I’ve been a member of the forum for a while but have not gotten around to contributing much so far. I’ve recently finished a stint at a company as an electrical engineer. Although many things here may have been mentioned elsewhere on the forum, the purpose of this datasheet is to provide yet another datapoint for those interested in the field. Due to length I’ve decided to start a thread as opposed to posting in the Engineering thread. I’ll describe if engineering is for you, and summarize school and work, and relay some of my experiences.
Is Engineering for you?
I honestly didn’t know what to expect going into an engineering career. Was I going to work at a desk, in a lab, in the field…? The answer is you will most likely be working at a desk. As to whether or not it’s a typical 8-5 depends. Most engineering jobs, most of the time, are a typical 8-5 (9-5’s don’t exist anymore). However, the overall trend is longer hours (more ‘overtime’) and even irregular hours such as working nights. I will go into more detail in the work section.
It used to be common for relatively older people (over 30) to enter into the field. These may have been people who worked hands-on in their particular field (i.e. electrician seeking electrical engineering, mechanic/assembly worker seeking mechanical engineering, construction worker seeking civil engineering, etc.), people from the military who did similar work, or others. Personally, I have found these types of people to be among the best engineers. Unfortunately, within the past decade or so, this is not true anymore. If you are over 30 and especially over 40, you will have a hard time entering into the field even with practical experience. It’s not impossible by any means, as I’ve seen people successfully do it, but it’s definitely getting harder to do. Additionally the trends that I’m seeing make it seem like it will only get worse. Your best bet is going to college right after high school, studying engineering and graduating as soon as you can, then getting a job right out of school.
As many people say, if you like to solve problems then engineering is for you. Although it’s true that engineering is heavy on math, this really only applies during school. If you can tough it out for a few years you’ll be fine, because you sure as shit won’t be using advanced math at your job.
School
First off consider what specific engineering discipline you want to enter into. The big five are electrical, aerospace, computer science, mechanical, and civil. There is also industrial and petroleum. There are probably several others that I can’t think of off the top of my head. Below is a brief summary of where each of these disciplines stands today:
•Computer Science Engineering (CSE): Probably the most in-demand of the rest by far. Pretty much every decent sized company has an IT department, and this degree gets you that kind of job. If you go to a good school and get a good GPA (3.8+) you could even land a job at a Facebook or Google. In general, expect to be at a computer coding all day. This is also a degree where you can expect to be doing what you actually learned at school on the job – coding in various languages.
•Electrical Engineering (EE): I would say this comes as a close second to CSE now. Not too long ago I would say this was at the top in terms of demand, but now I am seeing many with an EE degree performing CSE jobs. In general, there is a lot of ‘cross-pollination’ between EE and CSE (EE’s working CSE jobs and vice versa). This is also the field I am most familiar with. In school expect to learn complex math (cal 1-3, diff eq, trig, transforms, etc) and complex circuit analysis. On the job, expect to use none of this. At all. Instead, you will likely either be coding, integrating (read: putting together) electrical systems, on Excel all day, or if you do well in school, designing PCBs/circuit analysis or something else somewhat similar to what you learned in school.
•Aerospace Engineering (AE): In general, don’t expect to get a job doing what you learned in school unless you go to MIT and get a 4.0. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but gets the point across. In AE you are learning how to design airplanes. A lot of people think airplanes are cool. The result is far more people entering the field than needed. Today, after decades of merges between companies and overall cost increases, there just aren’t that many airplanes to design anymore. If you do land a job with this degree, expect to be doing mechanical engineering work. Similar to EE and CSE, there is a lot of cross-pollination between AE and ME (mechanical engineering).
•Mechanical Engineering (ME): If EE seems a bit intimidating due to the higher math and abstraction, but you still want to get into engineering and you want it to make sense, go for ME. This is a solid degree that has high prospects of landing you a job, though not quite as good as EE or CSE I would say. In school expect to learn advanced math, thermodynamics, physics, control systems, and other crap dealing with forces, temperatures, and pressures in mechanical systems. Also expect significantly more white people in your classes (a tell-tale sign that there’s less abstract math and more intuitive concepts, versus EE which is mostly East and Central Asians). On the job expect to play with CAD all day.
