Following on from The Resident Loon's post below
I am also an engineer, civil engineering with a major lean towards hydraulic modelling.

Now I can't speak for every type of engineering, but you get lured in with talk of working on big projects with lots of influence and with the chance to look at the finished article with proud and say "I did that"

in reality there aren't enough high profile projects to go around so these go to the favourite companies.

Even within a high profile project the day to day tasks are just as mundane and dull as every other crummy project that is on the go.

Personally I spend most of my time at work making flood or wave models. This sounds reasonably interesting right?

In actual fact I spend 50% my time looking at Excel, 45% looking at error messages, 4% wishing I had a faster computer, 0.9% telling the client why it isn't working and 0.1% enjoying exciting animations of flooding that are the result of my hard work.

and engineers don't get paid enough!
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Thu 26 Jun 2008, 14:40, Reply)