Engineers Working Harder for Their Paycheck 268
Editorgirl35 writes to tell us Design News has posted their annual engineering salary survey. While it does offer encouraging results with salaries up a bit from last year it also shows that engineers are, on the average, doing a lot more to earn that paycheck including supervisory and budgetary functions. From the article: "Kody Baker, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer agrees, "Yes, we are doing far more than just designing products," he says. He's a project manager, manufacturing engineer, product designer, R&D engineer, test engineer, CAD systems specialist, CAD instructor/mentor, and more, juggling many roles in his job as a mechanical application engineer at Honeywell."
Nothing new here (Score:5, Interesting)
What this may be showing is the trend towards smaller companies (already noted elsewhere) or larger companies using smaller, self-organized teams rather than groups of hundreds or thousands who have several layers of management for one project. My current project team has less than twenty staff assigned, including support and management -- and it's the largest team I've worked on since 1979.
Wearing multiple hats. (Score:5, Interesting)
But it's not about being able to do everyone's job! It's about being able to understand what other departments are doing, knowing enough of their job so you can work with them efficiently. Not only is it important in a communication perspective, but it's priceless in the troubleshooting and design phases of product development.
Bottom line is, every employee of value--anywhere--needs to be able to step back and see the bigger picture of the corporation/foundation/office/whatever. Technical specialists that can't see beyond their single language, single router, server, whatever are a dime a dozen. It's great to have someone with extreme expertise, but they are also easily replaceable.
Re:Welcome to life (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Average pay is far from real life (Score:4, Interesting)
As to the trend, I would say that the current economic conditions are pushing companies to push their engineers into new areas. But engineers always do whatever they have to to get the job done. When I did computer stuff at NLK Consultants, it was routine to hand engineers new software tools and watch them go and use them -- no training, no big deal, just part of the job.
It is also worth observing that other than one person's quote, most of the article deals with _skills_ that engineers think are important -- not their actual duties. There were few hard stats about how much more they are doing other than "50% say they are working in more areas than they did a year ago". I think that engineering is less subject to change and management interference than the average business -- something to do with rule #1: make sure the bridge doesn't collapse. Making an article like this bogus by default.
Graduate Degrees? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not just engineers (Score:4, Interesting)
I've found this to be true for almost any somewhat technical field, nowadays. If you have the skills, they will (ab)use you.
I work at a local paper - my primary job description is "Graphic Artist", but I also work with the page layout, do organizational tasks, web development, troubleshooting, sales on rare occasions, and even photography.
All this for only $10 an hour. I don't necessarily mind, but I get overwhelmed quite often, thanks to deadlines (we don't usually have deadlines of a week or so - more like a day, a few hours, or even minutes, on a number of occasions)
Net worth is a meaningless measure (Score:3, Interesting)
The only relevant statistic is how much we earn per hour (ie, productivity), and yes, we beat Canada, Europe, Japan, etc. The fact that we choose to work more and spend more on average is not a public policy issue. If someone is using "net worth" in a political debate, they are probably full of it, and in almost all cases, looking at total earnings or earnings per hour will paint an entirely different picture.
Most Managers have to be teachs to... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can honestly say that most engineers that come out of schools today are pretty poorly prepared for the work environment. Of the 4 engineers I have working for me now, all of them came out of school not knowing how to write a report, or do autocad. It generally takes me at least one year for me and the office manager to take some one raw out of school, and make them billable.
During that first year I have to be an autocad instructor, an English teacher, and hope they don't move on during the year.
Right now at work I am dealing with an engineer whom has a master's degree specializing in water resources, and yet I took 2 hours trying to explain to her how to do basic rational method hydrology.
If I had one request for engineering school, it would be make the students take at least 2 autocad courses. The first course should be a basic course for all engineering disciplines, and then an advanced course dealing with the software that each discipline typically has to use. Teach civils Autodesk land development desktop, teach mechanicals autodesk inventor, ect... I hate the fact that most took a basic course their freshman year, and never even touched autocad during the rest of their time at school.
--C. Alan Whitten
California RCE 63332
The water is rising... (Score:4, Interesting)
After the bubble broke and a lot of management thought they could save money by going over-shoring[1], management knew they still had to find some warm bodies locally. So they added water to the equation and all of the boats would rise. Added water as in effort poured into the body of water. You will generally find people who have director and VP in their titles (and not with seven or eight people in the company) doing hands-on. Directors generally have to be power users of Excel and Access. VPs aren't required to be quite as expensive, tool-wise.