•Civil Engineering (CE): This is the discipline that I am least familiar with. Job prospects will either be on par or just slightly below ME. In school expect to learn advanced math and a lot of structures/trusses/forces stuff. Not sure what the work entails but I would suspect plenty of CAD, perhaps other forum members in the field can expand on this.
•Petroleum Engineering (PE): Not too familiar with coursework, but due to the downturn in the US oil market this isn’t as hot of a field as it was 5 years ago. Entry level jobs still pay well, but they’re harder to come by. Working in refining is your safest bet (vs. exploration) since it is much more stable.
Make sure the school is ABET accredited (which most public universities are). Try to schedule things so that you can finish the degree in 5 years max. Finishing in 4 looks really good, but it’s tough. School choice is not critical like in other fields (i.e. business or law) but going to a good school certainly has its benefits and can raise you to another tier in terms of jobs. However, if finances are any obstacle – in other words if you’re normal like me, where you or your parents can’t afford a private school, or you weren’t able to get significant scholarships – do not go into debt thinking that going to a ‘good’ school will outweigh the debt. If you’re average in terms of finances, try to live at home (if you’re younger and still with parents) and go to a local university which is what I did. If there is no local university where you’re at, go to one that’s in-state. If you’re able to graduate with little to no debt you will come out way ahead.
There are some people who try to work full-time or significant part-time jobs while studying engineering. Most of these people either do not finish or take longer than 5 years. Your best bet is taking the summers off and working as much as you can and saving up (what I did). During the school year take a good-sized class load and put all your focus into school. If you want to finish in 4 years, every semester will be between 16-19 credit hours. Again, tough, but doable.
The first two years consist of basic ‘core’ classes. This will normally be physics 1-2, calculus 1-3, introductory engineering courses, and others like chemistry. If you want to save money and make it easier on yourself, take these classes at a local community college but be careful! Do research and cross-check with advisors at both the university you plan to transfer to, and the community college you’ll be taking these classes at, and make sure the classes you plan to take will transfer. Just like anywhere else, there are advisors that have no idea what they’re doing. The last thing you want to do is pay for and take classes that would have never transferred. The best thing to do is ask people who have successfully done it. If you do take core classes at the university as opposed to a community college expect to pay more and for them to be significantly more difficult. These classes essentially serve as weed-out classes with 40-50% pass rates.
What follows are some basic things you can do to ensure you can get through and pass your classes. If one thing is true about universities, it’s that professors are typically lazy and don’t care for teaching (they usually just care about their research). Use this to your advantage. This means that you can bet that the homework and tests are identical to last semester’s, last year’s, and possibly the last 10 years’! Make friends with people who have taken these classes recently, and get homework and test answers from them. Most will be happy to give you these as it’s how they got through the classes themselves. If this is not possible for whatever reason (maybe this professor actually does change things every year) don’t fret. Most homeworks and even tests are based off of the class book. As a result, scour the web or use torrents to try and download the solution manual for the course book, or find someone who has.
As a final note on school, I will discuss GPA. Basically if you get below a 2.5, you will have a very difficult if not impossible time getting an entry level job. 2.5-3.0 will be enough to get you a job with less demanding requirements or uninteresting work. 3.0-3.5 or so will get you an average entry level job at a decent company. 3.5+ and especially 3.8+ will get you more interesting jobs within decent companies, and if you get a 3.8+ at a good school you will be looking at top tier engineering jobs (i.e. Facebook, Google).
Work
It used to be that internships weren’t that big of a deal. However, I am seeing a trend of internships becoming more important. I myself never held an engineering internship, and I still see people who never held internships getting jobs. Basically, companies are growing their internship programs considerably and giving high preference to hiring people who interned with them. Although there is a popular notion that interns are treated like shit and have to be coffee runners, this doesn’t apply to engineering. For one, people with engineering degrees are relatively less common than those with say, art or business degrees. Additionally, many places that employ engineers are located in shitty parts of the country (i.e. small towns in the middle of nowhere). If this is the case, expect to be treated like royalty, since these companies have a harder time getting people to move to their location, much less stay with them past 2 or 3 years. Target these companies for internships, especially those with large internship programs, as they will have lots of hot girls and provide plenty of opportunities for you to interact with the other interns outside of work (i.e. group activities). At work you will also be treated well and given cool shit to do so you’re more likely to come back. As long as you’re not blind, you will understand that this will all end once you’re officially hired, since the engineers around you might be working 12+ hour days and weekends doing mind-numbing shit. Moral of the story – if you’re slaying in college, getting an internship with a decent sized company that’s located in the middle of nowhere will still provide opportunities to slay some more….but don’t accept the job offer unless you have no other options!
