Why technical-minded creatives should avoid the career of engineering in the USA

Reflections from a millennial engineer

Brief Background

• Middling “career” in heavy vehicles and consumer products of roughly 15 years

• Some cool things as proof that it doesn’t all suck

• Working on “cool s***”

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve wished I had gotten better advice about work. One common refrain is that you should attend a 4 year school and obtain a technical degree. “We need more STEM”. But is that really the best option? Will you get to work on “cool s***” or will it all be soul sucking mundane corporate nothingness?

First allow me to offer some highlights as proof that it doesn’t all suck and also that I’m not making this all up:

I really liked travel to China and working with the engineers there. They are really good at manufacturing engineering. The more of their ideas you can work into your design, the cheaper and simpler it will be. I personally like the long lunches and dinners. They like to talk and its fun seeing their favorite restaurants and night life.

Author in China

Another cool highlight was working on new design locomotives for the export market. The engineers leading everything were very experienced and I learned a lot from how they coordinated all the different engineers from different specialties. My role in this was tracking key stats as the design progressed, so definitely very mundane.

Author in London, Ontario with engineering team

A last highlight was converting the rear suspension of a Freightliner semi-truck over to a new design for testing. It received a custom new suspension, matching custom driveshafts that curved over the pusher axle and new super single tires and wheels. Everything was done to OE standards down to the Huck-bolts fastening the lift-able pusher axle to the frame. The mechanic in the picture did all the actual work on the truck. It was cool seeing the process go smoothly and the truck look factory-fresh at the end.

6x2 project in process

6x2 project installed

So yes, there was definitely was some “cool s***”, but those were the exceptions.

What draws people to engineering work?

• Solving technical problems

• Designing and building new things

Basically working on “cool s***”.

What does it look like in practice now?

• Doing all the other jobs

One trend is more time spent doing non-engineering work. Such as purchase orders, shipping, setting up and tearing down tests, work instructions, and sometimes even spending entire days fulfilling orders in the distribution center. They still have employees for these jobs but because “engineering” as a whole is judged on whether or the project reaches some milestone, you will be called to on to “help” constantly.

As an example - I was working on launching production of a new design at a factory in Matamoros, Mexico. The quality control engineer there was responsible for writing a report to the customer showing compliance to all their specifications. So she would schedule a meeting with me and the project manager and I was expected to tell her what to write in every field of her report.

• Doing hyper-specialized bureaucratic work

Some jobs are almost entirely hyper-specialized bureaucratic work. They don’t tell you this directly, you find it out later. I thought I had lucked into a cool job at the “custom engineering department” of a big medium & heavy duty truck OEM. They made it sound like we would all be designing cool 8x8 logging trucks and other wild stuff. Their headquarters was moving states and they needed to hire a bunch of new people. Most of the other guys/gals were younger and into cars, racing, motorcycles and mountain biking. We spent a week in Garland, TX “working” at the assembly line and partying after the first weeks of training.

This OEM has a custom inventory system which takes feature codes ordered at a dealer and translates those into parts pulled from inventory at the factory. It uses a custom syntax of logical rules and abstractions to block some combinations of features until they have been cleared by an engineer. The job of the “custom engineering department” is to manage changes to those rules so individual truck orders can be produced by the factory. My job was to do this for medium-duty trucks in specific. The most “engineering” I did was to put together cad layouts of individual orders to see if everything fit together. The majority of the job was doing hyper-specialized bureaucratic work.

• Not allowed to win

Power disputes with people outside of engineering are inevitable anytime you are working on anything new. At minimum, you are spending too much money, taking too long, and not communicating enough. But the worst is when the managers start to actively dislike you.

As an example I had started a new job designing fancy tv mounts for places like Best Buy. A coworker had an idea for a design that used scissor links instead of arms for movement. He had an old prototype but it didn’t move smoothly. So I fleshed it out with some more engineering and got it to move smoothly with a combination of ball bearings and rollers. The idea at the time was that it would be great for getting to the cables behind the tv. In practice it worked even better as it was able to swivel the tv side to side and hold position. They sent people from the Geek Squad and they liked how easy it was to install. I’m thinking great - mission accomplished.

