No I would not become an engineer in the USA because the US labor dept encourages firing of US engineers for legal or illegal H1bs and rumours in Cedar Rapids (2nd tour from LA) is that the Defense Dept does not encourage local hiring hence why only can get job out of state (now only out of the country with your own company) and not where you live. I have told my nephews not to follow me into engineering because US companies will not hire them. This is why Obama always blows off unemployed US engineers when asked directly. The economy is submarined by design. BR 30 years defense and industrial electronics
I know the show is over, but just to further the idea of a sabbatical. It would be nice if IEEE or some insurance company would let you put away $XX a month (and with a bit of luck your employer put in a matching sum) so that you could then take a sabbatical
But there's always something new to LEARN Rich. That's why I think AD's mid-career sabbatical idea is so important. Plan to take a year off and study wavelet theory or paleontology (and it would take a plan, given the demands of family and so on.)
@curt, don't know that I could. It would be a bit like re-engineering the path of a plumber. Once you get to a high level of competence there is only more of the same. Even the idea of putting senior engineers into mentor roles is a shift away from what made them good at their job.
I've seen and read a number of interviews with Steve Wozniak. Something he almost always says is that all eh ever wanted to do was design great products. Even as Apple grew, he just wanted to build stuff. That's the make of a great engineer IMHO.
I worked in a number of start-up companies that had a chief technology officer. The CTO was the engineering half of the founding team who was given that title because he hadn't adapted well to the upper management environment.
I think what happens to a lot of folks that get into management with high hopes of strasightening things out is that they discover that idealism generally doesn't hold up very well in the face of reality. After discobvering that, they just fold themselves into the burocracy and laregely just do their best to get through the day. I suspect the same happens a lot in politics.
It's hard to keep that idealism up, but I think it's necessary to slightly temper it with reality, but to keep idealism strong.
@curt, it is a different skillset, I agree. It's too bad that almost the only avenue for advancement as an engineer is into management. It's a mismatch for many engineers
I'll say this though: I've known many people that are natural born and often charismatic managers -- the skills just seem to come naturally to them. It's a true talent -- just not an engineering talent.
The biggest problem I typically see in management is a) forgetting that the customers pay their salary, and b) everyone else in the company makes it possible for the customer to pay their salary.
I wanted to be a photo journalist, but about the time I was working in that direction, news started to become entertainment rather than fact and that's not my style. I also wanted to be involved with those new fangled computer things so that worked pretty well too.
@nishant, yes, making is a very needful task, and we have the potential to do a lot of good. It's part of what kept me in the field. My last engineering jobs were medical equipment.
I was heading for the Academy, but my vision went bad my junior yearof high school. I wanted to fly jets, so I changed my focus. Don't have a problem following orders if one day I would be giving them :0
I certainly wanted my children to go into the sciences, but I never pushed engineering and I think they may have twigged to that. My daughter became lawyer (sorry Curt!) and my son went into chemistry.
Last I would like to say that Making is a very needfull task, If you are a developer/If you are able to make something then roaming in Asia or some other developing world country you can capture thousands of oppurtunities to help people while maintaining a steady stream of bread + butter, like those folks did by making Gravity Lighting
I am and engineer and have an MBA- don;t overrate a person by his degrees. I tried and failed to establish my own business. I use the MBA implicitly I guess, but it does contribute to some frustration.
I thought about a career in the Navy, since my dad was a Navy man, but circumstances took me into engineering. I would have probably enjoyed life as a NavalmOfficer.
MBA's have the ability to take a allready going company forward with more polish and professionalism but hardly these are the folks who can outnumber the number of engineering who have actually ESTABLISHED a business from scratch (remember when folks start out in their basement!) , its these engineer's with a entrepreneurial potency who have made most of these Business, atleast 60-65% in India!
AD, sounds a bit like burnout. what is disappointing about where you are today?
I am tired of having to juggle my management responsibilties, the necessities of corporate life like learning a new MRP system and tyring to get fairly complex projects to work.
Truth be told, right now I would rather be a vulcanologist (burnout may take on a different meaning)!
President Herbert Hoover studied civil engineering and once said of engineering:
Engineering ... it is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer's high privilege.
AD -- agree ABSOLUTELY that a mid-career sabbatical ought to be in every engineer's career plan. Especially just before you get seduced into some kind of management.
Antedeluvian, I think engineering is tool, its a talent, its actually something you sport that can make you everything in life IF used in a right manner.
I can't say that I haven't enjoyed engineering, lo these 33 years, but seeing wehere I am today I am not sure I would do it again. What I would like is the opprotunity to pause and re-evaluate. A sabbatical of sorts.