Upon graduating, you realistically have 1 year max to land a decent job. Most companies will not hire you if it’s been a considerable amount of time since graduating. Additionally, it used to be that 5-10 years’ experience was a requirement that made up the bulk of requisitions for companies. Those straight out of college or with very high experience were not quite as much in demand. Nowadays however there is a strong increasing preference for those straight out of college. Those with very high experience are only on an as-need basis, and hiring those with 5-10 years’ experience is becoming less common. Why? Hiring fresh meat out of college is much cheaper for one. Also, kids straight out of college typically don’t have families and are far more willing to work the long hours that may (read: will) be demanded of them since most don’t have much to do outside of work, especially after relocating. You may wonder if quality of products is sacrificed by hiring so many kids with no experience, and you’re right (i.e. Samsung’s phones exploding in your hands, Space X’s rockets exploding in mid-air, and many more). The higher ups don’t care though, since it’s ‘good enough’ for the time being and all they’re worried about is satisfying the stock holders for the next quarter so they can make the jump elsewhere or retire.
In general, the type of work you do in any engineering field can be subdivided into new product development or sustaining. As the name implies, new product development consists of developing new products, while sustaining consists of providing engineering support for existing products. Working for Chevrolet you’ll either be developing new cars or supporting existing ones. At Gulfstream it’ll be airplanes. You get the idea. Sustaining is generally pretty chill with normal working hours except for when the occasional fire pops up. New product development can be a different story depending on the complexity of the product. You can bet that engineers at Apple, Gulfstream, or Space X work 10-12 hour days and weekends consistently for long periods of time even. These spikes in overtime ebb and flow with product cycles. However, you may unfortunately find yourself in what I call ‘perpetual overtime’ where it lasts far longer than it needs to (over a year). The reasons for this are largely company politics. Basically, the bean counters think that if people are pressured to spend more time at work, more shit will get done faster. The result is many times occupying a cubicle when you don’t have to. Also never underestimate peer pressure – if you appear to work less time than others expect to be given shit for not ‘putting in the hours’ even if you get stuff done. Moral of the story – find ways to work on your own stuff (like that upcoming best-selling e-book) when you don’t have stuff to do but have to be at work! Also keep in mind that most places do not pay for overtime.
In terms of advancement in engineering there are generally two paths: the management path and the engineering specialist path. If you want your career to be in engineering, the only practical choice is the management path. It’s hella stressful but your job security and salary increases exponentially. At most companies nowadays the engineering specialist has lost a lot of respect and is treated as disposable, although relatively less disposable compared to that of less senior engineers. Salary is also fairly poor when compared to managers in the same field or other specialties in different fields. Moral of the story: if you want to go into engineering and stick with it, expect to go into management eventually.
Layoffs are also becoming more commonplace at companies as they attempt to run ‘lean and mean.’ What this translates to is that the bean counters see if you can pull off a project with a certain number of people. Then for the next project they see if they can do it with less people. They keep doing this until a breaking point is reached (another reason why so much shit’s exploding). Another common practice at many companies is to do an annual cut of about 10% of the employees. This practice has been termed ‘rank ‘em and yank ‘em’ or ‘stack ‘em and whack ‘em’ among other things. Basically people get graded annually compared to their peers, and whoever falls into the bottom 10% gets laid off. They do this instead of firing since it is actually quite difficult to legally fire someone. Falling into this bottom 10% is not always cut-and-dry. With companies getting so lean nowadays, you can easily find yourself working with a competitive group of people, at which point politics will be the deciding factor of who gets laid off that year – for those who don’t know, politics is just a term describing who likes or dislikes who.
