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Engineers Working Harder for Their Paycheck
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."
Since when is taking on new responsibilities and learning new skills that make yourself more marketable as a whole something to complain about? More and more companies are moving towards organic structures where cross functional skills are a necessity. If you want to be stuck in the same job forever then by all means turn down any offer to showcase your capabilities. In my opinion engineers are some of the most able-minded people to take on other roles in an organization. They possess the critical thinking and deductive skills to approach many types of problems. But given the historic and stereotypical personality (or lack thereof) of engineers I'm not sure I would want them giving too many sales pitches to my customers!
Another item to note - engineers are considered professionals and cannot join a union anyway!
"Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer lee light," sang Miss Binney