The bottom line of this is the higher the leven of people a company has writing code, the smaller the number of people they have to hire, even if you have enough chimps sitting at enough keyboards.
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[1] I've learned by experience, off-shoring is good if you aren't ever going to be managing the [source] code once you get it back. The quality code is generally illegable to anyone except to those who wrote it. It reminds me of the people who wrote code, then passed what they had thru file editors and changed COBOL variable names from "ADD CUSTOMER-WEEKLY-SALES TO CUSTOMER-CURRENT-TOTAL-SALES". to "ADD a3rafas TO awdfasdva-afws-Tasdffgas". i.e., obfuscated code guaranteeing job security. No, it's not apocryphal. I encountered this numerous times with my high school and college clients 20-25 years ago and writing the code to parse the variables proved to be quite a handy tool.
Re:Engineers not the only ones... (Score:4, Interesting)
While I'm not one of the best or brightest, there are many who are among the best and brightest who simply don't want to deal with it.
A good friend of mine who is a brilliant engineer, worked for Lockheed Martin for two decades and had his own consulting company since '97, decided last winter that it's not worth living here anymore and that he'd have better fortunes elsewhere.
He's thriving in the Phillipines right now, doing productive work that, in his own words, "isn't constricted by the viewpoints of the many and narrow combined." Half a dozen (out of twenty) of his employees went with him. Can't say I blame them.
SB
Re:Most Managers have to be teachs to... (Score:3, Interesting)
now if your design is truly 2d, then autocad is a good tool, but most useful things are not 2d.
Re:Net worth is a meaningless measure (Score:4, Interesting)
I would rather make half a mill each year. If I'm in a position where I make that much, chances are I have a nice pension and health insurance. Even if I have no savings, I can easily save thousands of dollars in future years if the $#!t hit the fan one year. I also probably have an incredible education, resume, job experience, credit, capital, and network to rely on. I could easily get a loan or sell some posessions if I really had to.
If I'm making $20,000 a year, or $5 an hour working full time, $10 part time, I might manage to save $1,000 over the course of a year. One trip to the emergency room eats that right up. I probably don't have health insurance nor any kind of pension. Chances are most of my friends and family are making the same money I am. If I run into any kind of financial emergency, I'm pretty much SOL.
After thinking it over, I'd rather be the person making 0.5 mill a year.
Re:Engineers not the only ones... (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, the borrower parks his car where it can be conveniently stolen, and waits to report it missing until the chop shop has had 48 hours to strip it. He then collects $20,000 in insurance, but somehow, he ends up driving an old beater. The rest of that payout goes to the loanshark. (The victim usually gets to keep a junker so he can keep working, to get those paychecks that will serve as part of the "renegotiated" payments).
Or, the debtor sells his house for $30,000 less than the going rate to a buyer his loan shark refers. The homebuyer gives an agent connected to the mob a fee of about $15,000 on that 30, for a sweet deal from his point of view. Under lots of pressure, the debtor passes on information that lets the mob rob his workplace, maybe leaves a door conveniently unlocked or even does the pilferage himself. Organized crime squeezes him like a sponge until they don't see anything left to bother with, and then he still gose on their bad list, and they will never loan him money again because they had to go to the trouble of squeezing.
If they can't get a good profit, THEN they get physical, but just like legitimate lenders, loansharks can run background checks and pre-inspect collateral, and they do. After all, it's far better to get the cash than vengance and a short envelope to pass uphill to the boss. Victims almost invariably have some way to give the loanshark at least 50% total profit.
"Getting closer to back on topic, "the mafia gives better rates" is the point. Organized crime still makes lots of money from illegal gambling, because they pay out 80% or better, and State lotteries pay only about 50% on average. Of course lots of Americans will work exceptionally hard for less chance of moving up with the company than in Canada (and parts of Western Europe, which the earlier poster didn't mention). Of course, the USA is where a company can offer people a chance to take a serious drop in salary to join management and get volunteers. Of course some companies can avoid union problems by co-opting employees to become pseudo-management. The same people who go along with all this are the ones who don't see how stupid state lotteries are. They're also the ones who could have saved enough for retirement, but never got around to it, etc.
Re:Graduate Degrees? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:De-commoditising engineering (Score:1, Interesting)
All in all, it is always hard living in a changing times. In the long run every difference balances out and wage to price ratio smooths a little bit, more better products gets designed and manufactured all over the world with all levels of expertise almost evenly distributed and then a new cycle starts all over again. In each cycle, of course, the gap in wealth between the "leaders" (investors and management) and followers (engineers, code monkeys, "implementers") widens.
