What Do You Do?
08-08-2005, 09:10 AM
#51
Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 3,108
[quote name='Feds' date='Aug 5 2005, 10:59 AM']Cheers is right and wrong.
I work for GM doing suspension design. My job is mostly making design changes to current produciton stuff. It is not as cool as it sounds. If you want to get into the hard-core, "clean sheet of paper" stuff, be prepaired to move to Michigan.
Salary wise (be prepared to be sick) I started in 2003 @ 56k, and I am now at 60 and change.
As far as supplimenting your education, there are 3 things you can do, and I am very serious about these:
1. Get a subscription to Hot Rod Magazine, and a subscription to Grass Roots Motorsports. Do this right now. There is TONNES of useful tech in these, and you should be able to handle the level of the wrtiting no problem.
2. As you get older/more education, check out the SAE books available. Tom Gillespie's vehicle dynamics book is great, though there is a good deal of Calculus. "How to make your car handle" is a pretty good starter book as well.
3. Start working on cars. Since the age of 14, I have owned/had/worked on...let's see... 14 different cars. There are not too many days that go by when I don't call some of this experience into use.
As far as the overall automotive industry goes, it breaks down like so:
OEM's (GM, Ford, etc.) pay very well, but the work is not that interesting. Basically, you make other people's designs fit into your vehicle.
Suppliers (Dana, Delphi, Visteon, etc.) basically do the hard-core design and testing. Much more interesting work, but they pay much less. My wife (also an engineer) designs/builds/tests intercoolers, but gets paid a lot less than me.
That's all for now. PM me if you want a "what I know now what I wish I knew then"
[/quote]
You started at 56? Damn. I started at 46 and with a raise I'm only at 48. The reality is that the market is saturated with engineering graduates. There are more people taking and graduating from engineeering than ever before, and not enough jobs to satisfy everyone. Everyday I wake up and think... damn another day at work (I do project engineering now, so I do cost, schedule, resource, contracts, suppliers). I wanted to do the backend stuff like final assembly, test and etc. BUt want and reality are two different things.
Then I think, it could be worse. I have classmates who graduated from the top of the class working for Bell Mobility customer service call centres, rogers door to door sales. So... I'm lucky to be doing something related to what I spent so much time learning.
As for car design it's hard to get into. Very hard.... I came close because of FSAE, I had an interview wtih TRD in California, I then had an interview with Altair engineering in Troy Michigan. The TRD job was supercharger development for the new toyota V6s, and the Altair engineering job was for ADAMS/Car dynamics modeling. I never made it past the 1st round interviews, partly because even though I was so involved in FSAE and know a lot I still know squat compared to the rest of the field out there, and not having a US passport does not help.
Coldfire: The book you should read is Vehicle Dynamics Engineering By Milliken. It's 700+ pages but worth it's weight in gold. I got my autographed by William Milliken himself at the FSAE when he was judging my suspension design. We made it to the semis beating University of Waterloo and finished higher than U of T in design for 2004.
I work for GM doing suspension design. My job is mostly making design changes to current produciton stuff. It is not as cool as it sounds. If you want to get into the hard-core, "clean sheet of paper" stuff, be prepaired to move to Michigan.
Salary wise (be prepared to be sick) I started in 2003 @ 56k, and I am now at 60 and change.
As far as supplimenting your education, there are 3 things you can do, and I am very serious about these:
1. Get a subscription to Hot Rod Magazine, and a subscription to Grass Roots Motorsports. Do this right now. There is TONNES of useful tech in these, and you should be able to handle the level of the wrtiting no problem.
2. As you get older/more education, check out the SAE books available. Tom Gillespie's vehicle dynamics book is great, though there is a good deal of Calculus. "How to make your car handle" is a pretty good starter book as well.
3. Start working on cars. Since the age of 14, I have owned/had/worked on...let's see... 14 different cars. There are not too many days that go by when I don't call some of this experience into use.
As far as the overall automotive industry goes, it breaks down like so:
OEM's (GM, Ford, etc.) pay very well, but the work is not that interesting. Basically, you make other people's designs fit into your vehicle.
Suppliers (Dana, Delphi, Visteon, etc.) basically do the hard-core design and testing. Much more interesting work, but they pay much less. My wife (also an engineer) designs/builds/tests intercoolers, but gets paid a lot less than me.
