selling cell phones are making way more money than me and don't go to bed at night wondering whether their new design is going to kill or injure someone.

Plus - I was sweating out exams in college weeks in advance while everyone else was partying up to the day before.

Am I the only one with this observation?

jackboot

 

[HgTX]

The question would be what does NASA officially call the folks who design their toys, not how they refer to them informally. Org charts, letterhead, business cards. Not sure if press releases referring to "a NASA engineer" count. I do know that some of them do have PE licenses and that this is valued somewhat, as a friend of mine at NASA is considering getting licensed. They do at least require that the "engineers" come from an accredited engineering program.

TX did just grant an exception to the licensing rule for some kinds of computer engineering, not sure exactly what.

Hg

 

[Tobalcane]

Doesn’t NASA give their engineers the title of scientist? You never here that it was the engineers that got the rovers onto Mars, it was the scientists.

Go Mechanical Engineering
Tobalcane

 

[EddyC]

HgTX brings up a good point about the medical profession, that doctors oversee a variety of subordinates who assist in performing medical procedures.

The difference is that in engineering, non-PE "engineers" are sometimes in supervisory positions over PE engineers. And I'm talking about A/E firms, not just industry. This situation makes engineering very different from medicine. Do you think that any Doctor would let a nurse supervise his/her work?

 

[metengr]

To my esteemed engineering colleagues;
Focus on the task at hand. People worry about how the engineering profession has either dwindled or lacks in status to other professions like doctors or lawyers. Who the heck cares about this type of glamor? I sure don't. It is a waste of precious time to think you can orchestrate a movement to require a PE license for ALL engineers or reduce the number of individuals entering our profession by some other means. Engineering has been around for hundreds of years and will continue to thrive in one form or another.

As my father once told me you work to the best of your ability to provide for yourself and your family. If you are in a profession that you truly enjoy it no longer becomes a job - you make it a life long learning career. A truly rich man is one that enjoys life and learns on a daily basis!

Engineering serves a purpose in our complex society. If you feel that you don't make enough money, then do something about it instead of complaining or bad-mouthing our profession! Change professions! If you perform your work with a passion and become skilled, I still believe one will be recognized professionally and will ultimately become more valuable to any organization.

I also am a licensed PE. I did this because I felt it is an important credential to obtain, and probably increases my employment opportunity, in the event I need to change companies. I don't ever see engineers as approaching the status of doctors or lawyers because these are completely different professions and have different liabilities. I have no complaints about salary as an experienced engineer.

To those engineers like myself that enjoy our profession and get the most out of it on a daily basis - we are indeed the lucky ones!

 

[QCE]

Metengr - You know it!

 

[makeup]

Of cause your right meterngr, all jobs are the same, if you really enjoy it and thats what you want then so be it. The problem is that unless you have incentives you dont encourage the diversity needed to make engineering as a whole work. Unfortunately love of the job is not everyones driver and thats where the industry as a whole is failing. Ok we have a few die-hards out there, I love my job and thats all that matters, and its a good job too. The national health service in the UK is totally reliant on this ethos. But when you start thinking about all the other attributes that are needed to make an industry successful I think that there is a lot to be desired. If you're at the top of the tree then fine but not everyone can be and in general engineering is long hours, poor money, inconsistant and undervalued as a profession. But I dont want to detract to far from you point that enjoyment is worth a lot.

 

[moltenmetal]

Yes, metengr, WE ARE the lucky ones. The lucky ones, note- not the average. It's crazy to extrapolate our success to engineers in general.

Again, I reiterate that I personally am very satisfied with my job and my choice of profession. But I'm NOT satisfied with the chances of recent grads and recent immigrants to my profession in my country to obtain the same level of satisfaction with THEIR choice of career. I also know that I would be more satisfied with my career choice if it paid something more closely approximating the value I provide to my employer and to my society in general. If my compensation slips below the level where it starts affecting my personal dignity, I'll be doing something else for a living in a heartbeat.

