Thoughts On Engineering Field Dec 2022

I’m fairly confident that this will apply decently to most engineering fields, but maybe not quite as well to computer/software engineering. Mostly writing this to look back on in a few years and see how my thoughts change.

I’m currently a senior mechanical engineering student. I have had two internships, one with a renewable energy lab in my university, and one with an aerospace startup. This information is built up from my experience applying to and working at those, as well as talking with other students about their various experiences. Note that this information is very colored by my interests which tend to be small companies that don’t care much about GPA, even though I’m trying to speak from a neutral position.

Note that this post mainly talks about GPA from the perspective of a student or recent grad. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that it holds very little importance 5+ years after graduation. Personally, I don’t think it matters much in most cases after your first full-time job.

First, the big myth of GPA. I don’t think it is nearly as important as most students think, depending on where they are looking to work during and after school. The a few cases where it might matter: if you want to work at an extremely competitive company with a GPA cutoff, a very large company (or department, e.g. NASA) with a cutoff, or get a Masters/PhD (especially so if you want to go into academia). However, even in those cases, I don’t think that your GPA really matters as long as you pass the cutoff. A 4.0 might get you in the door at some places, but in others it might be looked on as a slight negative if you have nothing else on your resume (the person who hired me at my startup internship told me this directly)- it shows that you chose to prioritize classes over things like projects and teams, which isn’t wrong, but it can be misaligned with the interests of certain companies (small ones who value practical experience, which classes generally don’t do a great job teaching you).

Something I’ll also note is that I don’t think that a company being competitive (and certainly not large) necessarily transfers into how much you’ll learn from the experience, or even how good it might look on your resume. The idea underlying this entire post is that practical experience trumps apparent societal indicators of hard work or intelligence, like GPA or working at a highly thought-of company. I especially don’t want to work at defense companies even though I know many people think highly of them, because the single common impression I’ve gotten from talking to people in defense is that it is slow and boring. I find that people tend to be pretty honest about their work experience at a given company if asked, so that’s my preferred method of looking past the veil of perception into what it’s actually like to work at a given place.

A question I’ve asked myself is, even if it doesn’t matter much, why not try to make it good, in case you end up in a situation where it does? My personal answer to that is that it will take up valuable time in which you could have been improving yourself and possibly your hire-ability in other ways, like doing personal projects or being part of an engineering student team. (If you’re choosing between 20 hours of partying every week and spending that time on your GPA, it’ll obviously be better career-wise to spend it on the GPA, although that’s a false dichotomy.) If one of the above cases doesn’t apply to you, those will give you a much better looking resume for the same time invested, and be much more fun, too.

Experience in varying engineering fields (maybe not CSE) appears to be pretty transferable to me. Definitely less so at or between large companies. I’ve heard of and met many engineers with a degree that definitely doesn’t match the job title, and I think that may well be me in the future. It’s even becoming more common to not have a degree at all, although I get the feeling that’s almost wholly isolated to small companies.

Most engineers seem to stay at companies for 1 - 10 years, and I think the lower end of that is much more common. I don’t think it is as much of a risk now to job-hop frequently as it might have been in the past. The risk is that companies see that as a liability - why spend the costs of onboarding on someone who will leave in a year? Maybe companies are coming to to think that accepting that some employees aren’t going to stick around is required to attract a growing proportion of engineers who like to jump around and see what the profession has to offer. I also think that this type of engineer is likely to have above average competence. I also don’t think that large gaps in experience are all that bad if you were actually doing something during that time, besides sitting around. Of course, this and perception of short stays at companies is one of the many things that will vary drastically depending on the size of the company.

To speak a bit more on the differing qualifications desired depending on company size, I think that generally, large companies care more about societally accepted competence indicators, like GPA or company prestige, and smaller companies look for more clear, lower-level indicators like project experience. Because this is such a broad statement, it has a lot of exceptions in both cases, but I think it will apply well for maybe 75% of companies. Why do different-size companies look for different things? Maybe it’s because recruiters for larger companies are used to sifting through more resumes, and they need to make more use of “at a glance” metrics like company names and GPA. Maybe larger company cultures can’t have as clear an idea of what they are looking for as small companies past “good engineer” which leads to using the most accepted metrics for that. Maybe recruiters self-sort themselves by choosing where to work - those that prefer different competence indicators go to companies that agree with their preference, so any company preference is just made more drastic. Finally, maybe the companies are actually looking for different things. Large companies prefer people who spend their time earning more socially accepted indicators of competence, smaller companies prefer people who don’t value social acceptance as much. There tends to be more quantification of performance at larger companies, so they look for people who are used to and more effective at working according to that quantification. As much as I am very clearly biased, neither of those things is better than the other, they’re just different - same goes for large and small companies in general.

Generally, salary seems to be positively correlated with company size (this goes along well with the “quantification of performance” idea). There are more benefits at larger companies, and they are much more willing to help pay for further education, and various other expenses including relocation (and various stipends for students).

Companies across the board are increasingly allowing work from home and more flexible hours. I think that small companies are further ahead in this, but I think larger companies are fairly close behind.

I’m not sure about the trend for vacation time (that means - even less sure than all the other very-small-sample-size guesses in this post). Maybe it’s flat? Smaller companies might be more likely to have “unlimited” PTO, but I’ve heard that a lot of the time that manifests as “not much” due to social pressures.

Work-life balance is certainly better at larger companies, on average. I don’t think that startups are the 80-hour hell holes that some think they are, but there’s definitely no one telling you to go home after 40 hours. I think it depends on the place whether doing exactly what you’re paid for and leaving at 5:00 every day will be looked down on. It won’t get you fired anywhere but the most miserable companies.

The people working at smaller companies seem to me a much cooler, younger, and more inspiring and motivating crowd, which is something extremely valuable to me. I think that when working somewhere, you’ll frequently rise or sink to the level of your coworkers in work, but also in other aspects of life. Constantly being the dumbest person in a room is something I aspire to, because you’ll be learning so much and seeing so many different rooms.

Larger companies also care much more about appearances and drugs, but I think it’ll also vary a lot between industries no matter the company size, especially when clearances are involved. Companies across the board are having to be more accepting over time, because socially acceptable appearance is becoming more and more wide.

A given engineer might work on average 25-30 hours out of their paid 40. I think that the “unworked” hours are probably spent in a more fun way at smaller companies, but there’s always going to be some meetings where everyone’s kind of wondering what there is to talk about.