<p>I guess this is just a question of curiosity. I work in power plants (I work on rotating equipment troubleshooting and overhauls) and most of the time the staff is working a lot of hours. This is especially true during scheduled maintenance outages where 12+ hour days can be the norm. During normal operation we may work 10 hour days and plenty of weekends and holidays. I have only been doing it for 3.5 years and it is already putting on a strain on the marriage life.</p>
<p>Are there any kind of good engineering jobs that don't require much beyond 40 hours per week or is long hours the standard in the engineering community? I have worked in steel mills, chemical plants, and power plants and a 40 hour work week was pretty rare.</p>
<p>Are you getting paid extra for your long days? If so, I’d work as many hours as you can so you have a nice house, money for your kids college education, and be able to take your wife on trips to exotic destinations. However, I suspect part of your frustration is you don’t get extra money for your long hours.</p>
<p>Generally, I’ve never been asked to work overtime until my most recent position, and I get paid extra for hours worked beyond 40. I’ve been out of school for 6 years now.</p>
<p>As an engineer I am a salaried employee and under federal law, my company does not have to compensate me for overtime. However, at management’s discretion we can get paid overtime at the straight time rate or not get paid. When the economy was good we got paid for the overtime but last year when the economy was not good we didn’t get paid for the overtime. And even during good times some salary employees were given comp time because their managers didn’t want to pay overtime.</p>
<p>The frustration is not about the money. It would be nice if the overtime pay did add significant income but it is only heavy during parts of the year and after taxes, it is not very significant. The main issue is the time spent away from family. A job that requires you to be away from home for 12 to 15 hours everyday will eventually damage a marriage if your spouse values spending time with you and you are never home to do so. </p>
<p>If I was getting 1.5x and 2x my rate for overtime, I would definitely want to work a lot of hours. But only getting 1x my rate for overtime is not enough to make me eager to work extra hours. The little bit of extra income doesn’t make up for the strain on the family.</p>
<p>As a salaried engineer, I don’t get compensated for overtime, either. Overtime is supposed to be one of those things they look at when bonus time rolls around, but if someone says the word “bonus” around here these days, everybody doubles over laughing. I haven’t had a raise in two years. They’ve promoted me; I’m a project manager now, so I have double the responsibility that I had when I started, but I haven’t gotten so much as a cost-of-living increase the past two years. Right now, we’re working around the clock just to edge everyone else out so that we can keep our <em>jobs</em>…</p>
<p>We’ve had a couple of divorces lately, and a lot of angry spouses.</p>
<p>A lot of software engineering is project-based. You start with gathering requirements and then doing functional specs and then design specs. These parts of the project are usually quiet with normal workdays or less. You can do maintenance work during this time too.</p>
<p>Coding and testing are where it gets busy and the amount of time spent on the job can rise quickly as you approach deadlines. Then it drops off and builds to the next deadline. Sometimes you can get called away to do maintenance work when an important customer has a major problem but this isn’t something that’s planned.</p>
<p>So for software engineering, the number of hours worked can be highly variable. In general, it’s important to get some rest during the quieter times as the busy times can be quite taxing.</p>
<p>The issue is that you are doing your engineering work in a certain subsection of engineering, that being the maintenance/upkeep/etc side of things. Most jobs in that area are going to likely have the chance to work a lot of overtime. However, on the other side of things, there are the design jobs and other so called “high tech” jobs where you will rarely, if ever, work overtime. The thing is, a lot of times those jobs aren’t as hands-on as the jobs you are most likely doing so for you it sounds like it is probably somewhat of a trade off.</p>
<p>I work at Boeing, and they pay us straight time + 6.50 an hour. Overtime is almost always voluntary, some people work it and some people don’t. I am one of those who take advantage of it while I can (it won’t last forever).</p>
<p>Your taxes on overtime hours actually aren’t any different than taxes on non-overtime. It will seem like you get taxed a lot harder on overtime, but at the end of the year, all of your earnings is multiplied by the tax factor, so it works out.</p>
<p>I did quite well with overtime pay last year and hope to do well this year. I don’t have kids (but do have a supportive wife) so that does make it easier.</p>
<p>No OT. I’ve worked 70 hour weeks. I’ve also worked 40 hour weeks. I’m on a 9/80 so I don’t really care about the OT (as a 9/80 easily makes it worth it).</p>
<p>The structural design firm that hired DH and me straight out of grad school paid us for OT, but we generally didn’t work much more than 40 hours a week. The firms we worked for after that expected us to work as much as was needed to get the project out on time. We put in a LOT of overtime hours without being paid for it. That’s one reason we decided to start our own firm - we can bill for almost every hour we work. Sometimes COLLECTING what we’re owed takes awhile, but clients have paid probably 99.5% of our bills - we’ve gotten stiffed only a couple of times.</p>
<p>The only time that I received more than a salary is when I was a consultant and when we had our own company. That was only for a few years for me. In my 30s, I routinely worked 80 hours a week. I hit burnout burnout and took a far less demanding job which has worked out better family-wise.</p>
<p>In software engineering, your job is what you make of it.</p>
<p>My job is very hands-on and that is how I like it. Although I did a lot of design work in college, I never intended to have that kind of job. Always wanted to be in the field managing the projects. I like my job but the hours are hard on the marriage at times. Right now I only see my wife and son for 30 minutes in the mornings. I work 4pm to 4am and she works 10am to 8pm. But things should return back to normal in another 5 weeks or so.</p>
<p>The 9/80 schedule would be nice but unfortunately we are expected to work up to 10 hours per day with those extra couple of hours being unpaid overtime. So I would say that 40 to 50 hours can be considered a normal work week. During normal operations, I may arrive at the plant at 7am and leave at 5pm.</p>
<p>Not having a job at all in this economy can be even harder on marriages.</p>
<p>We just hired another MIT grad yesterday. I’m hoping that several of us go down to lunch with him so that I can get to know him. We’ve hired a lot of MIT grads, in the last two years.</p>
<p>I’d encourage you to look for employment elsewhere. After working at a company that pays overtime, I’ll never work for free again. I work the 9/80 schedule, but the usually do 15 hours a week of voluntary paid overtime on the weekend. My wife and I carpool to and from work, and once we have kids, we’ll all carpool. It helps a lot on family time because my commute takes about 30 minutes and we get a chance to visit and spend time together that normally would be spent alone. </p>
<p>My job is hands on as well. I work on the airplane providing engineering support to the mechanics as they install hardware on the airplane and it’s fun. I don’t mind the weekend work because I get to spend more time on the airplane and it’s interesting work to do. But I don’t have kids yet - when I have little ones, I’ll want to be at home more.</p>
<p>I had thought about looking for employment elsewhere but all of the work I like to do requires a lot of hours for the big projects, which are normally 15% to 30% of a year. </p>
<p>I have a son, 18 months old. My wife takes him to daycare when she goes to work and when I am back on my regular 7am to 4pm shift I pick him up in the evenings. She works 25 miles east of our house and I work 60 miles west. We might have another kid in the future but there is no way she will be able to work if we do that. Can’t afford daycare for two kids.</p>
<p>I spent time working in an oil refinery, during our maintenance periods, the engineers typically worked 10 hours/day 6-7 days a week. Depending on how the refinery met certain targets regarding project progress, safety, etc. there was a maximum weekly bonus of 50% (for 6 days of work) to 75% (7 days of work) of week’s salary.</p>
<p>Since I was a co-op, I got paid time and a half for all the extra hours I put in. My mentor kept grumbling that I was probably making more than him as a result of this. :p</p>