Scissor linkage tv mount - note swiveling

I’m looking at the new sample box for it and it advertised that it could swivel some ridiculous amount. I talk to the hierarchy and explain that it’s both not physically possible and also not in the development specs, so it should be removed from the box. Meanwhile I tweak the design so it can actually swivel and hold position just in case. The managers all meet and reach some sort of détente. I’m supposed to now never claim that the design can swivel and they take the spec off the box.

So I do the engineering thing and have test units fabricated with all the fits at maximum material condition - as tight as it can get. They’re cycle tested and they still swivel fine. Meanwhile the design is doing great and selling millions of units a year with fat profit margins.

I’m thinking great let me design an even better one and do mission accomplished 2x - more specs, sleeker appearance, cheaper. I slip in some ideas from the engineers in China and their whole team loves it. Only problem is that the USA managers are not interested in funding even one prototype. You see, it’s not designed to swivel.

Well I quit and several jobs later stop at Best Buy. On the display rack they have the 2nd gen design I made years ago. Except they changed it so it rotates slightly at the connection to the wall bracket so it’s technically “designed to swivel”. They even patented that part.

Let me highlight exactly where I went wrong and why. What was from my perspective correcting a false statement to customers was also interpreted as an engineer winning a power dispute. And engineers aren’t allowed to win. My understanding is that the managers who lost looked really dumb at a meeting in front of their peers. So they went scorched earth to make sure I couldn’t “win” again. Making it worse was that the disagreement was over a subtle technical reality, not a matter of personal subjective opinion. So they decided to enforce an orthodoxy where the intent of “designed to swivel” vs “not” is more important than the testable physical reality.

Another example of not allowed to win. Project started late and is running even later now because everyone else is working from home. I had finally gotten a good working relationship with the customer from a success launching their last project, and was planning on maintaining it. Same for the USA based project manager and designer.

Then they switch out the project manager for a fresh one who worked at the MX plant, and early retire the designer I had been working with. I’m the designer now too. One of the first things the new project manager asks me is “can we just tell the customer the tests have started?” Obviously my answer to this is no. We have a weekly meeting with the customer where we go through all the development work, and when we get to the tests, the PM claims some of them have started. I immediately correct him and move on.

By this point I had smartened up and rarely spoke to management, and largely kept away from the danger zone through preemptive and positive communiques in their personal preferred formats. So when I see the manager calling me I know something is wrong. “I heard you threw your PM under the bus.”

Again I violated the rule. Engineers are not allowed to win in power disputes with anyone outside engineering. If the PM wants the project to go faster, they can tell the customer it’s going faster, and it’s your job to figure out how to catch up.

• Meetings

Let me explain how to do meetings “right” as an engineer. It’s a “you’re here to be seen and not heard” dynamic. Speak when spoken too. You have to realize that you have no power, your managers have no power, and your position in the company is on par with the janitorial staff or maybe the guy from IT that brought your computer to your desk. If you embrace this you won’t win but you will lose less often.

Let me share a trick. Once a manager starts to dislike you, they will usually try to ambush you at critical meetings with new objections to your work. But if you’re smart you can head them off at the pass. Figure out their schedule and drop into their office in the 5 minute gaps between their full calendar of meetings. You’re just there to get their input. Show them the stuff they hate the most and just listen and nod your head. Then plan out your response and clear it with all the other managers. If they still bring up their pet issue it will fall on deaf ears, and your precious project timeline will be safe.

• Do any engineering work in the gaps

Occasionally I have spent time doing interesting work and projects. There is an art form to convincing management that these are a good use of time and money. At my last job at a local mfg. company, in between re-configuring the entire product line to include new stickers, I was also setting up a test Lora WAN IOT network and developing an Arduino-controlled CNC assembly tool. You see, you get better at the convincing with time. And I got the assembly tool working my last hours on the job (as typical I had quit).

