The only industry you’ll make 6 figures in 5 years at is petro-chem. I didn’t go into that, but I’m still getting paid competetively with them. I’ll probably be one of the top 5 earners at my 5 year HS reunion. If I stay in engineering, that will not be the case at my 10 year reunion. I’m to smart to see myself get left behind like that.

If I’m hanging out with my buddy in law school, and my buddy in dental school, I will be gettin no lovin from the ladies. Not a very prestigious profession in the US apparently. An MBA or patent law degree is a certainty.

I suppose what I might do is still get my undergraduate degree as a mechanical engineer, but then pursue an MBA program after. That’s essentially what my father did (though substitute political science for engineering) and, well, you could say he does pretty well…

1) how many engineers do Toyota or BMW outsource?

2) same question for the Detroit 3?

I don’t mean for integrable sub-assemblies like seats or whole interiors. I mean the things that make a car distinct like the body, suspension and engine/drivetrain and related electronics. The rest, while important, are not nearly as fundamental.

And….

“Financially, it makes more sense for a laid-off engineer to load up on student loans, earn a law degree and make his living chasing ambulances than to take a job in his field at an abysmally low salary.” No, unless the engineer is able to get into a top tier school (possibly hard) and graduate in the top tenth (easier – an engineer with work/life experience should be able to rip through the 23 year old liberal arts pukes). This should get you attention and hopefully a generous offer from BigLaw. Otherwise, you’ve added $100K to $150K in debt and avoided making a living for three years to boot, all to start at the bottom of the law food chain. Thats a $250K to $400K total difference to make up. And what if you don’t love it, and you probably won’t? And don’t chase ambulances, use your technical skills more productively in IP or another specialty.

The Gov’t can’t hire foreign nationals or offshore the engineering…

Take a close look at the pay rates for the non-NASA and non-managerial positions. Apparently the government can’t even match the low engineering pay scales in the private sector, which may explain why those thousands of positions are still open. Financially, it makes more sense for a laid-off engineer to load up on student loans, earn a law degree and make his living chasing ambulances than to take a job in his field at an abysmally low salary. If engineers were paid commensurate with their training and skills, there would be no talk of shortages.

The Gov’t can’t hire foreign nationals or offshore the engineering…

I hear you. Your reasoning for following engineering is identical to the one I had fifteen years ago. I’m glad I fought my way through school, and am happy to be working in the automotive field. That said, it is a struggle, and when times are tough, like nowadays, things can get a bit scary. Many comments prior to this one are right on – engineering at large corporations has become glorified project management. That said, the work pays the bills, and allows enough for me to pursue my own amusement at home.

My advice to anyone willing to put in the effort to pursue engineering: Stick with it, and get an internship or co-op that is field-related, even if it pushes out your grad date. Pre-grad work experience is invaluable. Thankfully, most internships/co-ops pay.

For those who will whine about how dull school is, join or start an orgainzation, Formula SAE, for example. Even EE and Computer Engineering expertise is needed. And you don’t necessarily have to be a gearhead.

I paid my way through the Univ working for a company which built manufacturing equipment for the big three and their suppliers. Was a pretty decent place to work with about 100 people. I was working my way through the university program for a paycheck a fair bit less than an elementary school teacher. I graduated and my pay was bumped to slightly over an elementary school teacher’s pay. The next step up the food chain there would have been a bump in work hours from 45 to 65 per week and a pay jump of about $6K a year. It really wasn’t worth staying there for the effort expended. An engineer friend there grumbles that his pay averages out to $12 an hour after overtime and taxes.

I had several factors that shaped my choices: the pay did not even come close to my expectations, reading about the future of the big three did not paint a happy picture and they were our primary customers, and the company went through yet another 4 month stall-out where 4-5 people got laid off and I wondered when the doors would close. I started looking for jobs here in TN and found plenty of $45K options but we’d have to move two hours east or two hours west. Not a big deal for the right paycheck.

Got a job offer in East TN with an Asian parts company who would pay our rent for two months, pay to move my family and give me a $2K raise. Not even sure if my wife could have gotten a job there b/c the town was so small.

Huh? Are they kidding? For $50K I’d consider it. Heck for $45K I might have considered it. Most of my classmates were seeing $50K only if they moved to one of the state’s largest cities along with the higher costs of living, longer driving distances, and the social problems that the big city can present like crime.
This job was an hour out into the boonies. Rural describes it well. I also knew that $40K would likely only be $45K after five years. It would be a reliable job at least offering good experiences. Not a bad situation but not a great one either. It would have put the drive to Grandma’s house at 3 hours.

