<p>Not just the paid hours spent on-site, but the hours spent at home after a full day of work or on the weekends finishing up projects to meet deadlines. I'm trying to get an idea of how hectic the schedule of an engineer gets.</p>
<p>dont think the time needed to stay up to date is a walk in a park</p>
<p>plus the time needed to review on things you've been rusty on</p>
<p>and etc...</p>
<p>I work 40-50 hours a week, either in the office or on job sites.</p>
<p>Thing is, I don't really think we get particularly "rusty" enough on things to have to spend hours and hours relearning stuff. I've kept all my books and notes from college and grad school, as have my colleagues. Any time we have to design something out of the ordinary, we'll pull out an old reference, check a few things, and keep going. It's part of our normal work day, though... It's not like I go home every day and study, like I did in college.</p>
<p>Also, I really enjoy what I do.</p>
<p>That's key... I can't imagine being stuck forever doing something I hated. As a result, I really don't mind reading cool articles on innovative new things being done in the field. In my spare time, I <em>do</em> sometimes drive by construction sites that I find interesting, park my car, sit on my bumper and figure out how the new building's being put together. I don't <em>have</em> to do these things, but I do. I think it's pretty cool. They help in my job, too, which is nice.</p>
<p>Later in my career, I'll get more involved in code committees, and in technical committees in professional societies. That'll take up a couple of evenings a month. There are the occasional one-day workshops on a new design technique that I'll want to go to. There are a few conferences a year that I'll want to go to, which will involve some travel.</p>
<p>I'm more or less in the construction industry, which means that as an engineer, I need to occasionally go to observe or inspect construction sites. Working in a larger firm, that means that I occasionally need to travel. If things go wrong on a construction site (eg, the fab shop has sent out steel that doesn't match my specs... by a <em>lot</em>...), I may occasionally be called upon to go back to my hotel room and crunch numbers to see whether or not construction needs to be stopped and we need to send back those pieces, or whether things are technically okay, construction can proceed, and I just need to yell at the shop for deviating from the shop drawings later on.</p>
<p>My hours sometimes depend upon my clients. If I'm working for a client who's fairly laid-back, then my hours are fairly nine-to-five. If, however, the client is a bit of a pain and wants their plans now-now-now, then when it comes to their project's crunch time, I may be getting to the office an hour or two earlier and staying an hour or two later. Occasional weekends are involved (I was here at the office or working at my home office most of this past weekend finishing up a project), but beyond that, my hours are really flexible (I unilaterally declared yesterday to be Saturday and stayed home to do laundry and dishes).</p>
<p>All in all, it's not a bad gig, timewise. I'm working hard, but it's not the constant work that school was. I only take work home if I want less on my desk the next day, or if I want to take off early. We have words for people who take stacks of work home every day: they're workaholics. That's frowned upon. Unlike other fields, when you're at work as an engineer, you're actually flexing that brain muscle while you're at work. I do a lot more hand calculation than I thought I was going to be doing when I was in school, but I don't mind it. There's something very honest about the money I earn, and I like that... But when you're crunching numbers and cranking out designs and watching those designs go up on a construction site, your brain's on, and it's the same way for other branches of engineering (or at least, my friends in other fields and I have talked about it, and they say it is). It's not one of those jobs that requires some know-how and you can let your brain click over to autopilot while you do some mindless stuff for a few hours in between your actual work. In engineering, you're doing some serious mental stretching, all day long. I really like it, but if you do it more than 50 hours a week or so with no break, all year long, you're gonna burn out, and firms know that.</p>
<p>The work I do outside of my nine-to-five (or more accurately, my seven-to-three... construction folk rise early, and that's when they start calling the office to freak out at us about whatever went fubar at the 2 AM concrete pour, or whatever...) outside of those crazy deadline sprees is primarily personal enrichment, isn't as mentally challenging as the daily crunch, and is voluntary and unguided but more or less necessary to become the kind of engineer I want to become.</p>
<p>Ultimately, if I really want it to be, though, my time after I go home is nearly exclusively my own. I like that.</p>
<p>From what I've seen, it varies... a lot. It depends on how much work your company is able to pull in, especially if it's a small firm. I've worked with engineers that have pulled 70 hour weeks. These same engineers have also gone through periods where they were able to take one day off every other week.</p>
<p>As an engineer I've pulled 90 a week. But that was more extenuating circumstances.</p>
<p>Some really long weeks when we were trying to get a plant back on line. Long time average not much over 40 hours a week, but definitely over.</p>
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Some really long weeks when we were trying to get a plant back on line.
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True. So true.</p>