Don't let your current job satisfaction blind you to the overall trends in our profession. Too many self-satisfied people sitting on their behinds and doing nothing will ENSURE this profession's ultimate demise. It will shrink from a profession to a commodity before you know it. In fact, in many ways it already has. Too many people willing to work in the consulting industry for (on average) 20% less than the average salary for a professional engineer, and to work huge amounts of uncompensated overtime to boot- that does NOTHING to enhance the lot of the average engineer.

Don't mistake my constructive criticism of the profession for malicious bad-mouthing by a dissatisfied miscreant. If I didn't care about our profession so much, do you think I'd BOTHER with any of this? Of course not- I'd leave and find something else to do for a living. But the first step to dealing with any problem is acknowledging that it exists. If you want to stand there with your hands over your ears, shouting, "Nothing to worry about, I'm fine!", then you're not helping matters either.

 

[metengr]

moltenmetal;
I reviewed your post carefully. First off, let me say that it is very noble to worry about new engineers and others arriving to your country to work as engineers. I would agree with your statement about this, but we can't change how companies view employees - as commodities not as people! Our business society today seems to be driven by greed instead of ethics. Cut as many engineers as we can and those left standing will absorb their work. Over time, the greed side of the pendulum will swing in the other direction. We live in a very dynamic society.

Hmm.. the perception of worth. I don't have an easy answer for that one. Worth is relative, and if you think you are underpaid based on your perceived value to an organization you (we all) have choices - change jobs or make a case that you need more compensation. There are days when I feel, what the hell I just saved the company $$$. However, in the grand scheme of things, I don't have the headaches and worries that the higher ups in our company have to contend with like being passed up for a promotion and can't attend family functions- it boils down to a quality of life issue. I am involved with the technical side of the business versus the management side of the business and there is no issue with competition for jobs. You are in your position because of your technical expertise – plain and simple. You can take all of those high level VP’s, directors and CEO’s and replace any one of them in a heart beat. When a technical recommendation is required like how to choose a particular material or recommend an innovative weld repair the high-ups rely on the engineer.


I don't want to give you the impression that things are rosy for engineers that focus on the tasks at hand. Take each day, one day at a time. I am not worried the least bit about our survival as a profession. I believe the engineering profession will survive over time as it did years before us with new job prospects that will require even more comprehensive analytical skill sets.

 

[moltenmetal]

metengr:

This most recent post of yours puts your views into better perspective. And again, please don't confuse my emphatic, passionate argument on this topic with a disrespect for your point of view. Clearly I understand your love for engineering- I share it. Like any good engineer, I can calculate in dollars and cents exactly what value I bring to my employer- and I demand my fair share of the value I generate through my professional activities. Unfortunately, too much love of what we do can and does tend to bring engineers to put up with bad pay and working conditions, and that's good for NONE of us.

I'm not worried about the future of engineering as a JOB- clearly there will always be a need for that. A need which will increase with increasing use of technology- a need which will grow at somewhat more than the rate of the general economy.

What I'm concerned about is the future of engineering as a senior self-regulated PROFESSION. A calling which offers satisfying, engaging work experiences for its practitioners, and which provides the public with added safety and security because of the ethics and public duty-focus of its practitioners- and one which offers an exclusive scope of practice and adequate levels of compensation to its practitioners in compensation for the difficulty of their education AND for the personal liability, stress and risk brought on by the tasks they perform.

Oversupply due to unregulated immigration and increased university enrollments, globalization of both manufacturing and engineering services, the productivity improvements in engineering created by improvements in communications and computing/software technology, and the ceaseless pressure from business and non-professionial groups bent on taking away what remains of our exclusive areas of practice and while setting barriers against our attempts to expand these into areas of new technology- these are ALL factors which will tend to force the profession of engineering further down the pay and job satisfaction scale in my country. And if people don't acknowledge that the present AND future of engineering as a profession is anything but rosy for a great many of its practitioners, we will NEVER be able to do something about it.

 

[GregLocock]

I am interested that you keep demonizing immigrant engineers. From memory, using your figures, you would still face an excess of new engineers without them.

