Anyone work in engineering? How’s it going?

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rectifryer

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Higher paying roles seem real unstable right now. Engineering firms are being burnt down by private equity and the stable trading is ferocious. I haven’t seen a quality product put out in a decade….its just not the focus of any org I’ve worked with. Anyone else seeing this?
 
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Furry

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rectifryer said:
Higher paying roles seem real unstable right now. Engineering firms are being burnt down by PE and the stable trading is ferocious. I haven’t seen a quality product put out in a decade….its just not the focus of any org I’ve worked with. Anyone else seeing this?
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My relative who just retired as the head engineer/chemist of a petrochemical company left in the middle of their highest sales/profit year they've had by a huge margin. They offered obscene bonuses to stay on. I got to hear a lot about GE engineers when I went to the retirement party (that shit company is still in business?). Apparently they hire swarms of engineers, especially h1bs, that suck ass and stumble over each other. His company had precisely two.

In their line of work, if you mess up its lawsuit city. Good engineers get to keep their job.
 
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rectifryer

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Furry said:
My relative who just retired as the head engineer/chemist of a petrochemical company left in the middle of their highest sales/profit year they've had by a huge margin. They offered obscene bonuses to stay on. I got to hear a lot about GE engineers when I went to the retirement party (that shit company is still in business?). Apparently they hire swarms of engineers, especially h1bs, that suck ass and stumble over each other. His company had precisely two.

In their line of work, if you mess up its lawsuit city. Good engineers get to keep their job.
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I’ve seen much more of the ge side of things rather than the converse. Your relative’s company sounds like they knew how to operate. H1bs have flooded every civilian industry to the point that domestic engineers are competing over positions that can’t have foreigners.
 
TJT

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I am currently a Staff Software Engineer, working in Data Platform Engineering.

No shortage of opportunities for my discipline, if you will.

Or do you only mean the Professional Engineer certified type roles?
 
Caeden

Caeden

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I am in a high level technical staff role in specialty chemicals. I almost left two years ago and got offered a 35% per year retention bonus for two years. We are bleeding experience. We are not enthusiastic about H1Bs either. I am concerned that R&D has stagnated in the specialty while China is catching up. The US can’t compete with their costs. At all. I’ve seen Lang factors as high as 10 on some projects.
 
Intrinsic

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I work with a bunch of different firms providing PE stamped MEP, structural, geotechnical, foundation, etc within Telecom and they're dying to turn around documents b/c they don't have the staff to support the amount of work we have. Project schedules are slowed waiting for designs to come back. One major company that recently acquired a smaller consulting company I've contracted through is growing at an accelerated rate as well. Unfortunately, they do outsource some "grunt" work to India, but it is very small relative to the size and amount of work they do.
 
Slaanesh69

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I am a development engineer in oil and gas, and the Oil and Gas Industry in Canada is as unstable as it has always been, more recently because of the instability in oil price with all the Iran shit. You can't even fathom the whiplash changes in programs my company has made through 2026.

This industry is hiring mostly data-trained, mid level engineers, and us old Gen-X farts are being marginalized even though we are still the core of success in EVERY company: for example, I am the oldest development engineer in my company, and my asset is the top producer and the foundation of corporate cash flow. It was not that way when I joined.

So if you are about mid-30s and have a diploma or some training in data analytics, and an engineering degree, you can get hired immediately as long as you get AI to word match the job description in the creation of your cover letter.

If you are my age, you hold onto your job like grim death.
 
R

rectifryer

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A lot of petroleum engineers in here. That’s cool and not foreseen. I bet you guys are killing it as you say. To clarify, by PE I meant private equity as private equity keeps buying everywhere I seem to work then burning it down.
 
mkopec

mkopec

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Development engineer in Automotive, namely Instrument panel and plastics design. Shit in auto is dying though. Were being replaced by H1B poos and if not that then all the stuff is being outsourced to india en masse. I work for a tier one supplier and there is still jobs to be had in the OEM, but even they are outsourcing vast swaths of engineering and design work. Thank god im almost retired.
 
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Kobayashi

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Should be a great time to get into engineering, there is an incredible amount of change happening. Unfortunately, too many asshole bean counters are rising to the top again. They see engineering as a cost and a commodity, not a skilled occupation that generates value.

My company (automotive) has a local hiring freeze, has basically stopped paying out raises here, and is hiring like gangbusters in Mexico. I feel sorry for the Mexicans, they just expanded the Brazil office. I guarantee in the near future, Mexico is going to be too expensive as well.

I've still got 15 years to ride out. I suspect I'll have to do an industry change before then.
 