My Experience
In closing, I’ll describe a little bit of my personal experiences at the company I was at. Basically right after school I started at a company that’s heavy into new product development working as an electrical engineer. The first couple years weren’t too bad, but the last couple years were pretty hectic to put it mildly. For the first couple years I mainly kept my head down and worked on low priority projects. Life was pretty chill and I had a good work-life balance. The last couple years I decided to stick my neck out and pursue a transfer to a highly desirable position within the company. Due to the desirable nature of this position and my competitive qualifications, this triggered a few crabs in the bucket so to speak. As many on the forum will know, there is a very dirty political aspect in any corporation, and this is no different in engineering than in any other field (don’t think you’ll be dealing with a bunch of innocent unsocial nerds). The method by which crabs will drag you down include gossip, rumor spreading, and even shit talking about you to the hiring manager the morning of your interview. That crashed and burned as a result, but it was an excellent life lesson. Moral of the story: keep your motives/goals hidden and be very careful of who and how you associate with others. Additionally, be very wary of low-T betas in the corporate environment. Sure, they’re of no competition when it comes to gaming women at the bar, but they can be very dangerous in the corporate environment and even ruin your career since they are more prone to attack you in a way that women would.
The last couple years at that company also consisted of me working on high priority new product development. This resulted in challenging work and lots of overtime which included mostly 60 hour weeks minimum, weekends, and even working nights for certain periods of time in order to provide 24/7 engineering coverage at peak times in the program. Deadlines set by management were completely unrealistic and never met, but still pushed nonetheless. This is another reason why you see many products from ‘cutting edge’ companies today that are shitty or even outright ‘exploding’….unrealistic deadlines are set, employees are worked to the limit under threat of losing their job, and in many cases they’re completely inexperienced and doing what they’re doing for the first time. In fact, if you look at job requirements for positions at these places you will see that they are now flat out listing ’50 hour work weeks minimum expected’ or ‘Must be available to work extended hours and weekends as needed.’ This isn’t some decorative just-in-case statement, this is basically an indication that work will be your life. Also as I mentioned above, you will often be doing things you’ve never done before. Training and mentorships are a thing of the past, so don’t expect any. Also if you make mistakes, people will remember and hold it against you no matter what they say, but they will never tell you. I think this mostly has to do with WASP culture which dominates corporate culture, which is highly conflict-avoidant. So if the relationship with your boss is pretty typical (i.e. you don’t have beers with him once a week or know his family), and he’s a WASP, if he comes over to you to talk about your work, no matter how nice and casual he is, it probably means you’ve fucked up something pretty bad!
The demographics of the group I worked with for the last couple years at the company was also significantly younger on average, and what that means is you’re going back to high school. For the first couple years I worked with a lot more older people, or people who had families. These types of people have other things to worry about and don’t have time for drama – they show up to work, maybe bullshit about politics a little bit around election time, and are mostly great to work with. Younger people are full of drama, gossip, and other useless bullshit. Women will worsen this exponentially as many here will know. Funny story: an ugly younger chick was part of our group, and even though she was engaged she flirted with me and mistook my friendliness for interest. I eventually turned her down and started keeping a distance from her. Months later I found out that a rumor was circulating in the group that I was the one that pursued her even though she was engaged. Moral of the story: engineers aren’t necessarily a bunch of social dorks that are drama-free, so if your team consists of younger members (and especially women), be prepared.
I eventually got laid off in what was one of several waves that year. I recall reading a thread on this forum that said to wait for your company to let you go and don’t quit on your own. I went by this advice (since I wanted to get the hell out, but I waited) and I will reinforce that here on this thread. This doesn’t mean smack a girl’s ass so you get fired. This means just be patient and hold on a little longer. When companies lay you off, they will typically give you a severance package which includes a lump some of money, and usually it’s pretty decent. Additionally, you are eligible for unemployment, and if you were making an average starting engineer salary of $50k or more, you’re looking at checks of over $400 a week from Uncle Sam, which isn’t too shabby.
So what’s the takeaway from all this? Engineering is a solid go-to degree to get in college that will land you a decent $50k ish salary job starting out. As long as the school is ABET accredited you’re good to go. The job you get with that degree is a typical cubicle drone job, which comes with all the usual downsides of the corporate environment.