That's all for now. PM me if you want a "what I know now what I wish I knew then"
[snapback]745540[/snapback]
[/quote]
You started at 56? Damn. I started at 46 and with a raise I'm only at 48. The reality is that the market is saturated with engineering graduates. There are more people taking and graduating from engineeering than ever before, and not enough jobs to satisfy everyone. Everyday I wake up and think... damn another day at work (I do project engineering now, so I do cost, schedule, resource, contracts, suppliers). I wanted to do the backend stuff like final assembly, test and etc. BUt want and reality are two different things.
Then I think, it could be worse. I have classmates who graduated from the top of the class working for Bell Mobility customer service call centres, rogers door to door sales. So... I'm lucky to be doing something related to what I spent so much time learning.
As for car design it's hard to get into. Very hard.... I came close because of FSAE, I had an interview wtih TRD in California, I then had an interview with Altair engineering in Troy Michigan. The TRD job was supercharger development for the new toyota V6s, and the Altair engineering job was for ADAMS/Car dynamics modeling. I never made it past the 1st round interviews, partly because even though I was so involved in FSAE and know a lot I still know squat compared to the rest of the field out there, and not having a US passport does not help.
Coldfire: The book you should read is Vehicle Dynamics Engineering By Milliken. It's 700+ pages but worth it's weight in gold. I got my autographed by William Milliken himself at the FSAE when he was judging my suspension design. We made it to the semis beating University of Waterloo and finished higher than U of T in design for 2004.
08-08-2005, 02:54 PM
#53
Senior Member
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Kincardine, Ontario Canada yeah Canada bitches
Posts: 1,068
damn it you engineers seem to be getting the short end of the stick. From what i hear jobs for me will be everywhere, and pay a crap load, but like jason said, reality and what i want are two very different things.
08-08-2005, 03:21 PM
#54
Member
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 45
[quote name='Cheers!' date='Aug 8 2005, 10:10 AM']Coldfire: The book you should read is Vehicle Dynamics Engineering By Milliken. It's 700+ pages but worth it's weight in gold. I got my autographed by William Milliken himself at the FSAE when he was judging my suspension design. We made it to the semis beating University of Waterloo and finished higher than U of T in design for 2004.
[/quote]
i'll definetly check out the library and take a look at that
with my computer engineering degree i'd like to get a job designing the control systems for cars, since it seems that now cars are just one big computer...
or i might be stupid (or is it smart...) and go back for another degree, who knows.
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[/quote]
i'll definetly check out the library and take a look at that
with my computer engineering degree i'd like to get a job designing the control systems for cars, since it seems that now cars are just one big computer...
or i might be stupid (or is it smart...) and go back for another degree, who knows.
08-09-2005, 05:12 PM
#55
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 270
Well engineering was what i was leaning towards at first due to it looked like it would be intresting, as for what you said about loving cars, i am 16 and i have 8 cars and one full time drag car, i am thinking of going into pipefitting welding now though, up in the oil sands starting wage is 70 g a year and a 40 g sign on bonus, no one wants to work up north, but whatever, go due that for a couple years then moved back down and buy a house, seems like a good idea. Engineering doesn't seem as hands on as i would like it to be, i know i have the grades and smarts as i just finished grade 10 and i have already finished calculus and 12 chem and physics. Do you guys ever get to go out on the job site and be light a project manager type thing?
08-09-2005, 07:38 PM
#56
Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 3,108
[quote name='mike_rudy' date='Aug 9 2005, 05:12 PM']Well engineering was what i was leaning towards at first due to it looked like it would be intresting, as for what you said about loving cars, i am 16 and i have 8 cars and one full time drag car, i am thinking of going into pipefitting welding now though, up in the oil sands starting wage is 70 g a year and a 40 g sign on bonus, no one wants to work up north, but whatever, go due that for a couple years then moved back down and buy a house, seems like a good idea. Engineering doesn't seem as hands on as i would like it to be, i know i have the grades and smarts as i just finished grade 10 and i have already finished calculus and 12 chem and physics. Do you guys ever get to go out on the job site and be light a project manager type thing?
