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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."
and the fact that your actual job duties will entail far more than what your job description said.
Seriously, someone managed to write an article about this concept?
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
As I understand it, people across America have been working harder for the same pay for some time now. This trend is exemplified by less vacation time taken by Americans, greater hours worked for the same relative pay, and fewer benefits offered than even a decade ago.
I believe the Economist had a special on this a while ago, showing that Americans are four times less likely to achieve high net worth status than Canadians, even though they work more hours and take on more responsibilities.
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
compared to the workload they dump on people 30-40 years ago. however less pay.
Read radical news here
As a mechanical contractor, working with Honeywell products, and having to apply the engineering to real world application, I find, that the leadership that many contractors are looking for, is lacking. Many times, actual project engineers are sub-par, and it is the contractors' experience that get's the job done, with the engineer walking away with not having to use his insurance to cover mistakes.
It is not that the engineer is not intellegent, but in fact is he/she is over worked, dealing with multiple projects, with impossible dead lines. Many contractors are able to get away with sub-par work, because the job for the engineer is very stressed. Many engineers don't understand what they are engineering, since mechanical engineering is a wide field. They use rule of thumb. And when the contractor uses rule of thumb, we have a recipe for disaster.
More engineers need to go in to the real world, as a helper, or technician. Understand the way things are done, and then become the leadership that a company and a project needs.
It was just on a rerun of 60 Minutes tonight saying the same thing. Thanks to technology (especially the Crackberry) and this social more were quantity is more important than quality - hence all of the stupid meetings and being in the office for the sake of being there. It's too bad that the jobs that pay based on results are only in sales. I'd go there, but I suck at it.
If you want to be just a commodity engineer with a job description then don't cry when your job goes to China/India/whatever. To stay competitive, you have to add value beyond working to a job description. Welcome to the new millenium. Get over it.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Given your use of the English language I'm not surprised.
... I must be new here.
I hate this kind of response. I would think many slashdotters speak English as a second language, and may have less than perfect grammar. This is an accomplishmnet that should be respected and admired, not scorned. Please, show a little respect.
oh wait,
Is this article talking about real engineering or does it simply accept that anything with the word engineering in the title falls under engineering (eg. Refuse Disposal Engineer)?
I got my current job on the expectation that I'd be doing mostly non-engineering work. My main day to day function is being a research, to the extent that I introduce myself as one rather than give my actual title (because people wonder "Then WTF are you doing in front of the computer all day"). In any given workweek I might do PR presentations, translate documents, interpret for clients, hold an internal lecture about SEO, help the web team out a bit, or actually do some research/programming. And you know what? It doesn't matter to me. I'm still getting the same salary we agreed on and I'm still working the (absurdly low) number of hours they request from me. My thought is if they're paying me for my brain and my time then they can use both however they want to, within reason.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
But if you only do one thing very well, and that becomes obsolete (not rare in technology), you can't do anything of value. It is best to be competent in many areas and excel in one.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
And we hit the point of debt. We are trained to live the correct life style we need things to show off status. Debt allows us to show this status to friends and family to make them feel like you did something with your life. If we realized our standard of living is not a G/god given right, then we may be able to stay out of debt. So lets assume you live in the North East US not NYC. What you need.
Shelter: Studio Apartment $300, Heat $100, a good working car $150 an average of 30 miles travel day at $4:00 a gallon $256, food $320, electricity $100, medical $200. So living comfortable and safely can be at $17,112 a year or about $9.00 and hour at full time. This is assuming you are living by yourself. And I tried to keep the estimates on the higher side. So most engineers make at least $15 an hour and most of them (at my area) make $25-$35 an hour). We as Americans need to learn to put their pride aside and learn to lower their standard of living, if we want to get out of debt.
At first I was wonder what I was doing wrong, other people who make as much as me seemed to have a higher quality of life, then I realized the average person is $30,000 in debt, so I know I am actually better off and I can live comfortably without worrying about debt.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'll grant I've only been an active engineer since about 1978, but I know a bunch of guys who've really been at it a long time, and none of them remember a time when a reasonably senior engineer wasn't expected to be a decent drafter (we called them draughtsmen and used pencils, but it's much the same), do his own computations, supervise junior engineers, make budgets, and do costing.
Other than another demonstration that people writing for magazines think "time immemorial" is anything before about 1994, I don't see much surprising here.
You're thinking median not average. It's possible to have an average where say 10% of the people make more than average.
I started in the '80's at a large Canadian aerospace company which a couple of years after I arrived got sold (er, given) to a family of the Canadian Establishment. They promply thereafter exported all the materials R&D work I was doing to Ireland. Then they started playing games trying to lock me into a pension plan, to which I replied screw this, I'll do my own. That didn't go down well.
When I left to become a (much better paid) contractor, my boss took me into his office and told me, "You know, I can't approve of this." Apparently, what bosses really mean when they say they want you to show initiative is "Do what I want even if I don't know what it is, oh and make my life easier and make me look good." Well I know thats true, I'm a boss now too.
