Thread: Engineering brahs, do you like your job

I'm still in the learning phase of a new job and it's good. Lots to do, lots of room to grow. I have the kind of overly analytical brain where I'll tear apart football stats or guitar riffs just on idle time, and work throws enough new problems at me to keep that guy occupied and happy all day. It's a good fit. And when it doesn't occupy me, I can just switch to my other monitor and join the misc at work crew like I have all day today.

But misc loves negativity and I'm no different, so let me chit talk the profession.

Where engineering sucks dik IMO is

-Sweatshops. Same with any field... no one likes working 70 hour weeks unless there is an end date and a bucket of compensation for it. 90+% of shops don't do this, but some do, and especially the ones you see the big flashy salary numbers for.

-Little chance for promotion or advancement. At most places, if you don't make manager, you can stall out at senior doing the same work for the same money for a very long time. The pay is great for newcomers but tends to not grow hugely over the life of your career, unless you break into management or become a top 10% technical stud at a company that rewards technical studs.

-Iterative work. You don't build a space ship or an Iron Man suit from scratch. You work on a car temperature sensor that's had 5 generations of car temperature sensors before it, and you just tweak the new model a little bit to make your customers happy. The guys who get to do the Iron Man stuff almost always have doctorates.

-Tendency to pigeonhole. Combines with points 2 and 3 above. You get good at one narrow thing your company needs. You do it over and over, sit in your seat, cash your check. Then bam, you get laid off one day and now you're bombing interviews because the rest of your skillset has eroded over the last 10 years. You need to make sure you stay sharp, and the problem is your company will not incentivize you staying sharp, they just want you to be good at one thing. You need to take initiative on your own to get on new projects, learn new skills and just make sure you don't atrophy.

-Your coworkers are engineers. There's no chicks, just autistic Indian men and autistic white men all day every day. You will hate being surrounded by that personality, then realize that you probably have that personality. It does bring some self-loathing.

-It's a common thing with all salary office jobs these days, but you're never really offline. Midnight emails, crunch time, 9PM calls with India... there's plenty of fukoff time when you do work, but work does have a habit of popping up in what you thought was fukoff time.

-Officecelling. Get your computer posture correct, because you'll be in it for a couple decades.

Yeah mate doing hyper detailed work with large teams and high consequences, sometimes life or death, is super easy and loads of fun