If you gave me a boatload of motivated capable engineers I would regard that as an opportunity, not a threat.

Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[phex]

I just wanted to put in my two cents. I live and work in Germany, a country nowadays well known for high cost of living and high emplyee on-cost (don't know if this is the right expression... it's the overhead generated by employees in form of medical insurance and so on). First of all, I must say that nonetheless (whereas I am a very new engineer, just two years into working) the salary is ok, even in comparison to others (excluding perhaps the financial businesses). I can not yet evaluate how this will develop, if the rise in salary will compensate the rise in responsibility, but that doesn't really matter. For one thing, I have to concur with many of you that the most important thing is that I enjoy my work very much. But the thing that has me convinced that engineering is THE way to go is the simple fact that I understand nature. When something happens outside, I have the neccessary knowledge to know WHY it happens. In my view, there is nothing more satisfying than this fact and this compensates me for ALL the work and time I had to invest into aquiring my degree.

 

[moltenmetal]

I'm not demonizing anybody! Get that dead straight- I have NOTHING against the immigrants themselves. They're victims in this whole mess, and they're not to blame whatsoever. They're just doing what we're all doing- trying to make a life for themselves and support their families.

All I'm saying is that these poor bastards are coming here by the thousands expecting, based on what they've been told pre-immigration, to earn a reasonable living practicing their profession. Instead, they're ending up driving taxis and cursing their new nation for "keeping them out" of a job. It's a damned shame, and it's irresponsible and unjust to let it continue without providing a reality check to these people BEFORE they choose to come. If they choose to come anyway, in full knowledge that a taxi driving job is what likely awaits them, they're absolutely welcome as far as I'm concerned.

Once immigrants are here, we have a responsibility to treat them fairly, and everything I've seen indicates that the system in my province of Ontario is doing the very best it can. In fact, as imperfect as it is, our licensure system is a model for the other professions to follow. 2/3 of the foreign-trained engineers who apply, get their license and three years of the required 4 year experience based on an interview without writing a single technical exam- compare that to 100% of applicants for most other professions who have to write a technical exam. We offer them provisional licenses until they meet the 1 yr Canadian experience requirement. But they STILL don't get licensed because they can't find a job to get the necessary 12 months of mentored Canadian experience, and that's solely due to massive over-supply. Ten years ago, when the immigration rates were more sensible, this kind of problem was much less prevalent. If we eliminate the 12 month Canadian experience requirement, we might as well just give a license to anyone who asks for it, since it will be basically useless for public protection.

If immigration increased at the same rate that Canadian engineering university enrollments increased, we'd probably still have a small problem with oversupply. But it would be a SMALL problem rather than the gigantic mess we have currently. Immigration rates have increased by a factor of 12 in a decade. It's not the immigrants' fault- they're victims in this mess, as are the recent grads they compete with for jobs. It's Canadian Federal immigration policy that's to blame.

As an employer I might consider a flood of foreign-trained engineers to be an opportunity- but I'm just an employee engineer like the MAJORITY of engineers out there. All a flood of engineers to the marketplace does is push down salary and working condition expectations for everybody, newcomers and residents alike. The local market for engineering services is saturated, so hordes of new engineers would need to drive new export industries to be of any use to the economy. True, some of that is happening and more would be of benefit if we could harness it. But as we all know, competition from off-shore engineering firms from cheaper locales is a growing factor that's not likely to act in the right direction to put these people to work once they're here.

 

[HgTX]

Unrealistic expectations on the part of immigrants is hardly an engineering issue. The US, and probably Canada by association, still has the international image of a land of plenty. Our luxurious lifestyle is on television worldwide, and in places where they've never had television they're even more likely to believe fanciful tales.

I am here in the U.S. today because my stepfather wanted to come to America to pick the gold up off the streets. He fell flat on his face; fortunately for all of us, my mother's an engineer.

Hg

 

[moltenmetal]

Unrealistic expectations which are come by honestly because of wilfull blindness are normal. There's nothing we can do about these except to provide the facts and let people make their own decisions.

