After more than (9) years as an engineer (Mechanical Engineering, minors in Mathematics and Physics) and bouncing from one dead-end engineering job to another, I’m getting seriously burnt out. I realize I don’t really have much room to issue complaints; the pay, while not extra-ordinary, is quite satisfactory; the job environment is corporate-typical; in general, the hours have been pretty flexible; et cetera. As a job (or rather a series of them) they’ve been pretty standard stuff, and if I can complain about one manufacturing company after another disappearing out from under me the same could be said of many people in other professions as well. Certainly, I live better and (usually) work much less than many people, and much less than when I was working my way through school.
Nonetheless, I’m thouroughly sick of this job, career, and corporate employment in general. Idiotic management, crap planning, generating a carefully crafted estimate of time and cost only to have it cut by 70%, having necessary training and con-ed funds cut out of the budget “so we can maintain our record profits this year”, no consideration for costs of overhead and maintainence of engineering tools, and so forth. Blah, blah, blah, I know. Anyway, I’m trying to find something I can segue into or in some way make use of my prior experience but get away, or at least at arm’s length from, this kind of nonsense. Pay isn’t terribly important (gulp) as long as it’s liveable, but greater freedom to make decisions and more opportunities to do something creative (other than sending out satirical e-mails about company policies and statements) is what I’m looking for.
So, any suggestions? Anybody in a similar bind (engineering or otherwise)?
A friend of mine has been out of work for a couple years, after getting an engineering degree. He lives in Ohio, where the economy pretty much sucks. So he asked me about going to law school, and even though I hated my experience and regret it daily, he seems like the type that would excel in that environment. I told him about intellectual property law, and how attorneys need to have backgrounds in science or engineering to get into the patents side of it, and he seemed pretty excited about trying that out as a new career. I helped him with his admission essays, and he just got accepted to (at least) two excellent law schools in Chicago that specialize in intellectual property law.
Now I’m not sure if you want to spend three years earning another expensive and difficult degree, but I thought it was worth mentioning. The money to be made in patent law is just STAGGERING.
If there had ever been a time, when I was younger, that I wasn’t in a relationship, before I was financially bound to a job by debts I would have loved to have tried teaching overseas. Maybe that suits your circumstances.
I’m in the same boat (sick of being an computer programmer in a corporate environment, though enjoying the money).
Have you considered taking your dog, abandoning your house, and wandering have naked through a national forest in a warm state? That’s what I often fantasize about doing for a second career.
No suggestions, but lots of empathy. I’ve been in magazine publishing for about 20 years and am so sick to death of it that unemployment is beginning to look a viable alternative. With a resume full of magazine publishing, it’s damn hard to get a job in another field, esp. at my age.
Could you post about what you like about your job? That may make it easier for people to suggest things. I do second the suggestion about law school, but you ought to do more investigation before making a big committment like that. While the money can be staggering, so can the sacrifices in terms of your personal life. (Less so for the patent attorneys [what’s a patent emergency, after all], but definitely for the general IP attorneys). And I don’t get the impression that money is that important to you.
But you’ve talked about wanting to be a writer – why not do that? If you’re willing to take a pay cut and can live frugally, why not try writing?
Also, one thing to consider about teaching: my mother has been a teacher for most of her adult life. She has never found Dilbert to be funny. She says the strips just don’t make sense to her, because schools just aren’t like that. (Oh, sure, they suck in other ways, but not Dilbert ways.)
Slight correction: Though I’ve worked in several bars I’ve never been a bouncer. At 5’10" and typically around 175lbs I’ve nowhere near the physical presence or brute strength to bounce. I’ve known bouncers (hence, my input on the “Applying for a job as a bouncer” thread) but have (essentially) no first-hand experience with the job.
So, what have I done? Jobs I’ve held to pay rent and groceries:
[ul][li]Line/prep cook[/li][li]Bartender/barback[/li][li]Security dispatcher[/li][li]Garbage man/groundskeeper[/li][li]Cashier[/li][li]Retail stocker[/li][li]Math tutor[/li][li]Programmer (C, Pascal, scripting codes)[/li][li]Database clerk/tech[/li][li]Undegrad TA[/li][li]and of course, mechanical engineer[/ul] [/li]A substantial but not extra-ordinary list; I suspect many here could better it by a significant percentage.