Is Engineering for you?
I honestly didn’t know what to expect going into an engineering career. Was I going to work at a desk, in a lab, in the field…? The answer is you will most likely be working at a desk. As to whether or not it’s a typical 8-5 depends. Most engineering jobs, most of the time, are a typical 8-5 (9-5’s don’t exist anymore). However, the overall trend is longer hours (more ‘overtime’) and even irregular hours such as working nights. I will go into more detail in the work section.
It used to be common for relatively older people (over 30) to enter into the field. These may have been people who worked hands-on in their particular field (i.e. electrician seeking electrical engineering, mechanic/assembly worker seeking mechanical engineering, construction worker seeking civil engineering, etc.), people from the military who did similar work, or others. Personally, I have found these types of people to be among the best engineers. Unfortunately, within the past decade or so, this is not true anymore. If you are over 30 and especially over 40, you will have a hard time entering into the field even with practical experience. It’s not impossible by any means, as I’ve seen people successfully do it, but it’s definitely getting harder to do. Additionally the trends that I’m seeing make it seem like it will only get worse. Your best bet is going to college right after high school, studying engineering and graduating as soon as you can, then getting a job right out of school.
As many people say, if you like to solve problems then engineering is for you. Although it’s true that engineering is heavy on math, this really only applies during school. If you can tough it out for a few years you’ll be fine, because you sure as shit won’t be using advanced math at your job.
School
First off consider what specific engineering discipline you want to enter into. The big five are electrical, aerospace, computer science, mechanical, and civil. There is also industrial and petroleum. There are probably several others that I can’t think of off the top of my head. Below is a brief summary of where each of these disciplines stands today:
•Computer Science Engineering (CSE): Probably the most in-demand of the rest by far. Pretty much every decent sized company has an IT department, and this degree gets you that kind of job. If you go to a good school and get a good GPA (3.8+) you could even land a job at a Facebook or Google. In general, expect to be at a computer coding all day. This is also a degree where you can expect to be doing what you actually learned at school on the job – coding in various languages.
•Electrical Engineering (EE): I would say this comes as a close second to CSE now. Not too long ago I would say this was at the top in terms of demand, but now I am seeing many with an EE degree performing CSE jobs. In general, there is a lot of ‘cross-pollination’ between EE and CSE (EE’s working CSE jobs and vice versa). This is also the field I am most familiar with. In school expect to learn complex math (cal 1-3, diff eq, trig, transforms, etc) and complex circuit analysis. On the job, expect to use none of this. At all. Instead, you will likely either be coding, integrating (read: putting together) electrical systems, on Excel all day, or if you do well in school, designing PCBs/circuit analysis or something else somewhat similar to what you learned in school.
•Aerospace Engineering (AE): In general, don’t expect to get a job doing what you learned in school unless you go to MIT and get a 4.0. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but gets the point across. In AE you are learning how to design airplanes. A lot of people think airplanes are cool. The result is far more people entering the field than needed. Today, after decades of merges between companies and overall cost increases, there just aren’t that many airplanes to design anymore. If you do land a job with this degree, expect to be doing mechanical engineering work. Similar to EE and CSE, there is a lot of cross-pollination between AE and ME (mechanical engineering).
•Mechanical Engineering (ME): If EE seems a bit intimidating due to the higher math and abstraction, but you still want to get into engineering and you want it to make sense, go for ME. This is a solid degree that has high prospects of landing you a job, though not quite as good as EE or CSE I would say. In school expect to learn advanced math, thermodynamics, physics, control systems, and other crap dealing with forces, temperatures, and pressures in mechanical systems. Also expect significantly more white people in your classes (a tell-tale sign that there’s less abstract math and more intuitive concepts, versus EE which is mostly East and Central Asians). On the job expect to play with CAD all day.
•Civil Engineering (CE): This is the discipline that I am least familiar with. Job prospects will either be on par or just slightly below ME. In school expect to learn advanced math and a lot of structures/trusses/forces stuff. Not sure what the work entails but I would suspect plenty of CAD, perhaps other forum members in the field can expand on this.