[/quote]
I'm in aerospace. I push papers around. My job is to make paper. I'm not allowed to touch hardware as the company is unionized. The CAW (yes canadian auto workers union) are the only ones allowed to touch any hardware that will be flown in space. Do not ask me how CAW managed to get into SPAR aerospace 20 years ago because it puzzles me as well.
I used to work nuclear and it was also paper pushing. I'm fortunate that both jobs past and current are real engineering jobs because all too easy is it for a company to stop doing engineering and just design and the end prodcuts are things that don't work or kill people. However I'm unfotunate in that the sense of engineering is lost most of the time having to deal with BS and more and more reports.
If you ever read dilbert comics, they make perfect sense if you work in a regulated/critical engineering field where either millions and billions of dollars are involved or people's lives are put in risk if you **** up.
I have not worked in the car industry or the electronics industy such as say sony, so I can only comment on my own experiences. But i'm certain a product driven field like sony or motorolla is different as they are not "system engineering houses" like nuclear or aerospace.
[snapback]746830[/snapback]
[/quote]
I'm in aerospace. I push papers around. My job is to make paper. I'm not allowed to touch hardware as the company is unionized. The CAW (yes canadian auto workers union) are the only ones allowed to touch any hardware that will be flown in space. Do not ask me how CAW managed to get into SPAR aerospace 20 years ago because it puzzles me as well.
I used to work nuclear and it was also paper pushing. I'm fortunate that both jobs past and current are real engineering jobs because all too easy is it for a company to stop doing engineering and just design and the end prodcuts are things that don't work or kill people. However I'm unfotunate in that the sense of engineering is lost most of the time having to deal with BS and more and more reports.
If you ever read dilbert comics, they make perfect sense if you work in a regulated/critical engineering field where either millions and billions of dollars are involved or people's lives are put in risk if you **** up.
I have not worked in the car industry or the electronics industy such as say sony, so I can only comment on my own experiences. But i'm certain a product driven field like sony or motorolla is different as they are not "system engineering houses" like nuclear or aerospace.
08-09-2005, 07:39 PM
#57
Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 3,108
[quote name='mike_rudy' date='Aug 9 2005, 05:12 PM']Well engineering was what i was leaning towards at first due to it looked like it would be intresting, as for what you said about loving cars, i am 16 and i have 8 cars and one full time drag car, i am thinking of going into pipefitting welding now though, up in the oil sands starting wage is 70 g a year and a 40 g sign on bonus, no one wants to work up north, but whatever, go due that for a couple years then moved back down and buy a house, seems like a good idea. Engineering doesn't seem as hands on as i would like it to be, i know i have the grades and smarts as i just finished grade 10 and i have already finished calculus and 12 chem and physics. Do you guys ever get to go out on the job site and be light a project manager type thing?
[/quote]
I'm in aerospace. I push papers around. My job is to make paper. I'm not allowed to touch hardware as the company is unionized. The CAW (yes canadian auto workers union) are the only ones allowed to touch any hardware that will be flown in space. Do not ask me how CAW managed to get into SPAR aerospace 20 years ago because it puzzles me as well.
I used to work nuclear and it was also paper pushing. I'm fortunate that both jobs past and current are real engineering jobs because all too easy is it for a company to stop doing engineering and just design and the end prodcuts are things that don't work or kill people. However I'm unfotunate in that the sense of engineering is lost most of the time having to deal with BS and more and more reports.
If you ever read dilbert comics, they make perfect sense if you work in a regulated/critical engineering field where either millions and billions of dollars are involved or people's lives are put in risk if you **** up.
I have not worked in the car industry or the electronics industy such as say sony, so I can only comment on my own experiences. But i'm certain a product driven field like sony or motorolla is different as they are not "system engineering houses" like nuclear or aerospace.
[snapback]746830[/snapback]
[/quote]
I'm in aerospace. I push papers around. My job is to make paper. I'm not allowed to touch hardware as the company is unionized. The CAW (yes canadian auto workers union) are the only ones allowed to touch any hardware that will be flown in space. Do not ask me how CAW managed to get into SPAR aerospace 20 years ago because it puzzles me as well.
