<p>What are you talking about? Guys doing IT implementation work long hours too. They generally work for consulting companies like accenture, deloitte, etc. and work 60 hour weeks on average with no overtime. Contracting companies can be good or bad. For example, construction contracting companies like Fluor will give you 42 vacation days per year and bill your overtime hours as additional vacation time at time and a half whereas sweatshop companies like Kiewit will work you 55-60 hours a week with no regard to your worked overtime and effectively just rent their workforce since the turnover is so high. Not that it matters since a monkey could do construction management.</p>
<p>Hey, take it up with Globaltraveller - he was the one who asserted that one can avoid long (unpaid) hours by becoming a contractor, for he’s doing that himself. My point is that I rarely encounter many contractors from the traditional engineering disciplines, but instead seem to come from the software or IT ranks.</p>
<p>Oh. Well I think in engineering it just depends on who you work for. There are a lot of companies that will work you long hours without overtime, particularly those doing project based work (consulting and contracting companies). Personally I’d like to work for my city government since they work you strict 37 hour weeks with pretty good pay. Start you out at about 60k and get up to 90-100k within 7 years. Not the highest paying but generally the highest paying jobs in engineering offer low “hourly wages” since you’re on salary working high hours.</p>
<p>Then perhaps you’d care to identify the city in question, so that readers on this forum would know where to apply for such a job that pays a solid salary for clearly light working hours?</p>
<p>One of my goals on CC is to help those engineers who feel that they sadly have to leave engineering for fear of being stuck in jobs that don’t pay them as much as would other careers, force them to work long and uncompensated hours, or both. That is why I have been asking for non-obvious but concrete and actionable steps that they could take to find promising opportunities as engineers. An engineering job for your city government might well be one such opportunity. Ultimately, I would like to compile a list of all such opportunities.</p>
<p>Otherwise, we are going to continue to witness an emigration of the most talented and enterprising students away from engineering. For example, I notice that you have yourself admitted on another thread that you are considering leaving engineering for law school.</p>
<p>I work on NSA Federal contracts which limits charged overtime hours. Add to that the very competitive nature of these DC-area defense contractors who would use paid overtime to snatch all of the available talent if they could offer that. NSA knows this and prefer to deal with MANY defense contractors (small and large) therefore limiting overtime hours spreads out the available talent.</p>
<p>I cannot comment on non-INTEL contracts but NSA/CIA/FBI gigs do not allow much charged overtime and employers do the same. Of course, an employee CAN work as many unpaid hours as they want but WHY do it if the NSA/CIA/FBI contract will usually slide the due dates?</p>
<p>Then, again, perhaps you could provide an actionable pathway for the traditional engineers to find jobs working on NSA Federal contracts. As I said before, I can think of plenty of EE’s, ME’s, ChemE’s, etc. who are being forced to work long unpaid overtime hours for fear of losing their jobs entirely. {For example, I can think of several Boeing engineers who haven’t had a single day off for months, not even the weekends, for no extra pay.} Many of them would surely prefer to work a standard 40 hours a week.</p>
<p>Heck, it would even be helpful to even instruct the CS graduates as to how to obtain NSA Federal contract positions. Again, I can think of plenty of software engineers working torturous hours for no extra pay, for which a 40 hour work week would feel like a vacation. I highly doubt that many software engineers at Microsoft, Oracle, or (especially) Google are working only 40 hours a week, and those that do likely won’t have a job for long.</p>
<p>Yeah, but I’m thinking of leaving engineering because I find it boring. The notion of engineering being about math and science is an outright lie. However, I think that the pay relative to investment is pretty good. </p>
<p>The city is a large Canadian city. It might be different in the USA, but as I said before, there are plenty of companies that don’t work you overtime and pay good. DOW Chemical does 37.5 hour weeks with very good pay (up here they start EITs around 67k and I think it’s similar in the states). Utilities companies also generally had good hours, pay, and benefits. The trick is getting on with a good company that doesn’t operate like a body shop. Labeling engineering as a field where people work overtime for mediocre pay is pretty misguided. Like any other large broad field (finance, etc.) hours and pay can be good or bad. The best deal in engineering is probably getting on with an oil giant, who pay ALL of their workers well and won’t work you overtime. Engineers at exxon, chevron, etc. get to 6 figures pretty quick and have nice cushy jobs. Only problem is you’ll be working in a plant or industrial site until you get an office job.</p>
<p>“Yeah, but I’m thinking of leaving engineering because I find it boring. The notion of engineering being about math and science is an outright lie.”</p>
<p>Sorry i dont want to go off topic but what do you mean by that? I want to go into engineering and the reason im going into it is because i like math and science.</p>
<p>I’m afraid I have to beg to differ. I can think of quite a few engineers in the oil/petrochemical industry who routinely pull 60+ workweeks for no extra pay. </p>
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<p>Then as a service to our readers, we should name as many as we can. </p>
<p>But more importantly are the following questions:</p>
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<p>And that is exactly the trick. The operational question then is, how does somebody actually land a job with such a company? What are the actionable, yet non-obvious steps - hence, no platitudes such as “work hard” or “be the best you can”, but actual non-obvious but accessible advice - that one should take to maximize their chances of landing such an offer? </p>
