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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."
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.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I have been one of these hat-wearers since 1997. The reason being, I tend to stick to smaller businesses. The agile ones instead of the corporate behemoths. I do contract to the larger corps occasionally but it's not a working environment I enjoy. My salary has increased every year I have been employed through three companies and various contracts. Moving up is about expanding your experience as well as your spectrum of abilities.
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.
Thats a *VERY* good point. However, it this particular case, the upper management completely undermines the middle management with unrealstic projects, deadlines, budgets and staffing levels. Nothing gets done. And they blame the manager. Everyone sees this, and nobody will ACCEPT any middle management positions. Far more so when they offfer *NO* pay increase whatsoever, yet you'll soon be the scape goat for their problems.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I think further examination would show engineer wages bunched closer to the average than almost any other profession. Lawyers would probably have the greatest distribution. Although I never practiced as a chemical engineer [BASc, UBC, 1984], switching to computers over 20 years ago, I am proud to be associated with this profession.
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.
I come here for the love
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)
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
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.
Excellent post, but I'd like to point out that not all of us spend like that, nor vote like that, but still are penalized by the backlashes in the system. ... and yes, some of us are considering leaving. I live simply and way "under the radar" yet the increasing regulation is going to force me out sooner or later no matter what my worth. Sorry, but there is entirely too much bullshit.
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
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
"If I make $500,000 each year and spend the same, I have zero net worth. Meanwhile, if you make $20,000 but only spend $19,000, you gain $1000 in net worth each year. Yet who would you rather be? "
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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I know you're being humorous, but for those who don't know how these things work, organized crime very seldom breaks arms, or worse yet kills, over loansharking. Instead, they get the debtor to pay back, even if it looks like the debtor doesn't have the money.
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.
Who is John Cabal?