What Does an Engineer Actually Do

This article aims to answer the question: what does an engineer actually do? If you come from a non-engineering family, like me, this question is surprisingly difficult to answer. Most guides tend to give general answers like "engineers build things", or "engineering is an art and a science", "engineering is the application of science to make practical things", etc. etc. While those things are certainly true, they don't answer the question of what an engineer actually does on a day to day basis or what roles they play in companies. This article will hopefully answer some of these questions.

Design Engineer

We'll start with the design engineer. This is the stereotypical picture most people have of an engineer: someone in a hardhat scrambling around with blueprints and a slide rule. The design engineer is the person responsible for designing the product the company sells. In the end, this means producing the schematics or other deliverables (i.e. software, firmware, etc.) that will then be used by manufacturing to turn the plans into a real-life product.

Design engineering also involves making (and fixing) prototypes of the product before it gets into manufacturing. This usually involves some lab work, either working on scale models, prototype circuit boards, etc. Mechanical engineers nowadays tend to make a lot of prototype parts using 3-D printers, which is pretty cool. Electrical engineers will make prototype circuit boards. Civil engineers may make scale models and test the structural integrity in a lab.

I would estimate that probably less than half of working engineers are design engineers. There are a whole lot more types of jobs engineers do, and every design engineer needs quite a bit of support. The pros of design engineering is that it is very technically challenging and you will likely receive a lot of training throughout your career. The cons is that it involves a lot of office work. While it is still social and you have to interface with colleagues, you will spend a lot of time in your cube working on your designs.

Project Engineer

The project engineer is responsible for making sure a particular project at the company gets finished to spec, on time, and within the budget. They are responsible for coordinating the efforts of the various engineers involved in a project, making sure all standards are met, dealing with outside vendors, scheduling, budgeting, etc. The upside of project engineering is that it can feel like owning your own small business. You get a budget and in the end have to see a project through. Of course, the catch is that the product engineer is not the manager, they have authority over a project, not people. In most companies it tends to work out, but it is an important distinction to keep in mind. The upsides of project engineering is that its very social and multi-faceted, and you get to see a project from a high-level. The project engineer, however, will not be involved in the low-level design of each component of the project.

Applications Engineer

The applications engineer is not quite designer and not quite salesman, but somewhere in the middle. Applications engineers are the technical 'how-to' people at a company. They will know every nuance of how to take full advantage of a company's product and will interface with customers, helping to solve their customers' problems. A good example is MathWorks, the company that makes Matlab. If you want to use Matlab for a particular application, you can talk to an application engineer at the Mathworks and they will recommend how to use the product to solve the problem you're trying to tackle.

Application engineering tends to involve a fair bit of travel, as they are often flown (or driven) on-site to meet face to face with design engineers at a company. When you're not travelling, you're probably answering emails or talking on the phone. Applications engineers also tend to receive a lot of training on the company's products, so they are the domain experts and can advise customers.

Field Engineer

The field engineer is fairly self-explanatory. They will go out into the field and, well, get things done. This usually means supervising and troubleshooting an installation of a new product (i.e. a new manufacturing machine your company designed and is putting into a factory) or advising and coordinating efforts to fix or replace a product that is already active. Field engineers will usually be supported by design engineers at the home office. The job tends to involve a lot of travel, but can pay quite well. It can also be stressful, as there is often a lot of money on the line and schedules are tight. You're also directly in the cross-hairs if anything goes wrong.

Test Engineer

The role of the test engineer is to take the beautiful baby painstakingly crafted by the design engineers and to do everything in their power to break it. The guys in white coats watching as a car is driven into a brick wall: test engineers. Test engineers will design and execute the testing regimens a new product goes through. They'll make sure it meets all required standards (and there are usually a lot). If anything does break, they give that feedback to the design engineer, who is then tasked with fixing the problem.

Sales Engineer

We now come to the black sheep of the engineering family: the sales engineer. The sales engineer is not quite an engineer anymore, as they are not really involved in making things (unlike the other job types I listed above). However, technical sales are very important, and these jobs are usually staffed by engineers. Sales engineers will usually be involved in selling the company's products to other engineers, or technical people. As such, they need a good science and engineering background, understand the customer's needs, and understand the product being sold. The advantages of a sales engineering position is that it again involves a lot of social interaction, can involve a fair bit of travel, and tends to pay quite well (commission is often involved).