We could move back to Chattanooga where our families live but we know the quality of the school system there and would really need to be in the best neighborhoods to use the public schools. Like any city there are good schools and schools whose parents don’t value education or raise their children very well. These kids impact everyone’s children’s safety, quality of education, and so on. Even some of the schools we attended are now undesireable.

Am not seeing opportunities that I could pursue there – need the correct degree, companies want candidates to already have the necessary experience, 5+ years of that experience, etc. Understand that I am a 38 male with six years experience in the Navy (electrician, military police), not a 22 year old graduate with no work experience.

Ended up moving to a university engineering job that is challenging, which will train me for new skills at no cost, and my pay has surpassed that of my peers for a while – but not that of some of my non-college friends. Some of them are doing much better in blue-collar jobs, non-degree advertising, and non-degree project management.

Where is the motivation to be an engineer? Admittedly I’ve gone up the income ladder much faster than my non-univ friends but the average pay is about the same as a non-college office worker after 15 years.

FWIW I take everything in five year chunks. I’ll reconsider my situation in five years. I’m content for now.

I have a friend who is taking an $80K a year job right out of college in CA. Cost of living adjustments indicate that’s about $50K here. Not sure whether they will be able to afford a house or to be in a decent neighborhood. Nothing to indicate where his pay will be in ten years (would it be $60K or $160K?). The challenge of living in CA without any pay advantages…

Could I imagine being anything other than an engineer? Not at all.

In retrospect, I should have earned an MBA and gone into marketing, finance, product planning or technical management rather than earning an MSEE from Stanford and staying in engineering. I’d be better paid and much happier with my career if I’d taken a different path. I am happy to say that my children have learned from my mistake and are pursuing careers in areas other than engineering.

In good economic times those that “manage” and “sell” and otherwise self-aggrandize get the credit and the power.

In bad economic times it is those who actually do the thinking that get the credit and power because those who do not add value are quickly marginalized.

We see this in discussions of the Detroit auto companies in the idea that creative talent in the trenches can be unlocked as soon as the self-aggrandizing management is removed (as through bankruptcy).

Unfortunately, I do agree with most of the negative feelings expressed here. Having worked in the auto industry as a mechanical engineer, I can also say it wasn’t the creative “designing cars” type of work I expected when I was a bright eyed 18 year old heading into engineering school. The most frustrating thing for me was the bureaucracy that superceded any and all decision making. Now 8 years out I see my friends who went into finance pulling in big, big bucks while my engineering friends back in Detroit are being laid off left and right.

Still, it is what you make it. My engineering degree has helped me to have a pretty decent salary and is a good path to other more lucrative fields. I’ve learned alot about what goes into designing and producing something, which I probably wouldn’t have gotten through finance. And there are still technical engineering jobs in the auto industry for car guys, such as vehicle dynamics. Just realize that it isn’t going to be easy and you’ll likely never make the money as an engineer that you could as an investment banker.

After 20 years as a product engineer, my outlook for the profession is not so good. it would seem that in our modern world, product engineers are no longer considered valuable in terms of keeping them. I have worked for companies big and small, new and old, international and domestic, and they all have one thing in common: product engineers don’t hang around very long.

Having been laid off 3 times in 6 years, it is no wonder I am still driving my truck, a ‘94 GMC that now has 284,000 miles. Because in my 20 year career, I have only been continuously employed long enough to pay off a 5 year car loan one time, and that job ended when the plant closed 6 years ago.

I would like to think that our culture will return to the place where experience is valued, but everything I see is the opposite. The MBA geniuses who now run the world see product engineering as a commodity that can be purchased when needed.

First, an engineering degree will open a lot of doors to professional jobs that aren’t engineering jobs. It’s not going to limit you. When I first left the army, I had to start at the bottom for a couple years. Had I had an engineering degree, I could have been more than 3 years ahead towards my sales career.

Second, if you are in a competitive field of any sort, and you find that you are not getting the assignments that you desire, and that you know will further your career options then start looking for the next job immediately. There are plenty of engineers and other folks that got sidetracked and then had a hard time getting back on the proper career track. If you are a chemical engineer, but they keep working you as a technical support guy, then smile, ask for the assignment you want, and put out your resume’ the next day. If your employer won’t give you the jobs you need to get ahead, another one might. If no one will, then you may need to reassess your chances of making it in that field. It might be you, it might be fate, it might be the whole industry is filled with idiots all the way to the top.

This is depressing.

