Calling all engineers

[herm0016]

Originally posted by: TKE899
I am a Civil Engineer E.I.T. It appears that I may be the only non EE that frequents this site.

nope, ME. read above. there are others.

 

[KillerCharlie]

I'm Aero E, which is definitely the coolest of them all

 

[gorcorps]

I'm a metallurgical/materials engineer, which I'll explain even if nobody wants me to. I basically know the chemistry behind metals and other materials and what you need to add or do to them in order to make them do what you want.

 

[krnmastersgt]

Hmmm, I guess since I'm seriously considering engineering as my major I should interview everyone, or at least get general info. So to start, how about:

Discipline:
Years of experience:
Company:
Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10):
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise:
Do you enjoy what you do:

Currently I'm looking into Aeronautical or Mechanical engineering, but all disciplines are a welcome suggestion.
Thanks again and in advance.

 

[bobsmith1492]

I'll bite.

Electronics engineer
Private company (~20 people, 14 engineers, 5 design guys, the business boss guy, a couple of secretaries, and lots of interns!)
Job experience: 10 so far
Average salary: don't know or care, I've heard 60-70K but I'm at 40K (the area is cheap anyway and we get twice-yearly bonuses too)
I love it

We do projects for other companies, particularly those that need RF or electronics expertise. We work closely with the design group to come up with finished products as opposed to just being a skunkworks lab. As I said, we do lots of RF work plus circuit design and code for embedded systems. I filed for a patent a month or so ago after starting three months ago, so that was fun.

 

[DyslexicHobo]

I'll be an ME in a few years. Starting my sophomore year in a few months. I can't wait!

 

[herm0016]

Discipline: Mechanical Engineering
Years of experience: ( graduate in December, have had Co-op jobs)
Company: leading composites firm in wisconson
Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10):7
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise: i would expect at around 40000 for the engineering staff
Do you enjoy what you do: I did enjoy it, worked with wind energy.

 

[serializable]

Discipline: software engineer
Years of experience: 2 years
Company: health care company
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise: i started at a consulting company after i got my bachelors making $50k + profit sharing. i enjoyed the job since i got to travel and work on some cool projects. got my masters degree in cs and got recruited by someone that had heard about some of my work and now im making $90k + bonuses.
Do you enjoy what you do: yes to some extent. its challenging and i enjoy the people i work with.

 

[QuantumPion]

Originally posted by: krnmastersgt
Hmmm, I guess since I'm seriously considering engineering as my major I should interview everyone, or at least get general info. So to start, how about:

Discipline:
Years of experience:
Company:
Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10):
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise:
Do you enjoy what you do:

Currently I'm looking into Aeronautical or Mechanical engineering, but all disciplines are a welcome suggestion.
Thanks again and in advance.

Discipline: Nuclear Engineering
Years of experience: 4
Company: Utility (Power Company)
Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10): 7
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise: ~$60k-$70k
Do you enjoy what you do: yes, about 2/3 of the time.

Right now the nuclear industry is booming and there is a huge demand for nuclear engineers. Both because a huge number of them are baby boomers whom are retiring, and because of the likely new construction of plants in the near future.

Nuclear Engineering in college:
I really liked majoring in Nuc. E. It is a varied field, and you'll learn a lot of different subjects from material science to fluid dynamics, from electrical engineering to particle physics. Many universities offer dual-majors in mechanical engineering for only 1 or 2 additional semesters, which is a big plus.

Nuclear Engineering in industry:
Your experience in the industry may vary greatly depending on where you work. I work for a utility, and I do a lot of interesting problem solving but also a lot of mundane bureaucratic stuff. Starting pay is generally very good, as well as job locations and types. You can work in a city at corporate headquarters, near Washington D.C. for the NRC, or at one of the nuclear plants around the country.

 

[Zorba]

Originally posted by: gorcorps
I'm a metallurgical/materials engineer, which I'll explain even if nobody wants me to. I basically know the chemistry behind metals and other materials and what you need to add or do to them in order to make them do what you want.

