State of the Engineer: What would I be, if not an engineer?

There is a series of articles on "engineer" in EETimes today . Let me highlight those that I found to be interesting.

~On gender~
The survey also found that electronics engineering remains one of the most male-dominant professions in the world. This year's respondent pool in North America included only 90 women, or 5.7 percent of the total. In Europe, the share was even lower, at 3.1 percent, and in Japan the question was not even asked. Women today in all types of engineering make up 14 percent of the total, with most in chemical engineering. In comparison, more than 17 percent of partners in law firms are women, and, according to The Boston Globe, more than half of all medical students and 42 percent of hospital interns are women. Among the handful of occupations that underperform engineering in the percentage of female practitioners is truck driving, at 5 percent.


~ On being away from hands-on engineering~
A rule of thumb in engineering, according to our survey results, might be that if you're in it for the money, you should do as little actual engineering as possible. Among the three top-earning total compensation categories on the 2007 survey, only one, component and chip design, involves real hands-on engineering. R&D managed to crack the top five. In all, six categories in our survey exceeded the mean compensation among engineers of $108,800.

~On not having a rock-star pay~

~ On marriage and children~

One piece of good news is that engineers, compared with the general public, seem to live remarkably stable lives. They are better educated than the average. They tend to stay in the same job and with the same company (an average of seven years, our survey found). Most are married (81.2 percent), and their divorce rate is low (4.1 percent).

"Becoming an engineer and maintaining your technical edge requires lots of work, dedication and time," noted Matthew Burns, a field applications engineer at Avnet Inc. "After many years spent attaining an engineering education and career, it requires diligence and stability to maintain. Most of the engineers I know [apply] this same dedication, diligence and time to maintain stability in their daily lives."

In the same vein, respondent Kenneth Rousseau said, "Engineers seem like inherently conservative people in their personal lives, not particularly welcoming of change. Perhaps it has to do with our creating so much change on the professional side that we abhor change in our personal lives."

~ On state of the engineer ~
Paul Vincent

I am an engineer. Period. I have always loved the adventure and challenge of creative problem solving, of finding a way to make something work and persuading others to let me do it. If I were not an engineer, I suppose I would be an architect. Then again, maybe I would be an attorney, or a psychiatrist, an entrepreneur, a novelist, a performer.

Being an engineer at heart, I find that most other careers provide only portions of what I love about engineering. The truth is, I would probably find most other careers too limited in variety and challenge.

What attracts me to architecture is how it blends inspiration with utility. I once engineered a remote control for whole-house automation. It provided the utility of control of all in-house systems while being intuitive enough for a guest to be able to use. It had to fit into your hand, look perfectly in place next to the good china and inspire oohs and ahs from visitors.

Being an attorney provides the opportunity for competitive persuasion. Facts and evidence are great, but how well they are researched, understood and presented makes all the difference in the world to the outcome. Engineering is full of competing ideas, trade-offs and pathways to end solutions. They must be researched, strategically weighed out and agreed upon. The pathway from idea to end product is greatly shaped by engineers' abilities to understand the requirements and persuade themselves and others of the best possible solutions.

Psychiatrists help people understand that what you get out of life is largely due to what you put in. They have to deal with stress, insanity, emergencies and finding balance. They help people cope with life, deal with change, find strength, overcome weakness. Engineers have to deal with the laws of physics: You can't get more out of a system than you put into it. They have to balance target requirements with reality, time and effort. Engineers constantly deal with change: feature creep, performance failures, resources, international design efforts and technologies, and more. New designs have to strengthen power, range, throughput, user interface and functionality while overcoming weaknesses in power consumption, size and noise susceptibility.

Entrepreneurs deal with creating strategy, organizing resources and generating plans of action to form new businesses. Entrepreneurs are evangelists for ideas and their potential to yield a return on investment. They form ideas into viable, compelling business plans. I've been an entrepreneur. I founded a company, raised millions of dollars, created a product, presented it to the market, sold it to customers and moved on to other adventures. Every engineer requires the wherewithal for strategic planning--a course of action for project completion. Engineering requires getting buy-in for budget, tools, talent, resources and schedule. Ideas have to be sold to those who need to contribute to making them reality.

Novelists are communication artists. They use words to create understanding in their readers' minds. Books solidify ideas so that people can envision and follow a story. Writers create definition and personality for characters and depict how they interact. Books create a reproducible standard that can be interpreted and delivered in many languages. I have written thousands of pages of architectural specifications, product feature requirements, design reviews, theories of operation, research findings, project plans and technical specifications. For groups to work together effectively, they must be on the same page when it comes to project specifications, component specs, interface specs, performance requirements and intended operation. It is not good enough to write documents that you can understand; it is neces-sary to write documents that others will not misunderstand.

Performers are artists who make complicated actions look simple. A good and entertaining performance requires preparation, timing, coordination, the right materials, a lot of skill and a little luck.

Engineering is like a good song and dance. It requires a lot of coordination--and a lot of failure in practice before the final presentation. The quality of the final product is directly related to the combined talent of the company. Engineering also requires good frequency control, noise reduction and contingency plans, and often improvises when things don't go as planned.

I remember as a youth pulling apart an old phonograph and a small transistor radio to create a stereo sound system. I remember taking over installation of the electrical wiring in our house when my father was having difficulty with a four-way switch. I remember my first electronics kit and putting together all the projects. I remember plugging my first multimeter into a 120-volt outlet and making sparks because I had used the wrong inputs.

I guess I have always been destined to be an engineer. And in a way, choosing to be an engineer has enabled me to be much, much more.

Why would I choose to be any one other thing, when being an engineer has enabled me to be so many?