The real issue as I have come to know it is not that people are being multitasked like crazy (they are), but that its not easy enough to take that kind of experience and translate it into a startup of your own. Companies want their people to act and think like entrepeneurs, but they don't actually want them to become one, and the governments IMHO help them out with that.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
.....Take a stand. I always hear everyone complain, sometimes including myself. We generally do as we are directed but there is a point where you just say no, hire someone else if you want that done!
If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?
Have you ever considered personality might have something to do with it?
Eh, that's how highly skilled professions work. There is no substitute for actually learning these skills in the field, so the schools basically don't even pretend to try. Rather, they try to (theoretically) teach the theoretical underpinnings of the given field, as well as produce well-rounded, more or less cultivated individuals who will be able to do well in their field; once they get some actual work experience under their belts.
Universities are not vocational schools.
sic transit gloria mundi
My "job" is to analyze the structural integrity of various components in an aircraft. In reality, in a given week, I will probably do the following:
-set up shortcuts for really old workers on their desktops so they can more easily get to the files they need
-document a drawing that's missing that is needed for the project, and what is missing
-write a tutorial for a new software package we're using, or explain to someone else how to use it
-set up the printers for someone's machine, and explain what each goes to.
-sort out what's different between two documents and briefly summarize it
-chase down a person in IT responsible for fixing some problem that has arisen with some software
-gripe to some tech support guy about why the software we bought doesn't do what they say it will
-and more I probably can't think of.
So, yeah, just thought I'd share my side. Like with you, none of that bothers me. If it got the point where my job is to vacuum all the offices, yeah, then it would start to bother me. But I don't consider doing any of those tasks to be "working harder"; it's just "working different".
You want to know what kind of job there is where you ONLY do your narrow, specific job function? A union shop. And while in theory, that's supposed to make your job better, in reality, you'll get written up for moving your computer or desks around, and you're employer will quickly tank as they spill money from having to hire a new person for every little task.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I am not criticizing your overall cutting of corners, because I don't know what you are already doing, but sometimes when you think that you can't cut anymore corners, you actually can. You gave the example of Subway, and what the price is now. I actually go to Subway as well, but I don't get a drink; I drink water. If I want chips, I buy my own chips in bulk at the supermarket instead. That saves more than you might guess. It gets the price down to about what you used to pay for the meal with the drink. Yes, you did originally get the drink for the same price, but that doesn't mean that you really ever needed to. We Americans "just get the drink" due to habit, and this applies to many other categories of our spending in our daily lives as well. And, back to the Subway example, it is true that most businesses really do get your money with the pricing of their drinks. Speaking of which, all of the fast food options have high fructose corn syrup in them, which isn't good for us anyway, and extra calories.
Obviously, the above is not a solution to all of your problems, and I am not meaning it to be, but instead I am simply reminding everyone that EVERYTHING adds up, not just the big purchases. Good Luck!
... or we don't know what we want, and just let it happen to us. Worse yet, some of us do know what we want but do nothing about it for fear of losing our precious jobs. Now, for those of you with kids or other serious obligations, there is a certain logic to this. For the rest of you, the simple fact is that you've let it become expected of you and your testicular fortitude is too weak to potentially risk your job over saying 'no.' Several years back it finally dawned on me - I was not born to serve my boss' every stupid whim. So I don't. And you know what? It works. Be good at what you do, but don't tolerate the situations where you are making up for someone else's (planning/financing/hiring/designing/etc.) shortcomings unless there is a significant reward for you for doing so - more than just keeping your job. Eventually, they will learn and stop repeating their mistakes (or rather, having you clean up after them) or they will fail and exit your life (by quitting, suiciding, taking the company down with them, etc.) On the other hand, if you enjoy watching others use your superior talents (read "gullability") to cover for them, by all means, continue to remind everyone how much they are working while failing to do anything to correct the problem.
You're not Libertarians... you're corporate statists. You prefer a nation governed by and for the corporate elite. I've talked to Libertarians who even prefer that voting rights be removed from the masses and restricted to the landed gentry. I've a link to the forum if you don't believe me.
Which suggests that neither you, nor they, actually know what the word means.
Those aren't libertarians (difference in capitalization noted), they're Republicans without the Jesus gene.
would be the choice between being the average American, who makes $40,000 and saves $500, and the average Canadian, who makes $35000 but only spends $33000. Note that again, the American is clearly richer, while the Canadian has more savings.
The low net worths of Americans indicates that we aren't saving enough, not that we are getting paid less than our fair share, which the OP tried to imply. Almost every time variations of this statistic are cited, this same illogical mistake is made.
At an average wage of $73k/yr, or about $36/hr you might have some added responsibility.
When you're making over $0.50/minute isn't it reasonable to expect some larger responsibility and decision making ability?
For those numbers to have a chance of working you're going to have to expand "not NYC" to "Not within 50 miles of NYC, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Long Island, or the entire state of New Jersey". Otherwise you're never going to have a chance to get that kind of rent payment, and the high price of auto insurance throws your working car calculation off.
Not that I disagree with the general idea of living cheaply, but some of the prices you've listed aren't really possible in some areas.
Also, that's $17000 after taxes, and doesn't leave *any* leeway for "Oh, shit!" kind of expenses, which seem to pop up from time to time.
All those degree's and you have no job? And you blame "this economy" last I checked unemployment is at or near an all time low. Maybe the problem is YOU.