• Buying innovation

Why is there such an art to doing interesting work? Well most companies would rather pay another company for an innovative product that is already complete. Creating it themselves is too much work and risk. And if it doesn’t exist yet, they would rather pay another company to be innovative for them. If you play your cards right, they might even pick you to be the liaison to these innovation consultants.

• Succeeding as an engineer in 2025

Succeeding as an engineer in 2025 requires redefining “success”. In the past a successful engineer was someone like Kelly Johnson:

Managing Lockheed’s Skunk Works

For most engineers now success is becoming an engineering manager. How does one do this? Well let me describe the most common strategy. First stick with one job for a few years. Having a few successful projects is nice but the key thing is to not screw anything up. Figure out the power structure at the job and be sure to kiss some ass. Get into craft beers and golf or whatever the “right” clique like. Use your contacts there to find out when a manager position is opening up. Then you will be positioned as the logical choice by your clique and the position is yours to lose.

How do you “succeed” as an engineering manager? Well its really the same strategy as becoming one. The additional random element is your employees. You want to prune out or at least give a haircut to the splergliest and most autistic of the bunch. These are the ones most likely to piss off your fellow managers and tank your chances of another promotion. The proven method of accomplishing this is good work processes and procedures with lots of check points and sign offs. That way you don’t have to muzzle the splergs directly, and you can always tell the other managers warm sounded truisms like “we have to respect the process” when things happen they don’t like. This is the process by which fertile pastures of “cool s***” are monocultured into soul sucking mundane corporate nothingness.

• No reward is worth this

Obviously you still get paid regardless of what work you’re doing. And engineering pays good but not great if you stick to 40 hours a week. But if you want to progress in job title or to manager you need to be doing at least 50-60. So your actual pay per hour of focused work plummets. You’re essentially doing a trust fall for several years as you wait for the promotion.

What do I recommend instead and what I’ve been doing lately

• Building a house

Several years ago we bought land in the country for a house and started building it. It’s a post frame house and it is designed to be very energy efficient. The process of building it is taking longer than planned, but it’s been very enjoyable, memorable and interesting. I keep coming across technical challenges and find myself approaching them with an engineering mindset.

• Engineering as a mindset

Which brings me to engineering as a mindset anyone can use. Think of it as your bag of tricks. Some of them apply pretty much everywhere, like doing cad and drawings on the computer. Others are hyper specialized to specific things, like an energy modeling program for a residential house in its natural climate.

The mindset is that the thing you’re trying to do or make, you’re going to do it to its best as an abstraction first. Plan out every detail and run the whole thing through every bag of tricks you have. Keep changing it and reviewing it with the team of people actually doing it. Then build it. When you run into problems, keep updating the abstraction until you’ve solved the problem in it first.

• Work that can’t be done anywhere else

What I recommend is work that can’t be done anywhere else. The entire construction field, mechanic, machinist, welder, etc. You don’t need a 4 year degree and the student loan debt that goes with it. While working, constantly be viewing the work through the perspective of “how would I do this work if I owned the business”. At least you are only competing against people who are geographically close.

• Study math and science at community college on your pace

The core of the engineering mindset is math, physics, chemistry and the other sciences. These are all hard. If you study engineering at a 4 year school, these fundamental classes happen all together in a “weed out” process. Probably not the best learning environment. A better approach is studying them at your own pace at a community college. Less financial risk (debt), less stress, and more focus on learning the subjects themselves and maybe even enjoying them.

• Plan a path to your own business

The great thing about work that can’t be done anywhere else, is that much of it is relatively easy to translate into a small business. And the great thing about owning your business is that you’re free to apply this engineering mindset anywhere you see fit. The engineering mindset can take business challenges and transform them into solvable technical problems.

• Finding “cool s***” in the mundane

I used to think to think only stuff like this was cool s***:

But now I’m seeing it all sorts of places I’ve never seen it before. Challenges like housing and raising meat birds on feed from your own farm. Or how to best prepare and fertilize soil for cold climate grapes. Maybe you can find cool s*** in new places too.