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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.
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 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?