•Petroleum Engineering (PE): Not too familiar with coursework, but due to the downturn in the US oil market this isn’t as hot of a field as it was 5 years ago. Entry level jobs still pay well, but they’re harder to come by. Working in refining is your safest bet (vs. exploration) since it is much more stable.
Make sure the school is ABET accredited (which most public universities are). Try to schedule things so that you can finish the degree in 5 years max. Finishing in 4 looks really good, but it’s tough. School choice is not critical like in other fields (i.e. business or law) but going to a good school certainly has its benefits and can raise you to another tier in terms of jobs. However, if finances are any obstacle – in other words if you’re normal like me, where you or your parents can’t afford a private school, or you weren’t able to get significant scholarships – do not go into debt thinking that going to a ‘good’ school will outweigh the debt. If you’re average in terms of finances, try to live at home (if you’re younger and still with parents) and go to a local university which is what I did. If there is no local university where you’re at, go to one that’s in-state. If you’re able to graduate with little to no debt you will come out way ahead.
There are some people who try to work full-time or significant part-time jobs while studying engineering. Most of these people either do not finish or take longer than 5 years. Your best bet is taking the summers off and working as much as you can and saving up (what I did). During the school year take a good-sized class load and put all your focus into school. If you want to finish in 4 years, every semester will be between 16-19 credit hours. Again, tough, but doable.
The first two years consist of basic ‘core’ classes. This will normally be physics 1-2, calculus 1-3, introductory engineering courses, and others like chemistry. If you want to save money and make it easier on yourself, take these classes at a local community college but be careful! Do research and cross-check with advisors at both the university you plan to transfer to, and the community college you’ll be taking these classes at, and make sure the classes you plan to take will transfer. Just like anywhere else, there are advisors that have no idea what they’re doing. The last thing you want to do is pay for and take classes that would have never transferred. The best thing to do is ask people who have successfully done it. If you do take core classes at the university as opposed to a community college expect to pay more and for them to be significantly more difficult. These classes essentially serve as weed-out classes with 40-50% pass rates.
What follows are some basic things you can do to ensure you can get through and pass your classes. If one thing is true about universities, it’s that professors are typically lazy and don’t care for teaching (they usually just care about their research). Use this to your advantage. This means that you can bet that the homework and tests are identical to last semester’s, last year’s, and possibly the last 10 years’! Make friends with people who have taken these classes recently, and get homework and test answers from them. Most will be happy to give you these as it’s how they got through the classes themselves. If this is not possible for whatever reason (maybe this professor actually does change things every year) don’t fret. Most homeworks and even tests are based off of the class book. As a result, scour the web or use torrents to try and download the solution manual for the course book, or find someone who has.
As a final note on school, I will discuss GPA. Basically if you get below a 2.5, you will have a very difficult if not impossible time getting an entry level job. 2.5-3.0 will be enough to get you a job with less demanding requirements or uninteresting work. 3.0-3.5 or so will get you an average entry level job at a decent company. 3.5+ and especially 3.8+ will get you more interesting jobs within decent companies, and if you get a 3.8+ at a good school you will be looking at top tier engineering jobs (i.e. Facebook, Google).
Work
It used to be that internships weren’t that big of a deal. However, I am seeing a trend of internships becoming more important. I myself never held an engineering internship, and I still see people who never held internships getting jobs. Basically, companies are growing their internship programs considerably and giving high preference to hiring people who interned with them. Although there is a popular notion that interns are treated like shit and have to be coffee runners, this doesn’t apply to engineering. For one, people with engineering degrees are relatively less common than those with say, art or business degrees. Additionally, many places that employ engineers are located in shitty parts of the country (i.e. small towns in the middle of nowhere). If this is the case, expect to be treated like royalty, since these companies have a harder time getting people to move to their location, much less stay with them past 2 or 3 years. Target these companies for internships, especially those with large internship programs, as they will have lots of hot girls and provide plenty of opportunities for you to interact with the other interns outside of work (i.e. group activities). At work you will also be treated well and given cool shit to do so you’re more likely to come back. As long as you’re not blind, you will understand that this will all end once you’re officially hired, since the engineers around you might be working 12+ hour days and weekends doing mind-numbing shit. Moral of the story – if you’re slaying in college, getting an internship with a decent sized company that’s located in the middle of nowhere will still provide opportunities to slay some more….but don’t accept the job offer unless you have no other options!