How to Avoid a Bad Thesis Supervisor

If you're doing your Masters or PhD, getting stuck with an insane supervisor can extend your stay by a few years, really mess with your head (depression is quite common among grad students), and generally drive you up the wall. Unfortunately, the professorial ranks tend to attract more than their fair share of eccentric to downright batshit crazy individuals. Due to academic freedom and tenure, there is also very little oversight or checks and balances to keep the worst ones constrained. So, its not entirely unlikely there are a few bad eggs you have to keep clear off.

The problem is this: how do you know which professor to avoid, especially if you're from a different school (or country)? The answer is judicious use of RateMyProfessor.Com. Here's what you do:

1. Look up the potential supervisor on rate my professor.
2. There is a lot of crap on that site, so you have to know what to look for.
3. Look for comments that say the prof is organized, this is key since their organization is pivotal in you actually finishing
4. Avoid profs with very low ratings, more than likely these are the sociopaths
5. Don't be scared off by profs with an average rating (i.e. high 2's or 3's). A lot of undergrads give profs a low rating if they're hard or don't give them a free pass (or if the material is challenging)
6. Don't put too much stock in really high ratings. A lot of times profs that are really disorganized and easy (and hence everyone gets good grades) get high marks, even though they are really lazy bullshitters. You don't want a prof like this as a supervisor either.

So there you have it. Rate my professor is your first step in screening any potential thesis supervisors.

Engineering: Hardest Job to Fill in America

Keep your head up, freshly graduated and out of work engineer! According to Forbes, engineering is currently the hardest job right now to fill in America. A direct quote from the story, about why engineers are just so hard to find:

We have whole generations of people loving liberal arts, not going into science and math," says Larry Jacobson, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers.

Not only is there an incoming student shortage, but there is a large quantity of baby-boomers on the verge of retirement. Particularly in industries like utilities, companies are desperately trying to fill positions before all of their talent walks out the door, taking decades of experience with them.

So it appears engineering still has a very bright future, even if finding a job may be hard at the moment. Remember your career spans 40+ years, this will hardly be the last dip. Of course, these companies are still not going to take just anyone off the street, or necessarily train you from the ground up like the old days. Some relevant co-op experience or a Master's degree will be an invaluable help.

Weekend Roundup VI: Best So Far

I realize that the site is still fairly young, however quite a few people joined us after the first few months, so I thought it would be nice to recap some of the best (in my opinion) stories we've had thus far. If you're new to the site, I'd recommend starting with these:

Picking an Engineering Major

A laundry list of what to consider when you're first starting out in engineering and trying to figure out your major. Its a difficult task because at this point, you have no idea what each field is about, beyond some vague notions, and where this whole crazy adventure will lead you. This handy list will help you cut through the bullshit and (hopefully) make a more informed choice.

The Economics of Why Your Class Sucks

This is one of my favourite articles on the site. Its a succinct explanation of why undergrad classes have the peculiarities that they do, which has to do with how universities are organized and funded (hint: your class is probably somewhere near the bottom of your prof's to do list)

Beware the Lure of Department Flash

When engineering departments are trying to convince you to join up on their 'info nights', they are often lying through their teeth. Read this article to find out just how much putting a good spin on things there is!

Engineering Jobs: What Have Graduates Been Doing

Its hard to figure out exactly what engineers do after they graduate. There are so many areas where they're needed, and its hard to know what a job is just by reading the help wanted listing. This is a guide of what people I've actually known have been doing after finishing school to hopefully shed some light on the situation.

The Evil Professor

One thing is a constant in most university programs: at some point you will be forced to take a class taught by a complete sociopath of a professor. The professorial ranks tend to attract the quirky and off-beat, you need to be in order to spend so much time in your own head thinking of things off in the clouds. Sometimes however, quirky turns into scary.

There will always be at least one professor who makes your life a living hell. They combine a few key qualities:

• An ego so huge it has its own gravitational field
  
• A stunning contempt for students
  
• Unrealistic expectations
  
• Assignments and tests on topics you never covered in class (or is even in your textbooks)
  
• Lack of self-awareness of their own poor teaching skills
  

There's a strong corollarly that goes along with this: The worse the professor the more class time they'll spend discussing how it's the student's responsibility to learn and they can't “deposit information into your head”. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about the sadistic prof ... each class is a professor's private fiefdom, especially if they're tenured, and no other prof will stick out their neck to try to change things. You'll just have to grit your teeth and struggle through, and just try to do better than the class average.

I actually had a prof that went through a list of “Qualities that Distinguish an A student from a C student”. Apparently an A student never looks at the clock and is engaged in the lecture, while a C student keeps checking the clock and doesn't listen. I alternated between looking at the clock and staring into my coffee most of his lecture and got an A+, so fark you Dr. Asshat, maybe students keep looking at the clock because you're boring and can't teach.