I used to work nuclear and it was also paper pushing. I'm fortunate that both jobs past and current are real engineering jobs because all too easy is it for a company to stop doing engineering and just design and the end prodcuts are things that don't work or kill people. However I'm unfotunate in that the sense of engineering is lost most of the time having to deal with BS and more and more reports.
If you ever read dilbert comics, they make perfect sense if you work in a regulated/critical engineering field where either millions and billions of dollars are involved or people's lives are put in risk if you **** up.
I have not worked in the car industry or the electronics industy such as say sony, so I can only comment on my own experiences. But i'm certain a product driven field like sony or motorolla is different as they are not "system engineering houses" like nuclear or aerospace.
08-11-2005, 08:52 AM
#58
Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Sunny Downtown Fenwick
Posts: 177
[quote name='mike_rudy' date='Aug 9 2005, 06:12 PM']Well engineering was what i was leaning towards at first due to it looked like it would be intresting, as for what you said about loving cars, i am 16 and i have 8 cars and one full time drag car, i am thinking of going into pipefitting welding now though, up in the oil sands starting wage is 70 g a year and a 40 g sign on bonus, no one wants to work up north, but whatever, go due that for a couple years then moved back down and buy a house, seems like a good idea. Engineering doesn't seem as hands on as i would like it to be, i know i have the grades and smarts as i just finished grade 10 and i have already finished calculus and 12 chem and physics. Do you guys ever get to go out on the job site and be light a project manager type thing?
[/quote]
Here's the thing with Engineering: You can do whatever you want. You just have to be careful when selecting your job. For example:
My wife designs and builds engine coolers. Right now she is assembling and testing intercoolers for a high powered turbo car. She has been to England and Arizona on testing trips, driving everything from full sized diesels to lotus'.
One of my co-op jobs was tuning engines. This job was everything from installing fuel injection hardware to running a dyno to high altitude testing in Colorado.
Construction engineering is pretty cool too, but you need to do a lot of travel. Friends of mine are site supervisors all over the place.
I have an oportunity right now to go to Florida, and more or less run a medium sized company.
In automotive, the OEM's pay a lot, but the work is not that interesting. The suppliers pay less, but have more interesting work.
The reason I am sticking with a boring 9-5 job is so I can use my engineering knowledge to start a high-performance shop.
Engineering also prepares you for pretty much anything. MBA's are popular with engineering grads now, but you can also get into pretty much any field afterward.
Pipefitting probably pays a lot, but you are infinitely replaceable, and your job for 30 years is welding pipe. Nothing more.
[snapback]746830[/snapback]
[/quote]
Here's the thing with Engineering: You can do whatever you want. You just have to be careful when selecting your job. For example:
My wife designs and builds engine coolers. Right now she is assembling and testing intercoolers for a high powered turbo car. She has been to England and Arizona on testing trips, driving everything from full sized diesels to lotus'.
One of my co-op jobs was tuning engines. This job was everything from installing fuel injection hardware to running a dyno to high altitude testing in Colorado.
Construction engineering is pretty cool too, but you need to do a lot of travel. Friends of mine are site supervisors all over the place.
I have an oportunity right now to go to Florida, and more or less run a medium sized company.
In automotive, the OEM's pay a lot, but the work is not that interesting. The suppliers pay less, but have more interesting work.
The reason I am sticking with a boring 9-5 job is so I can use my engineering knowledge to start a high-performance shop.
Engineering also prepares you for pretty much anything. MBA's are popular with engineering grads now, but you can also get into pretty much any field afterward.
Pipefitting probably pays a lot, but you are infinitely replaceable, and your job for 30 years is welding pipe. Nothing more.
08-11-2005, 10:53 AM
#59
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 118
Graduate of: St Clair College Mechaincal Engineering Technologist: Mold tool and die design (3 year program)
Years of experience: 3 full time (5 Co-op)
what you hate: BS
what you like: Freedom to set my own hours, designing a cell and watching it run for the first time.
job description: Automation designer/project manager/JHSC rep
Started at 44K now at 55K but this is with overtime (Saturdays)
SPIKE
Years of experience: 3 full time (5 Co-op)
what you hate: BS
what you like: Freedom to set my own hours, designing a cell and watching it run for the first time.
job description: Automation designer/project manager/JHSC rep
Started at 44K now at 55K but this is with overtime (Saturdays)
SPIKE
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