Upon graduating, you realistically have 1 year max to land a decent job. Most companies will not hire you if it’s been a considerable amount of time since graduating. Additionally, it used to be that 5-10 years’ experience was a requirement that made up the bulk of requisitions for companies. Those straight out of college or with very high experience were not quite as much in demand. Nowadays however there is a strong increasing preference for those straight out of college. Those with very high experience are only on an as-need basis, and hiring those with 5-10 years’ experience is becoming less common. Why? Hiring fresh meat out of college is much cheaper for one. Also, kids straight out of college typically don’t have families and are far more willing to work the long hours that may (read: will) be demanded of them since most don’t have much to do outside of work, especially after relocating. You may wonder if quality of products is sacrificed by hiring so many kids with no experience, and you’re right (i.e. Samsung’s phones exploding in your hands, Space X’s rockets exploding in mid-air, and many more). The higher ups don’t care though, since it’s ‘good enough’ for the time being and all they’re worried about is satisfying the stock holders for the next quarter so they can make the jump elsewhere or retire.
In general, the type of work you do in any engineering field can be subdivided into new product development or sustaining. As the name implies, new product development consists of developing new products, while sustaining consists of providing engineering support for existing products. Working for Chevrolet you’ll either be developing new cars or supporting existing ones. At Gulfstream it’ll be airplanes. You get the idea. Sustaining is generally pretty chill with normal working hours except for when the occasional fire pops up. New product development can be a different story depending on the complexity of the product. You can bet that engineers at Apple, Gulfstream, or Space X work 10-12 hour days and weekends consistently for long periods of time even. These spikes in overtime ebb and flow with product cycles. However, you may unfortunately find yourself in what I call ‘perpetual overtime’ where it lasts far longer than it needs to (over a year). The reasons for this are largely company politics. Basically, the bean counters think that if people are pressured to spend more time at work, more shit will get done faster. The result is many times occupying a cubicle when you don’t have to. Also never underestimate peer pressure – if you appear to work less time than others expect to be given shit for not ‘putting in the hours’ even if you get stuff done. Moral of the story – find ways to work on your own stuff (like that upcoming best-selling e-book) when you don’t have stuff to do but have to be at work! Also keep in mind that most places do not pay for overtime.
In terms of advancement in engineering there are generally two paths: the management path and the engineering specialist path. If you want your career to be in engineering, the only practical choice is the management path. It’s hella stressful but your job security and salary increases exponentially. At most companies nowadays the engineering specialist has lost a lot of respect and is treated as disposable, although relatively less disposable compared to that of less senior engineers. Salary is also fairly poor when compared to managers in the same field or other specialties in different fields. Moral of the story: if you want to go into engineering and stick with it, expect to go into management eventually.
Layoffs are also becoming more commonplace at companies as they attempt to run ‘lean and mean.’ What this translates to is that the bean counters see if you can pull off a project with a certain number of people. Then for the next project they see if they can do it with less people. They keep doing this until a breaking point is reached (another reason why so much shit’s exploding). Another common practice at many companies is to do an annual cut of about 10% of the employees. This practice has been termed ‘rank ‘em and yank ‘em’ or ‘stack ‘em and whack ‘em’ among other things. Basically people get graded annually compared to their peers, and whoever falls into the bottom 10% gets laid off. They do this instead of firing since it is actually quite difficult to legally fire someone. Falling into this bottom 10% is not always cut-and-dry. With companies getting so lean nowadays, you can easily find yourself working with a competitive group of people, at which point politics will be the deciding factor of who gets laid off that year – for those who don’t know, politics is just a term describing who likes or dislikes who.