Hopefully some of you older folks can steer me in the right direction. Am I just a naive 18-year old with an unrealistic dream?

I’ve always loved cars, and always will. I also really like programming. I like languages. I like planning things. I like building things.

I figured I should major in mechanical engineering. I want to work on building new and innovative products. I would be a liar if I said money was not an important factor (how else to feed one’s automotive fetish?), but it’s still true that enjoying what I will be doing is more important.

Am I setting myself up to be disappointed? Say it isn’t so…

I work in the US MI-complex. Don’t worry, engineers in this business are also treated like second class citizens.

ashtheengineer-

#3 is a good point, but I’ve been on the flipside of your argument. Some organizations will pigeonhole an engineer in the role of doing nothing but test and measurement. This happened to myself and a good friend for several years. Both of us asked for design work clearly and repeatedly in our development plans. All we got from management was prevarication.

Eventually my friend and I transferred out of that group for greener pastures. Management never seemed to fully grasp precisely why we left.

The other extremely frustrating aspect of our organization is how territorial the level 4, 5, and senior scientists are. No interest in mentoring younger engineers, just fighting turf wars and acquiring data b*tches to do their dirty work.

Aside from the only other area in the US that excels in engineering, the computer industry (which in and of itself is an outgrowth of the need for warfare targeting number crunching), most engineering in the US is outsourced overseas where wages are a fraction of what they are in the US. Unless it’s computer-related or an advanced weapons system, ‘Made in the USA’ simply doesn’t have the caché it once had. The pinnacle of intellectual respect and prowess in the US was probably the fifties when people like that “Quiz Show” guy, Charles Van Doren, one of the first well-known and popular nerds on a national level, were at the height of their popularity.

Jeremy Clarkson: “The Americans? Pah. Left to their own devices, I doubt they could build a pencil”

Oow, that’s harsh. We all know how Packard built a better Rolls-Royce Merlin than thru British methods. I think its bad business management that make engineering and production look bad.

I agree that talent follows money… but disagree that medicine and law are paths comparable to finance in terms of compensation, or even engineering. It is an uncommon physician that, over his or her lifetime, will ring up compensation equivalent to the average engineer. Figure in compensation per hour worked, the delayed compensation that medical school debt-load and residency mandate, and you have a lot of physicians in their 20’s and 30’s wishing they’d had the will or ability to become engineers.

Not really car-talk, just saying that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence… for almost everyone.

I have worked with engineers in more than one field. I find that the good ones are well rounded in the basics of engineering, and can likely move among different fields with a little training. Somehow, we need a system that lets engineers retrain more effectively. I can tell you that the oil companies are looking at hiring graduates in other specialties, but they don’t seem to look for folks with experience in other specialties. Why?

I stayed away from engineering because the year I went to school the petroleum engineers were being laid off all over, so everyone said not to become an engineer. Of course, when I got out of the army, they wanted engineering degrees for all the best jobs, even the non engineering ones. Go figure.

It’s like an obstacle course I plan to get through, but the appreciation and compensation of an engineer basically reinforces negative comments I hear on the rewards in the field.

My father graduated as a Mechanical Engineer and worked for 20 years for Colgate-Palmolive, the company was kind to him, as he was given resources and got to exercise his engineering skills, but he mentions how the new engineers coming in basically made it past him without doing any substantial engineering work, their mindset was on doing politics, and the company rewarded them for that.

He now cautions me and basically reflects comments here that say that very little actual engineering is taking place, that his 20 years as an engineer showed him that his skill set as an engineer is not his most valuable asset if he wants to move up on a company.

Overall not very encouraging to hear, I’m currently looking for something of interest in the medical field.

Our kids are interested in engineering again. I offer as two examples the very bright children (sons – some thing don’t change, guess) of friends who are in the financial business. Both of these boys want to be engineers. One’s starting at RPI this fall. The other’s dreaming of MIT in his senior year of high school

I think engineering may again be becoming cool.

I agree. I have 20+ years in the field in addition to an undergrad degree in computer science and a masters degree in software engineering. This field has definitely served me well.

I also work for a small engineering firm after leaving the mind-numbing corporate conglomerates, and I definitely prefer the smaller businesses…

I actually do more database work/programming than actual engineering. Most civil design work is contracted out to private firms. I enjoy my job, and it’s relatively secure, but the salary isn’t huge. That being said, I’m still satisfied. The cost of living here is pretty low, so my salary provides a decent standard of living. I can retire in 13 years and have the option of pursuing contract work or going into another field entirely.