The problem is, by very same process, the gap between manual labour and intellectual labour shrinks and manual labour becomes too expensive (just look at the prices of any maintainance service: plumbers, electricians, car mechanics services,
First, in period before we do out with manual labour completely (today) majority of kids start generally avoiding intelectual work carreers (and that already is happening), and this increase in manual labour workforce could slow down the spread of robo-handymans for some time but eventually they will lose their jobs.
Second, when they get replaced (as they are replaceable... and engineers will follow, replaced by their own "tools"!) by machines, you get arising number of people who are superfluous in the society, arising number of the poor and angry, seeking "miracle" "way out" (which in most cases boils down to crime). Well, fine, there'll be more opening positions in law enforcment and crime control, but point of balance between people working in law enforcement and people living of crime is on very high crime rate. The cream of society will respond by isolating themselves in "guarded zones" and social layer of those who are neither criminals nor police officers will soon thin out to nothing. And here comes the nasty surprise: law officers can also be downsized by robots... the same machines today designed to fight on battlefields, perhaps with a mod or two.
Now, so far, how the future built by "invisible hand" looks alike? We have rising populaton of citizens pushed away and turned into savages on the bottom of the pyramid, then above an layer of police army protecting the top, where we have another isolated society. Obviously, police layer will demand at some time to be "recognised" as "patricians", too. The "Savages" will be exterminated, or they will prevail, depending on how many quality leaders they can produce that will not pass the barrier to enter the "patricians", or how many dangerous "patricians" will get outcast into the world of "Savages". In the long run, the outright killing of dangerous "too-smart-to-be-left-loose-but-not-appropriate-t
There has to be a big picture, a plan, blueprint of society you (I mean, each one of us) wish it to be (or at least can accept). The realities of the society and its average citizen must be taken into account. You can't just give no second thought about "losers" if you know for sure that no matter how good contestants are, there is very certain large number of those who will not "win". There has to be some acceptable outcome for them too, or otherwise the rules are going to be broken and chaos, massive killings and finally, tyrannies, will ensue. It is very dangerous for masses to live without the meaning in life, or to taste the bitterness of disillusionment or betrayed belief. "You can be the one" sounds great, untill you find yourself not "the one". And all the others will.
In a related story (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Most Managers have to be teachs to... (Score:2, Interesting)
Lower quality (Score:3, Interesting)
managers (Score:1, Interesting)
I say we outsource all our upper managers to China or India to save some $$$'s
Re: spending (Score:3, Interesting)
Buying a TV for cash is spending money. Getting a car loan or an apartment is spending income - you are committing that amount for a long time. Have a kid and feed him for 20 years, etc.
You have to be ten times as careful spending your income than when spending your cash - $50 here, $50 there, and your income can be all gone. Spend all your income, and you'll have no cash left to spend. Worse, spending income can change after the fact: energy rates go up, kids go to college, card rates go up, etc. So you need to have some pad in there - running it right up to the wire is disaster waiting to happen.
Every year or so I take a look at the income that I'm spending, and see what can I do to improve it. Refinance some higher rate loans? Drop insurance coverage on and old car? Get a better cell or long-distance plan? It's amazing how $20 here and there can add up to a lot. But sometimes the answer could be a little more drastic, as in "replace my Mustang with a 40MPG 4 banger" or "move into an cheaper apartment".
If you are outwardly middle-class, but struggling to keep that, then typically it's a hint that your lifestyle exceeds your income. I like a lot of padding, and would rather underspend with security, than drive fashionable cars or wear cool clothes, or even get extended basic cable.
As for saving, no lecture, but an opinion: Savings is an acquired habit. If you can save $10 a month, then you've established the habit, which is the most important thing. Then, it's easy enough to increase that slowly over time. If you can't save $10 a month, then you are too close to the edge of danger. So many people seem to think "But I can't save $1200 a month to put into a 401K! I need that for (something)" What, you think everyone started at that amount? You start really low, just to acquire the discipline, and slowly ramp it up from there.
Good luck. I hope things improve for you.
Re:Most Managers have to be teachs to... (Score:1, Interesting)
Secondly, if you want employees properly trained in autocad, send them to a course. If you think uni will make them proficient in a specific piece of software, you are a bit batty.
Perhaps gradutates should be proficient in multiple CAD and FEA systems? As well as being experts at hand calculation. I think not.
I would not pay for my BE Mech Eng course if it spent 10% of the time training me to be a CAD monkey on a useless CAD system.