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Nabi

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My former best friend and uni roommate started as a controls engineer for 3M back around 2005 (no idea what position he is now). They're slowly laying off engineers and he believes 3M won't have an internal engineering team in about 10 years. I suggested he meet some Somalis and start a daycare. No contact from him since then.
 
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Kobayashi

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Not sure if it's still the case, but oilfield services companies (Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, etc) were always looking for new engineers they could burn out back when I graduated. No experience required. The job interview was literally just sleep depriving a large group of people and weeding out the ones who couldn't stay up. Pay was good, but long hours were expected and they work you so hard they don't expect you to have a shelf life longer than 5 years in the field.
 
Borzak

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Not an engineer. I work with a variety of engineers. Turnover is very low and has been that way for a while. Civil and mechanical engineers mostly supporting the petrochemical industry. When someone does leave or someone is hired it's mostly someone changing to another company that does the same stuff. Jacobs does most of it now since a lot of the jobs are now contracted out post 1981. I knew some engineers for Dow that at one time were temp Kellys girls, that did not go over well. I wouldn't say it's growing, more shifting around. Not petroleum engineers, all these jobs are supporting chemical plants and refineries, who knows going forward with refining and marking subsector of the S&P 500 being up near 50% year to date.
 
Hateyou

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Work in engineering but I’m not an engineer. Our mechanical, electrical, controls engineers are stable but software engineers are getting replaced by Indians quite often. Some of the long term software engineers are still here but mid and low level all getting wiped out and moved overseas.
 
Hekotat

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Equity groups are destroying this country. Torch a company, make their profit and move on. Been seeing it for awhile now.

As for jobs, a position I got immediately declined for I ended up getting hired immediately for once I met the hiring manager through a friend.

He had no idea ai was auto rejecting everyone and said he couldn't get a single interview setup through corporate for 2 montbs as no candidates "matched". Basically the people in charge of setting up the filters have no idea whats going on and are likely copy pasting requirements from a website.
 
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Caeden

Caeden

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Borzak said:
Not an engineer. I work with a variety of engineers. Turnover is very low and has been that way for a while. Civil and mechanical engineers mostly supporting the petrochemical industry. When someone does leave or someone is hired it's mostly someone changing to another company that does the same stuff. Jacobs does most of it now since a lot of the jobs are now contracted out post 1981. I knew some engineers for Dow that at one time were temp Kellys girls, that did not go over well. I wouldn't say it's growing, more shifting around. Not petroleum engineers, all these jobs are supporting chemical plants and refineries, who knows going forward with refining and marking subsector of the S&P 500 being up near 50% year to date.
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Best piping engineer I have ever worked with is a local on site contractor. We have tried to hire him, but he knows he will be doing the same job, including unpaid overtime, as he does now but instead he gets paid overtime and is paid hourly instead of salary. No brainer on his part. And we eat it because he’s fucking good.

The biggest problem I’ve seen is the George Floyd era resulted in a lot of younger females in Technical Group Leadership. But they gossip, overshare shit they shouldnt, and generally favor women over developing either sex technically (if that makes sense).

Retirement brain drain is hitting hard. And we prioritized “leadership” skills aka bullshitting skills over the introverted, bowels of the plant technical folks. So now we’re left with a fuckton of young engineers that want to be business people and can’t calculate an energy balance or read a pump curve.
 
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Caeden

Caeden

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Hateyou said:
Work in engineering but I’m not an engineer. Our mechanical, electrical, controls engineers are stable but software engineers are getting replaced by Indians quite often. Some of the long term software engineers are still here but mid and low level all getting wiped out and moved overseas.
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Related - I am not a great programmer. So all the little bullshit program tasks id kick to a junior programmer to make for me - AI is getting it right enough now I can fix it. And these are onesie twosie things since I do staff work and most things are done in a data historian or a proprietary historian analyzer. Yeah. AI decimated my need for basic programming.
 
Hateyou

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Caeden said:
Related - I am not a great programmer. So all the little bullshit program tasks id kick to a junior programmer to make for me - AI is getting it right enough now I can fix it. And these are onesie twosie things since I do staff work and most things are done in a data historian or a proprietary historian analyzer. Yeah. AI decimated my need for basic programming.
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Yep it’s useful. I used to write SQL daily but got promoted into engineering and management roles the past 7 years. So I still write it every once in a while but I’m rusty, and writing anything complicated would take me forever, have to look up old stuff I wrote to remember how to do it. Now I just tell AI to write it for me, review the results and figure out if they make sense and done.
 
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