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Engineering

Engineering

This thread has been started so professionals or others involved in this sector can post their job related descriptions and experiences to help you better determine if this is the career/job you would like to pursue in the future.

Professional: Please tell what the job involves, the pros and cons, usual salary, and kinds of promotions
Future Professional: You may ask questions here, but please be specific

Note: This board should not be used for discussions relevant to other boards.

Engineering

I am classified as a Software Engineer although my job functions may well position me as an IT Specialist instead. My job description involve post-sales support of software hosted on midrange servers. Salary usually starts around $40,000 US and can go all the way up to $110,000. Pros are that you get to deal with almost a different situation every day and with the ever changing software due to new releases, etc, you never are stale and always being educated (which in the IT world is a good thing). The cons are that you sometimes deal with customers who are sometimes overbearing, incompetent and irrational. Some cases require you to travel to the customer site and basically hold their hand and appease them until they are happy. You also dont have the luxury of leaving at a specified time. If something goes wrong at the end of the work day or on the weekend, you can't put it off till a convenient time; its fix it now, or lose money. Like the old saying goes, Time is Money.

Engineering UFO & Writing Art Education Sciences

I am a manufacturing/process engineer, working in the automotive industry. This is, essentially, a subset of industrial engineering, but there are quite a few schools that offer manufacturing engineering as a separate degree.

In general, manufacturing engineers design and manage the production processes, including the documentation, watching and managing quality, keeping machines running properly, and implementing design changes in the product. We frequently design the entire process to make a particular part, then spec out the required equipment, tooling, and controls, then make sure it is all working right before the company pays for it all.

Normally, when working on the plant floor, it is a job that doesn't change a lot from day to day, as many of the projects are quite long-term. Even a simple assembly fixture can take four or five months to create the specifications, have a design made up, choose the vendor, and then have it built and run off.

However, it is a generally fascinating job. Especially when making gears, like I do.