Unrealistic expectations ENGENDERED and ENHANCED by liars and ignoramuses who propagate the myth of a general shortage of "skilled professionals" (including engineers!)and portray our profession in particular as some kind of work paradise, are another matter entirely. These people are committing a mass fraud, resulting in significant harm in people's lives, immigrants and recent grads alike. Some of them have been at it for years, and are doing it deliberately for direct or indirect personal gain, while others are doing it out of ignorance of the true situation and a genuine desire to help both their nation AND the immigrants and students themselves.

I know that to some of you, the previous paragraph sounds like hyperbole, but I rather suspect you haven't been, like I have been, in a meeting room with literally HUNDREDS of unemployed, hopeless recent immigrant engineers in a single city, and listened to their sad stories. You haven't been around as 2,500 foreign-trained engineers applied for a (cancelled) program offering 50 people the chance for some work-readiness courses with job placement assistance at the end. You haven't been approached by numerous recent graduates of fine local engineering schools who have gone six months or a year without finding engineering employment and have to take McJobs to start paying back their student loans...

We owe people the FACTS, before they choose to immigrate or enter an engineering program. Beyond that, it's up to them to decide- we've discharged our duty by providing the information.

 

[HgTX]

Which particular liars and ignoramuses (not names, just categories) are you talking about? Not that I'm doubting, I just haven't seen it from where I stand.

Hg

 

[makeup]

I guess I see it most days here in the UK. Lots of promotional activity aimed at schools to encourage young people into engineering. The promote very glamous positions and salary prospects. However reality paints a very very different picture. The Times read just this week, graduates after 5 years service could realise 36% higher remunerations in the public sector. Engineering was the bottom of the pile. So there is a complete mismatch between what is being sold and national figures. I guess it must be the same in the US after all we're not that different.

 

[moltenmetal]

Who are the liars?

Some of them are business lobbyists and business-funded "think tanks" and NGOs of that ilk. They have lots of money, and it talks loudly and often. The same old story, "Shortage of skilled workers!"; "Looming demographic crunch as baby-boomers retire!", "Knowledge Economy is Coming!", "Hydrogen Economy is Coming!", "Biotech Boom is Coming!"...They've been shilling the same "shortage" story for the past twenty years or more, and I've NEVER seen an actual engineering shortage that extended beyond a few narrow areas of practice for at most a year or two.

Some of them are senior partners in engineering consulting firms: you know, consulting, that industry which pays salaries on average 20+% less than what the rest of industry pays engineers. These people are active in the national and provincial engineering societies AND actively lobby the Federal government- and they always know which side their bread is buttered on. Note- some senior engineering firm partners are great people in every sense and truly have the best interests of the engineering profession at heart, but some of them have been converted to "the dark side" and quite frankly have no clue what life is like for their engineering peons any more, nor do they care.

Others are "immigration consultants", those people who profit directly from the high hopes of potential immigrants, so needless to say they paint a very pretty and very inaccurate picture... Many of these operate in the home countries of the prospective immigrants and are hence completely beyond our national control.

Yet more are the management of universities, whose institutions profit directly through increased enrollments. I've NEVER heard a university call for decreased enrollments in ANY program, even when the market is flooded with its previous grads.

Yet others are organizations who profit from the recent immigrants once they're here, by providing them services, re-training etc.

Who are the ignoramuses? These are the ones who are spreading mis-information not out of malice or self-interest, but because they're uninformed.

Principal among these: Citizenship and Immigration Canada staff, who don't know any better and don't care to inform themselves. The preamble to the 2002 Immigrant and Refugee Protection Act spells it out in glorious detail- they've given up even trying to match supply and demand for skills because it's too complex. Instead they award points based on "skills", which they equate with education. So we're short machinists and bricklayers and overloaded with PhDs...Heck, we even deport people who have jobs and are totally satisfied working in the construction trades but who lack a work visa!