I need a metal that can do 2400°F, yield stress of at least 100ksi at that temp, creep life of 1000hr (at temp and stress) and oxidation life of 1000hr at 2400 and 10000hr at 2100. Also needs to be able to do 25,000 cycles at stress and temp and have a density of less than 0.296lbm/in^3.

Oh and it can't have Rhenium or Yttrium.

If you could do that, you would have a building named after you at my company .

Questions:
Discipline: Airfoil heat transfer/cooling design engineering (heat transfer is a subset of Mechanical engineering)
Years of experience: BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering, 1 year not including experience during school
Company: Major aircraft engine manufacture
Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10): 4 (This is because of the company, not because I don't like engineering)
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise: When I was looking for jobs last year I was offered between 57K and 70K all in aerospace. Oil companies pay around 65K-80K, but that is for brai numbing work.
Do you enjoy what you do: I love what I do when I am actually doing engineering, I hate messing around with our crappy software and I don't like the company much.

Currently I'm looking into Aeronautical or Mechanical engineering, but all disciplines are a welcome suggestion.

A lot of schools teach Aerospace and Mechanical engineering in the same department so it is very easy to do a dual major, and even if you don't get a dual major you get good exposure to the other discipline.

 

[CycloWizard]

Disciplines:
BS: Chemical and Materials Engineering (materials research)
MS: Chemical Engineering (did environmental research)
PhD: Energy, Environmental, and Chemical Engineering (really, my work was in biomechanics)

Years of experience: 0 "real-world", 7 in the lab
Company: trying to decide between a few
Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10): 8
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise: ~$100k
Do you enjoy what you do: sure

 

[KillerCharlie]

Originally posted by: krnmastersgt
Aeronautical or Mechanical engineering

Since I'm an aerospace engineer, I guess it'd be good to answer this.

Discipline: Aerospace engineering - aerodynamics (design and development)
Years of experience: 2
Company: very very large aircraft company
Rating: 8
Average salary for 2 years of experience is about 67k I'd say. (I strongly advise against using salary to make a decision on what field you want to work in).

Yes, I enjoy what I do. It's hard to find something cooler than airplanes (or spacecraft, though I work on airplanes). It's cool to say that you designed a wing on a big airplane that's flying. Wind tunnel testing is pretty fun (though less common these days) and it's always interesting to compare the results to computational predictions (which typically run 150 processors on massive computer clusters).

Most big schools have separate aero and mechanical programs and aren't in the same department. They're both pretty generalized majors and cover very similar material though. If you know you want to work in the aerospace industry, go aerospace (every person we've hired in the last 3 years in aerodynamics is aero) . If you have no idea what field, definitely go mechanical as it covers just a few more topics. Really though you can do jobs with either major.

 

[lurkmoar]

Originally posted by: serializable
Discipline: software engineer
Years of experience: 2 years
Company: health care company
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise: i started at a consulting company after i got my bachelors making $50k + profit sharing. i enjoyed the job since i got to travel and work on some cool projects. got my masters degree in cs and got recruited by someone that had heard about some of my work and now im making $90k + bonuses.
Do you enjoy what you do: yes to some extent. its challenging and i enjoy the people i work with.

hey serial can you check your pm's?

 

[Jedi2155]

Senior doubling in Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a associates in Physics.

Currently interning at government facility doing spectral analysis on Saturn in the infrared spectrum. Not really related to engineering but interesting work mostly programming.

Still another year left though and I might add a physics minor on it!

Enjoying engineering, and how it opens up your mind to the way the world really works!

 

[krnmastersgt]

I had no intention of basing my choice on pay, but it is interesting to know how much one might earn. Anyways thanks everyone for you input, I'd like to hear more from different disciplines and see what those fields are like. Properties is starting to interest me as well now.

 

[kwantam]

>Discipline:

mixed signal integrated circuit design engineer

>Years of experience:

6

>Company:

small-to-mid-size public company

>Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10):

9ish? It'd be 10 if it weren't for marketing...

>Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise:

110k-ish including bonuses and stock

>Do you enjoy what you do:

Absolutely. There's nothing more rewarding than taping out a part, the people are smart and friendly, and life is generally good. Except, as I said, for marketing

 

[darthsidious]

Originally posted by: kwantam
>Discipline:

mixed signal integrated circuit design engineer

>Years of experience:

6

>Company:

small-to-mid-size public company

>Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10):

9ish? It'd be 10 if it weren't for marketing...

>Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise:

110k-ish including bonuses and stock

>Do you enjoy what you do:

Absolutely. There's nothing more rewarding than taping out a part, the people are smart and friendly, and life is generally good. Except, as I said, for marketing

Cool, I'm a mixed signal IC design engineer too (albeit I just started working fulltime 4 months ago). I agree with you- for the most part it's a great job and the people are smart. But with tapeout, also come the long hours to checking out DRC errors and making sure shit works...but I can see that it would be very fulfillion to have silicon come back from the fab. Out of curiosity, what area in mixed signal design do you work in?

 

[kwantam]

Originally posted by: darthsidious
Out of curiosity, what area in mixed signal design do you work in?

A bit of everything. Analog/power by training, though, which means that my Verilog scares the digital guys.

 

[TuxDave]

Originally posted by: kwantam

Originally posted by: darthsidious
Out of curiosity, what area in mixed signal design do you work in?

A bit of everything. Analog/power by training, though, which means that my Verilog scares the digital guys.

Your verilog makes my logic verification work harder! :|

<--- works in a mixed signal area and now realizes how flawed my company's design flow is.

 

[Special K]

Originally posted by: kwantam

Originally posted by: darthsidious
Out of curiosity, what area in mixed signal design do you work in?

A bit of everything. Analog/power by training, though, which means that my Verilog scares the digital guys.

You model analog circuits using verilog? How does that work? Doesn't verilog only give you digital values?

 

[kwantam]

Originally posted by: Special K

You model analog circuits using verilog? How does that work? Doesn't verilog only give you digital values?

No, I write Verilog for synthesis of the digital portions of mixed-signal systems. A delta-sigma ADC, for example, uses a digital decimation filter for the bitstream, so in designing the ADC I might also have to build the decimator if I can't steal a CIC or get someone else to write it for me

By the way, there are two competing extensions to Verilog (Verilog-AMS and Verilog-A) that do provide some analog simulation capability, but it's generally used as a high-level modelling language (no transitor models; you might instead represent an op-amp as a voltage gain with particular frequency characteristics). The idea is that once you've designed a building block circuit (e.g., the aforementioned op-amp), you model it with simplified input-output characteristics for faster simulation of the bigger circuit it fits into. It's really nice because you can cosimulate your analog and digital blocks to make sure that, at the very least, all the control signals are wired up correctly. These simulation techniques are very powerful, and are certainly not limited to just checking your wiring---we do some extremely complex simulations in a similar environment.

 

[polarmystery]

Discipline: Electrical Engineering
Years of experience: 2
Company: German based engineering firm
Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10): 4
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise: $48-62k/year
Do you enjoy what you do: No. I use AutoCAD in 2d to make drawings for customers while I sit in a cubicle and rot. The pay is not worth my misery.

 

[Eskimo]

Discipline: Semiconductor Engineering (Electrical, Chemical, Mechanical, Industrial)
Years of experience: 5
Company: Top 10 Semiconductor Company
Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10): 7
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise: 70-100K
Do you enjoy what you do: I enjoy the technical aspects of my job and my co-workers. Very multi-disciplinary with new problems to deal with every day. After 5 years my dislikes revolve around management issues specific to my company and the time demands (60+/week)

 

[tehach]

Discipline: Civil
Years of experience: 9
Company: Private forensics firm
Rating of job experience (scale of 1 to 10): Can be an 8 but at times it's a 5
Average salary for someone of your experience/expertise: $80k
Do you enjoy what you do: At most times, yes.

 

[krnmastersgt]

*kicks the dead horse to find some life in it*
Sorry for avoiding the topic for a while, been busy with school.
I'm still leaning in the mechanical/properties fields, and starting to seriously consider aeronautical(lost interest for a while) and electrical disciplines. As for CS, I've been actively taking courses in a variety of languages, soon moving on to java, c#,c++ etc. So that might be a possible field for me to work in as well I suppose, any more takers on the questions?