My Experience
In closing, I’ll describe a little bit of my personal experiences at the company I was at. Basically right after school I started at a company that’s heavy into new product development working as an electrical engineer. The first couple years weren’t too bad, but the last couple years were pretty hectic to put it mildly. For the first couple years I mainly kept my head down and worked on low priority projects. Life was pretty chill and I had a good work-life balance. The last couple years I decided to stick my neck out and pursue a transfer to a highly desirable position within the company. Due to the desirable nature of this position and my competitive qualifications, this triggered a few crabs in the bucket so to speak. As many on the forum will know, there is a very dirty political aspect in any corporation, and this is no different in engineering than in any other field (don’t think you’ll be dealing with a bunch of innocent unsocial nerds). The method by which crabs will drag you down include gossip, rumor spreading, and even shit talking about you to the hiring manager the morning of your interview. That crashed and burned as a result, but it was an excellent life lesson. Moral of the story: keep your motives/goals hidden and be very careful of who and how you associate with others. Additionally, be very wary of low-T betas in the corporate environment. Sure, they’re of no competition when it comes to gaming women at the bar, but they can be very dangerous in the corporate environment and even ruin your career since they are more prone to attack you in a way that women would.
The last couple years at that company also consisted of me working on high priority new product development. This resulted in challenging work and lots of overtime which included mostly 60 hour weeks minimum, weekends, and even working nights for certain periods of time in order to provide 24/7 engineering coverage at peak times in the program. Deadlines set by management were completely unrealistic and never met, but still pushed nonetheless. This is another reason why you see many products from ‘cutting edge’ companies today that are shitty or even outright ‘exploding’….unrealistic deadlines are set, employees are worked to the limit under threat of losing their job, and in many cases they’re completely inexperienced and doing what they’re doing for the first time. In fact, if you look at job requirements for positions at these places you will see that they are now flat out listing ’50 hour work weeks minimum expected’ or ‘Must be available to work extended hours and weekends as needed.’ This isn’t some decorative just-in-case statement, this is basically an indication that work will be your life. Also as I mentioned above, you will often be doing things you’ve never done before. Training and mentorships are a thing of the past, so don’t expect any. Also if you make mistakes, people will remember and hold it against you no matter what they say, but they will never tell you. I think this mostly has to do with WASP culture which dominates corporate culture, which is highly conflict-avoidant. So if the relationship with your boss is pretty typical (i.e. you don’t have beers with him once a week or know his family), and he’s a WASP, if he comes over to you to talk about your work, no matter how nice and casual he is, it probably means you’ve fucked up something pretty bad!
The demographics of the group I worked with for the last couple years at the company was also significantly younger on average, and what that means is you’re going back to high school. For the first couple years I worked with a lot more older people, or people who had families. These types of people have other things to worry about and don’t have time for drama – they show up to work, maybe bullshit about politics a little bit around election time, and are mostly great to work with. Younger people are full of drama, gossip, and other useless bullshit. Women will worsen this exponentially as many here will know. Funny story: an ugly younger chick was part of our group, and even though she was engaged she flirted with me and mistook my friendliness for interest. I eventually turned her down and started keeping a distance from her. Months later I found out that a rumor was circulating in the group that I was the one that pursued her even though she was engaged. Moral of the story: engineers aren’t necessarily a bunch of social dorks that are drama-free, so if your team consists of younger members (and especially women), be prepared.
I eventually got laid off in what was one of several waves that year. I recall reading a thread on this forum that said to wait for your company to let you go and don’t quit on your own. I went by this advice (since I wanted to get the hell out, but I waited) and I will reinforce that here on this thread. This doesn’t mean smack a girl’s ass so you get fired. This means just be patient and hold on a little longer. When companies lay you off, they will typically give you a severance package which includes a lump some of money, and usually it’s pretty decent. Additionally, you are eligible for unemployment, and if you were making an average starting engineer salary of $50k or more, you’re looking at checks of over $400 a week from Uncle Sam, which isn’t too shabby.
So what’s the takeaway from all this? Engineering is a solid go-to degree to get in college that will land you a decent $50k ish salary job starting out. As long as the school is ABET accredited you’re good to go. The job you get with that degree is a typical cubicle drone job, which comes with all the usual downsides of the corporate environment.
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But yes you're right I forgot to mention that one. At my company we employed some IE's and they mostly did things related to manufacturing and planning. I would rank IE on the lower end of demand since we have relatively less manufacturing going on in the country now, but if God-Emperor Trump brings back those jobs, I'd say we could see an uptick in demand for IE's as well.
