Lately, yes. I love my job. I am working a lot in victim advocacy and training victim support/bystander intervention as the Canadian Armed Forces deals with the issue of Sexual Misconduct. It’s exhausting, rewarding and powerful.
A genuine interest? Oh my god, no. My job is boring as shit. I mostly do purchasing and travel reimbursement. There’s lots of red tape and wasted effort. But I do take satisfaction in that the people in this department depend on me and I’m well-liked. It’s my little rut and I fit here.
I never did figure out what I wanted to do anyway. If I could do something else, embalming and funeral home work sounds interesting and meaningful.
Prepress supervisor at a printing plant. It’s all computers. I enjoy it. I learn something every day.
Yes, I’m a database developer and web programmer, and I love going to work and solving problems.
Am I wrong in thinking that I wouldn’t trust *any *engineering work done by someone who does not know how to use every tool one would find in a small shop? It seems like a vital element of the job.
I’m retired now, but I spent over 30 years as an MechEng for an automotive supplier. I enjoyed it a great deal, read up on such things and bought books on it with my own money. We supplied driveline parts and components, axles, driveshafts, etc. I really liked the work and hated the bureaucracy, which I opted out of. The downside was that as you ascend the hierarchy you do less and less real engineering and more and more administrivia. Which I hated. I was sort of a type X from the Peter Principle, by being creatively incompetent at certain key management tasks, which prevented me from being promoted out of engineering altogether. There were other engineers who did the same thing. My specialty was mishandling budgets. I do miss the work, the people, the fun we had. Yes, we had FUN!.
Like a lot of people, I went to school knowing absolutely nothing about what I wanted to do in life.
I started off in physics then switched to EE in my freshman year because “everyone knew” that was better.
I realized at 9:00 am on a Monday morning toward the end of my junior year that I knew that I was never going to be an engineer.
On Friday, one of our professors had demonstrated how to solve a problem. .“Bob” and I spend a few hours that afternoon going over it so we could understand it for the next test. We then hopped into our cars and spend the weekend doing whatever.
“John” came in that Monday morning and was all excited that because he had found a more elegant method of solving the same problem. It got the same result, but took fewer steps. Upon query, he said he replied that he had spent the whole weekend thinking about it.
I then realized that the world needed more engineers like John and fewer like Bob or I so I started taking more general classes my final year.
For most of my career, I worked in sale, marketing or management in technical fields. Having the degree gave me a much better understanding of the products, the capacity and the limitations as well as the engineering and troubleshooting processes as well as street cred with the engineers.
There were parts of that field which I really, really liked.
Now I’m teaching English and it’s OK. Some things are good. Others are mixed.
Depending on which type of engineering it is… no, not at all. Specially every tool - there’s some I can barely lift, others for which my tiny hands are an advantage over most guys.
Crafter_Man was talking about people he had to teach how to use a socket set. Who can graduate from college without ever having tightened a bolt? Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to have gone to Junior High and High Schools with “shop” classes? I did metal, wood, plastic and electronics shop which gave me a basic level of skill with most tools.