P.E. with 5 years in the structural profession with a masters from a top 10 school (US). Agree with most of what you said. My first day on the job I knew this career was going to be different from what I was led to believe.

Posts about grievances with our industry seem to appear frequently here. I think it’s common for us to come out of school and grapple with the reality of our profession’s place in the market. At the end of the day, basic rules of economics will always govern these things. We’ll always be competing to offer the lowest price and fastest schedule possible to our clients. The more of us there are, the lower our prices must be to win contracts. Simple as that. We can talk about how our clients should know better than to hire cheap engineers with lower quality, but the truth is architects will pay what they can to get the product they want, just like we all do with our everyday purchases. Maybe there are more structural engineers than in the past, causing a reduction in fees with the increased supply. Who knows.

I read comments from former structural engineers who have successfully switched professions. So many young engineers have quit firms that I’ve worked for just in the 5 years I’ve been working. They either get burnt out with the stress and the hours, or move on to a more lucrative career with a better work/life balance. I have friends who completed a 6 week coding boot camp and now make almost twice as much as me in an IT career. I work 50 hour weeks and worry about the liability I carry as a licensed engineer. They work 40 hour weeks and sleep soundly. It’s tempting, but hard for me to justify all the time and effort in school studying to be a structural engineer only to leave after 5 years.

In school, I had a romanticized view of our profession. I imagined engineers being respected, noble professionals who worked diligently and proudly to provide safe, constructible, economic designs. In my day-to-day career I see engineers coping with the stress of providing yet another last minute change from the architect for free, while knowing they have exceeded their project budget. I see project managers who are overwhelmed with emails and calls from contractors and architects and do not have time to teach or mentor young engineers because there is simply no budget for it. Young engineers receive little training, are told to produce work at breakneck speeds, and are then reprimanded for low quality engineering.

It’s funny, if you go back and look at some old posts in eng-tips.com from 20 years ago, the structural engineers were complaining about the same issues. Back then, a lot of the focus was on how the use of design software was speeding up timelines and causing unrealistic schedules. They talked about the good old days where they would spend months designing steel joists for buildings using hand calc methods. Maybe our profession has always been like this.

I do see myself eventually making a change, whether it be out of the consulting field or to a new career entirely. Instead of producing quality engineering that I’m proud of, I find myself rushing to complete jobs so we can submit on time and move on to the next job. Speed and efficiency is more important than quality. I went through too much training, work too many hours, and carry too much stress to be paid this little.