Rich, Yes there is nothing to caution here! btw I'm not married so don't even think about kids! LoL
Even if some bad culprit takes your programme and becomes a millionaire even then I would become a developer of things! because its one of the noblest careers Mankind will ever sport!
yes, the internet has had some interesting impact on IP. I once had an author submit an article for publishing that used images from Jurrasic Park. I asked if he had premissions, and his response was "they were on the Internet, so they are public domain." Wrong.
I will become an engineer again , its the simplest of the all the answers you will get Why? its just that I like what I do ,its the passion one goes for and my passion is to engineer software along with electronic circuitry!
Rich - I really wish I or someone had the answer that would solve our IP woes. Inventors bneed to be able to make money from their efforts, but people need to be able to ewxpand and improve things, or utilize things like good compression algorythms.
3D printers, IMHO, will find a home in custom, low-volume, prototype kinds of manufacturing, but not thousand-unit-a-minute kinds. But I think it will become a permenant part of the production landscape
I'm taking a class on image processing and one of my discussion group is resentful that H.264 compression is patented and he has to pay a license fee. Says it "restricts innovation"
Rich - That's exactly where I think 3D printers will excell - things that previously needed custom machining. Some high-end consumer products will benefit form 3D printers too, but they won't be scalable untial after another fwe boom/bust cycles.
@duane, you think so? certainly they are not too good for high volume manufacturing, but I am seeing machines that seek to replace complex machining and casting with 3D printing. Some for aircraft and even rocket parts.
regarding kids, my father and grandfather were doctors. My father never pushed us in that direction, though. We became physicist, accountant/CEO, pilot/financial advisor, and EE/writer
Rich - There's a lot of ignorance in the maker movement in terms of economics. Take 3D printers, for example. They have a place, are cool and will continue to get cheaper and better, but it will be a very, long time before they can compete with volume manufacturing and be pratical for anything but specialize products.
An item on PBS last night showed a bunch of school children building their own energy-conservation projects and robots, and I thought -- those kids are getting hooked !
I do think there is currently it's fad-ish to be a nerd or geek right now, but that's probably short term. Basically, most engineers that I've known respect actions more than words. A lot of prefessions are the opposite.
Here-s what I've seen in terms of respect: nobody really respects sales people, not even eacho other, same for marketing, management, finance. Doctors, police and other public servants don't get a lot of respect. Engineers are lookd down upon by others a lot ott. However, I think engineers tend to show more respect to their peers than a lot of other professions.
I suspect that we're pretty close to another boom cycle in engineering. There is still a alot of off-shoring and there will be, but I think there's a Renaissance brewing in the small business start-up world
@duane, true, everything has its ups and downs. I switched from design engineering to writing, and now the publishing industry is still consolidating due to the impact of the Internet
duane, some of our Indian members have told me about being pressured into engineering by their parents, who hoped for a good future for their kids, and the result was a glut of engineers
I've heard so many times and in so many places about the decline or engineering as a viable career option. Certainly, iot's been a rough few decades for it. When I entered the workforce in the early 1980's, there was a tech bust here in the Pacific Northwest, and it's been up and down ever since.
Duane -- there's a new post this morning on installing Eclipse with codesourcery toolchain on Ubuntu from cnxsoft. It might be useful for you. I've not tried it, but it looks pretty good.
I would, and have, however encouraged my kids to pursue what they want. My son is in school studying computer science and my daughter has talked about some sort of engineering career.
in a heartbeat. But would I want it for my kids? If they have a natural curiosity about things and how they work; if they want to make the world a better, safer, more efficent place; if they want to be able to fix most anything; if they want to explain to others the hows and whys, sure. Learning is part of an active life. Where else would someone pay for your education everyday and buy you the newest tools?
I haven't made a fortune but I will retire comfortably. The complaints about job pressure, decreasing benifets, etc are not just a problem with engineering. It is a problem with our long term additude of rape and pillage the earth extended to screw the employees. We need to have some rational relationship between what the people at the top earn (total) compared to what the average employee makes. When that factor is more than 15x, something is wrong.
I would not. In the USA, particularly where I work, the engineer gets little respect. We work long hours, are expected to travel with little notice and get no perks in return.
We are constantly under pressure to learn new skills with little or no support from the company, and, regardless of past accomplishments, live in an atmosphere of 'what have you done for us lately?'
The ever-decreasing benefits, especially health plans, are really just another part of the race to the bottom.
For many of us the challenge of making things work and the thrill of seeing a design come to life is what drew us into design. But the reality of design is filled with frustration as markets and management impose limits and conditions on what we are able to do, and how. Knowing what you know now, would you enter the profession again (or recommend it to your children)? Tell us why or why not.
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