All the time. The perks are great, but I hear the retirement fund is lacking and the dental plan is only so-so. No three hour long meetings requiring me to sit still in a darkened, windowless room and try not to fall asleep or laugh derisively while watching yet another 300 slide PowerPoint presentation.
This is a serious consideration, and the notion has more than just a slight appeal; however, from talking to teachers (well, the couple I’ve managed to have a date with) there is a massive amount of frustration with how things are run in California public schools. I also tend to get very frustrated at students who don’t want to learn. I’ve a coworker, actually, who taught physics and chemistry in the Pasadena School system after graduating from CalTech. He lasted a year and a half, and just couldn’t take all of the bureacracy and parential BS. So, I’m a little concerned at that being out of the pan and into the fire…but I’m interested in other teachers’ experiences in contrast or comparison.
Eve, baby, what do you say we switch jobs for a while? Believe me, on my end nobody will notice, as long as you can manage to feign interest in endless presentation and corporate announcement. OTOH, being female will probably get you swamped by desperate, lonely (and seemingly confused) rocket scientists, which might be something you’d rather avoid, after all.
My ideal job would actually be doing some kind of writing…but I hear about what a glorious charlie-fox magazine publishing and free-lance writing is, and it makes me want to run far, far away. I take it that there’s a world of difference between being a staff writer at The New Yorker (“Yes…The New Yorker”) and trying to grind out one five cent a word article or story after another for Travel+Liesure or Popular Science. And news journalism…I shudder when I think of the future. One can scarcely read an article on cnn.com or in The Los Angeles Times without finding numerous inconsistancies, ambiguities, and grevious gramatical errors.
I’ve often thought about opening up a combination bar/funeral home, but I’d obviously need to do this near a center of Irish immigrant population, and I’d need to find someone to handle the corpse side of the business as I’m not having any truck with stiffs. Anybody interested?
Ah, the pre-mid-life career conundrum. You’re not happy at what you’re currently doing, and you’ve been around long enough to know that you probably wouldn’t be happy doing the things you once thought you’d be happy doing, either.
I don’t know what to tell ya, except I can relate.
I think a big step in preparation for whatever you do, would be to cut down on expenses as much as possible so you’re not dependant on an engineer’s salary to make ends meet. That way you could try stuff out that might be more fun and/or rewarding but doesn’t pay that well. Non-profits, government, something in health care (although certain areas in health care pay quite well), etc.
You might consider the peace corps for something to get you in a different head space for a couple of years. I’m sure your skills would be highly valued. A friend of mine is a wastewater treatment engineer and it took the peace corps over a year to decide where she’d best be placed because she was needed everywhere. She ended up in Bolivia and is having a fabulous time.
::shudder:: Been there. Done that. T-shirt (well, polo shirt) and all.
I might be willing to do the job shopper thing if it meant only working a few months out of the year and allowed me to pursue some other eventual dream, but I wouldn’t do it as permanently again. Thing is, one of my main skills/selling points is my experience with the CADD software and analysis tools I’ve used for the last seven years, and they are a major part of my current frustration. Why the developers can’t fix long-standing bugs, errors, and instabilities/known memory leaks in the code is beyond me, but it pisses me off every time a cow-orker calls me over and I have to say, “Yeah, it did that back in Release 15, too. They still haven’t fixed it, I see.”
I’d try to get back into writing code, but my coding skills are seriously out of date. I struggle to read C code now, never really did quite get the hang of Java, and my knowledge of Python is cursory, at best. My Perl skills are okay, but there are thousands of Tech City refugees whose experience and abilities far outrank mine, and anyway, I’d probably end up with the same complaints I have now.
Hey, maybe I could paddle a sea kayak around various South Pacific atolls and write a book making caustic comments about the native’s prediliction for Cheez Balls and Spam. Oh, that’s that’s already been done? Damnit.
Tomorrow is my last day at this firm, and I’m pretty well decided that my next career won’t be in IT, nor will it be a corporate desk job. I burned out on this career relatively quickly - I’ve been in IT for a little over 7 years - and the thought of being stuck in a cubicle, or spending day after day in meetings and conference calls, making little difference that counts is really too much for me.
Not sure what I’ll do next… I’m fairly sure my dream career involves working closely with animals so I plan to start looking into ways of getting into that.
