Do Engineers Actually Engineer?

This is definitely a strange question. I mean, engineers are called engineers because… they engineer, right? To engineer something is to design and/or build something. Yet, in the jobs I’ve had as an engineer, I haven’t really seen any of this.

I graduated with a BSEE in 2013. I was excited to finally get out into the world and apply my knowledge in the field. It took me about three months or so to get an offer outside of school. The offer was much lower than I expected for an entry level engineer, but I wanted to finally move on away from my college town and finally get experience.

I worked for an avionics company. My main job was to support production (Production Support Engineer). Boards would fail, I’d try to fix them, find trends in failures, make processes better, etc. Looking back on it, it wasn’t too bad of a job. But the pay and the benefits were terrible. Not only that, but the environment felt complacent. As a new engineer, I wanted to make a difference and make things better as well as learn things from my seniors. Instead, I got an environment of old cranky engineers who really refused to actually get anything done. Even the simplest of things were turned into much more difficult ones and were “outside of the budget”. This made no sense to me, I was told to always do your best and never accept “this is the way we’ve always done it” as an answer. Yet here I was, trying to improve, only to be discouraged from building any sort of career skills.

I could only stay there for a year and a half before I decided I had enough and couldn’t stand it. I could go on about my next few jobs, but it really just was a pattern of the same thing. I kept expecting to learn something new from these jobs. Maybe a senior engineer would take me under his wing. Instead, I would read one document and be told that suddenly I was the expert. I was becoming afraid that this was all the world had to offer for engineers. Sit in a cube/office, type some documents, and fantasize about what it would be like to actually design and test something. Well it’s been 4 years since I graduated, and honestly, that’s all I’ve found.

I’m not alone in this though. I’ve scoured the internet for like minded people and have found that there are a lot of engineers like me out there. Computer Science Engineers who sit at a desk and hardly even program. Mechanical Engineers who hated programming in school, only to end up at a desk staring at code all day. Electrical engineers being told to reformat a spreadsheet. What happened? What happened to the days where engineers actually engineered things? It seems like WWII was the only time when engineers actually mattered.

It doesn’t make it any better to find out the word engineer is overused in job titles. I mean seriously? Office Engineer? I think you mean secretary. Sanitation Engineer? Sales Engineer? It’s just ridiculous and makes real engineers look like a joke.

I’ve moved across the country in order to find an engineering job out there that has some level of fulfillment. And here I am in Arizona still looking. I’ve started to care less about the career and more about my personal life. That may sound like a good thing, but here’s the problem with that.

I chose to be an engineer. Why? Because I’ve always had a fascination with science and math. I wanted a job that I would enjoy so that it didn’t feel like a job. That’s what they say right? Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. Well, it definitely feels like I’m working. In order to feel any sort of satisfaction anymore, I’ve had to start projects at home that actually stimulate my brain like school did. So I am forced to engineer at home and be a desk jockey at work.

The sad part of all this is I don’t know what to do. I can’t see myself doing any other job. I don’t want to go to medical school and spend even more money on education than I already have. I could become an analyst, but wouldn’t it be more of the same thing that I have seen in engineering? Microsoft Office, scheduling meetings, watching the clock tick to the end of the shift. I feel lost and I’m not sure where to go from here. It’s really just led me to depression and anxiety. I can’t keep going on like this. I need a change in my life. I just don’t know where to find it.