Politicians too- all they do is parrot what they've heard in the media and from the business lobby. I watched politicians and business leaders one after another, glad-handing this room full of recent immigrants (80% of whom were unemployed engineers) and telling them how desperately Canada needed their services, and how much money their "unrecognized credentials" were costing our society...

Add to that the recent immigrants themselves, the victims in all of this- and the media who tell their stories. They incorrectly assess their undeserved lot as one of "unrecognized credentials" or of the professional bodies denying them licensure by acting like a "guild", when what's really the problem is simple oversupply- they're being out-competed in an oversupplied market. Immigrants in their position twenty or even ten years ago didn't experience nearly the difficulty in finding work that this new group does, for obvious reasons- engineering immigration rates a decade ago were less than 1/12 what they are today.

 

[chris9]

Would you do it again?

Hell No!

There are three ways of making money in engineering.

1) Start up your own business or be a contractor
2) Sell the product, don’t make it.
3) Get on the board of directors.

You can be an ordinary Doctor, Lawyer, Dentist, Vet etc and make a good living but to make a good living in engineering requires something extraordinary.

 

[KernOily]

Would I do it again?

Hell yes!

I went into engineering because I loved technical things, wanted to know how they worked, wanted to be involved with the process of improvement, and I knew it would make me a decent living. I knew going in that I would not get rich especially since I chose the technical side of the business.

At my engine school (go Sooners!) there were plenty of finance and accounting and business majors who were offered 30-50% higher starting base salaries than me.

Within reason, I think most of the time, one chooses a professional career out of interest and talent. For example I would be miserable sticking people with a needle all day. And no, a quarter-million-dollar salary won't make up for being miserable at work. You may accuse me of altrusim, to which I submit the following. I once heard someone say that we do jobs all day that we hate to enable us to do things we love in our spare time. So I took that to heart and I did that for awhile: I took a different type of position with a company as a staff reliability/maintenance engineer. I was miserable. High pay, 25% more than the job I left, over six figures, but along with that came a lot of unrealistic expecations, a jerkwad boss who had a baaaaad case of vertically-challenged-person's syndrome, an unmotivated support staff, company management who parroted the TPR/TPM gospel but who did nothing on the plant floor to support it, and a plantful of line personnel for whose behavior and output I was responsible but for which I was given neither carrot nor stick. So I left there after 15 months and went back to my small-firm consulting job.

Chris9 - Why did you even go to engine school in the first place? Why not banking, finance, or insurance? How do you define 'good living'? $200k salary? Four jet skis in the garage? An H2 in the driveway? Sure I'd like to have those things; most people would. Am I willing to be miserable in my career to get them? Nope. Everything in life is a trade-off. Your set of trade-offs may be different than mine. At the end of one's life he will look back on a career and decide for himself whether his time spent at the plant/office/bank/insurance company was worthwhile, given all the other variables that go into one's equation of life.

On the title issue - We have always been up against that. Historical tradition is unfortunately against us - witness your typical boiler plant operator being called a "building engineer" and heavy equipment operators called "operating engineer". And we all know about locomotive drivers. And comes now Mickeysoft with their ridiculous title of "certified network engineers", whatever they are. Ugh. Not to disparage any of those occupations, but you get my drift.


Thanks!
Pete

 

[QCE]

Haha

To bad for Chris9 but I'm an unextraordinary engineer making a hell of a good living!

But I'm afraid you would not understand.

Please explain the term "good living" in your terms. I would like to try and understand. I have a funny feeling I won't get it.

I've given up trying to understand moltenmetal - he is a good person trying to fight for our profession, I just can't grasp his idea.

Moltenmetal - I'm afraid we just lost 2 more engineers from our ranks. Two friends of mine that are engineers have just quit - 1 to be a full time mom and one to open a book store. So maybe when you quote your numbers that not all engineers work in their profession and you link it to a lack of jobs. Maybe the numbers will be skewed??????? Just because there are X amount of engineers graduating each year doesn't mean that there needs to be X amount of jobs. Some people have other plans in life.

QCE