<p>After all, like I said, I can think of plenty of engineers who graduated with strong grades from top programs who now feel stuck with ostensibly desirable employers such as Boeing, P&G, or General Electric that require them to work long hours for no extra pay. For example, I can think of plenty of GE engineers who regularly work up to 80 hours a week, yet receive nothing extra in return. I know one former P&G engineer who actually resorted to sleeping in his car in the company parking lot because he simply didn’t have time to go home because of the demands of his job, yet was never paid a dime in overtime. {It is no wonder that he’s now a former P&G engineer.} </p>
<p>What are these people doing wrong? More importantly, how can we help these people? They’re not enjoying their job. </p>
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<p>To be fair, engineering, for all of its problems, is still better than what the majority of other careers can offer. Yet it still has significant match-up problems with the alternative careers that many engineers contemplate, such as finance, consulting, or (in your case), law. This is particularly true of the engineering students from the top programs for which those alternative careers are highly feasible options.</p>
<p>I’ve been checking out the discussions on Dice.com forums, and it seems that lot of posters are suggesting that CS jobs are extremely hard to get… is this correct? College Confidential forums seem to express the opposite… so what is the real scenario? I am expecting to graduate Spring 2012… I would like to be able to find work right before or right after I get out of college…</p>
<p>sakky, I know we debated this in at least one other thread and I know this will just lead to the discussion going in circles but you could ask this very same question for almost any career. What steps can anyone in any profession take to find such a job?</p>
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<p>We are probably going to have to agree to disagree on this topic again. What match up problems are you talking about. As you know, many people in finance, consulting and law have to work extremely long hours also. A friend of mine is a lawyer and he always says that people only look at salaries and often don’t consider the amount of hours that one has to work to earn that salary. Chances are that top earning consultants or lawyers are going to be working much more than 40 hours a week. Sure some engineers will work overtime, but most of the companies that I know of do indeed pay overtime to engineers.</p>
<p>Finance and law are not guaranteed paths to great jobs, even for students at top schools. The important thing is to do what you enjoy. Most engineers that I know seem to enjoy their jobs. I have seen surveys that put lawyers near the bottom of most professions in terms of job satisfaction.</p>
<p>I will give you the fundamental rule on how I view the computer/information science industry…</p>
<p>If your skill-set is in high demand and you STAY that way, the industry loves you…If your skills are in less demand, this can be a cold industry.</p>
<p>which companies? The exact company is important, not just the industry. Like the example I gave before with Fluor and Kiewit. They’re both top F500 companies in the construction industry and are direct competitors. Fluor offers high salaries, gives 42 days vacation per year, logs overtime as additional vacation time at time and a half, whereas Kiewit is a terrible company to work for. Guys working in big oil will work 60 hour weeks sometimes. It isn’t a strict 9-5 but those weeks are not typical.</p>
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<p>Same way you land any other good job. Internships+good grades+good interview. Ofcourse that’s for on campus recruiting. You can get on with good companies like Fluor after starting out at lesser companies. It isn’t like finance where if you don’t get into a BB Ibank straight after graduation you’re never getting in. And a lot of the companies are regional (like local utilities companies, for instance) so it’s hard to make a list.</p>
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<p>Well they should’ve researched their companies better then. Just because a company places on the fortune 500 list and is internationally known doesn’t mean it’s a good company to work for. There are a lot of top companies that overwork their employees. However, those guys from GE probably have pretty good resumes to transfer to a different company.</p>
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<p>I wouldn’t say finance in general is better than engineering. High finance like ibanking is only attractive because of the opportunities it opens up (despite the 80 hour work weeks). Consulting at places like mckinsey, bcg, etc. is 60 hour work weeks. I wouldn’t really view those careers as alternatives to engineering. I mean, how many people have a shot at either? I agree that if you’re a 4.0 student, you should probably ditch engineering unless you’re really into design or R&D.</p>
<p>I think what you’re saying is that engineering is good for average students, but not for those with better options, and I completely agree with that. But there are plenty of engineering companies that don’t work you like a dog.</p>
As another mentioned, this was already addressed extensively in another thread, and with similar results. There are no silver bullets, and the thing about the obvious advice is NOT that everyone tries it unsuccessfully but rather that few really try it. I know a great deal of engineers and students who say that they are working hard, but that is a relative term and ultimately there are lots of people working harder. There are many people who go and do internships who manage to leave no impression - hardly a success story. I have heard a ton of people scream that there are no jobs to be had, after reciting a laundry list of requirements that reduce the potential hirers to maybe two or three companies in the country!</p>
<p>As to the issues of bad jobs in engineering, I have known people who worked those jobs too. In many cases they were working in companies or departments where their peers were working 40 hour weeks and having a blast. In many cases this is a result of an apparent willingness to be abused, but my company used to have a policy that indicated that you worked however long it took to finish your assigned tasks - efficient people left after 40 hours, avid social-networkers had 12-hour days. Ultimately, these people need to be looking for new jobs - in engineering or out. It is up to them to say that this is too much, no one else is going to do it for them.</p>
<p>Many software projects center around having a browser front-end which accesses Java objects using Hibernate (or similar) and store/retrieve data from a database system like Oracle or MS SQL Server.</p>
<p>Piggybacking on CosmicFish’s comment about no silver bullets, I don’t want to say that my job does not come with some “cons”. All I really mentioned was not having to work long hours. There are some “cons” about working defense contracts…especially INTEL ones. Like:</p>
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<li><p>Having to ask “can I visit this foreign country?” for any vacation like I am asking my parents can I go over to a friend’s house. Then I have to wait for an answer of yes/no. You even have to ask to goto Canada.</p></li>
<li><p>Having your private life pretty much opened up to some folks for them to just sift through things. This includes random checks on your credit reports and god forbid if you ever miss a payment on ANYTHING. You won’t be disqualified but be prepared to discuss it…with someone who you just shook hands with 20 minutes ago too.</p></li>
<li><p>Knowing that any type of action that requires you to interact with some court…even as minor as a speeding ticket has to be at least discussed.</p></li>
<li><p>Knowing that the newest technology of the private sector has to be evaluated and evaluated by the federal “powers that be” before it is approved to be used on new projects. By that time, the private sector has something new, so you are always at least a half-step behind the private sector in new technology.</p></li>
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<p>Fair enough, then if there are truly no silver bullets, then there truly is little counterargument to be found against those engineering students who feel that they have to pursue alternative careers to enjoy the type of success they desire. To paraphrase one guy who I recently talked to: “If I’m going to have to work the same long hours in engineering as I would in another, higher-paying career anyway, then at least I should pocket the money.” </p>
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<p>Well, I do find it odd that I happen to keep finding the ‘inefficient’ engineers. For example, of all of the engineers at Boeing that I know (of which there are many), not a single one could be said to have worked a reasonable number of hours during the last year or two. The same could be said of all of the engineers I know at GE, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc. </p>
<p>Now perhaps it is true that I just happen to be the endogenous element who just happens to coincidentally know only inefficient social butterflies. But, generally speaking, I have never heard of the companies that I mentioned to be noted for having short working hours. Far from it, in fact. </p>
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<p>So let’s identify these companies. </p>
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<p>Sure thing: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell. </p>
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<p>Uh, once again, that’s not my job, because I was not the one making the claim that engineering could offer those types of jobs. Those who actually make that claim (i.e. Globaltraveller) should be the ones who should substantiate the claim. Why should I be compelled to substantiate a claim that’s not even mine? </p>
<p>The bottom line is that if you’re going to claim that engineering offers you the opportunity for a strong salary for low working hours, then it behooves you to offer a clear pathway by which one can obtain such jobs. Otherwise, don’t make the claim. </p>
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<p>And that’s precisely the issue. From what I have seen, plenty of engineers not only work overtime, but unpaid overtime. If you’re going to be compelled to work long hours anyway, why not actually make more money for the privilege by taking a job in finance, consulting, or law? </p>
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<p>That’s obvious palaver. Everybody knows that you need good grades. Everybody knows that you need strong interviews. What I want is the nonobvious steps. </p>
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<p>But that’s specifically my point. For the engineering students at the premier-brand schools, such as the MIT’s and Stanford’s of the world, for which investment banking is a highly feasible option, exactly why should they choose to work as engineers? </p>
<p>As long as we are unable to answer this question, then we will continue to see many such graduates continue to choose against engineering. </p>
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<p>But that’s my point - perhaps you can help these people with their research by actually providing them with a list of companies that will pay them well but won’t force them to work ridiculous hours, along with a non-obvious but actionable set of steps for them to procure such jobs. </p>
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<p>Rather than a 4.0, what you really need for those types of jobs is a brand-name degree, such as one from MIT or Stanford. Regarding those engineering students, should they choose to work as engineers when consulting and finance are highly realistic options for them? </p>
<p>Again, if we cannot answer this question, then we’re continue to see the graduates from the most prestigious engineering schools in the world sadly migrate away from engineering. What do you have to say to them that could possibly stop this braindrain?</p>