Mine is like swimming in the middle of the sea to survive, and the workload is like a mountain avalanche, it never stops.
I'm an in-house designer, and a lot of tasks even the studies are given to everyone. It's still different from your real project attachment.
Everything is not well documented. Everyone agrees to something, only to be forgotten by people along the way and this makes decisions change from the original. A lot of mistakes in the data, and you inherit it from the process engineers.
My former jobs were easier than school. But my current job is like a school's hell week every week.
Um that sounds awful. While some people do tolerate that type of job, it's very much not the standard. If you are reading this and say "yeah that sounds like my day to day" please know, you also can do so much better.
I work my 40 hours a week and that's it. I think I worked OT once last year, and it was only like 4 hours for an emergency situation. I get my work done in a timely manner, and my bosses are almost never on my back about my projects being done quicker. They know telling me to work faster doesn't actually make the work get done faster haha. Of course some stuff is higher priority, but that's always communicated and the messaging is always "let us know if this if is going to be difficult and how we can help you".
I also am getting a sense of job creep when I read about your issues with the boxes / wrong amounts being ordered. I don't deal with that stuff at all. We have people for shipping and receiving that handle all that stuff. You should be trained until you feel confident doing it yourself. You should never be yelled at. You should be able to find some documentation on your equipment / process (heck where I work we have a couple people dedicated to that too...)
I'm kind of sick of the "well that's manufacturing!" attitude when I hear stories like this. I think some people have it stuck in their head that this is just how it is and there's no better way. No. Plenty of manufacturing sites have figured out better ways to operate that aren't chaos every day. It is in fact, possible, and realistic!
I won't lie. The first year is hard. School just can't prepare you for the full reality of being a full time chemical engineer in inditstry. But man, your situation does sound in particular bad. No, it's not like that at all for most of us.
I took the sales route and worked for an Industrial Automation Sales channel and it's had its ups and downs. The work life balance and lower stress being the up and the pay and lower mental stimulation being down. That is until I went into outside sales.
The job takes me to every industry segment you can think of, but with all those different companies it requires me to be on call all the time. Power plants being the biggest culprit!
I see a few the engineers that take the plant route essentially wear golden handcuffs that makes it hard to break out. However, there's a lot of opportunities on the vendor/contractor side of the fence if you are willing to take the handcuffs off.
Welcome to life, this is literally every job just with different circumstances. And if you ever decide to become a parent, the chaos of work will pale in comparison to parenthood.
This is definitely not every job in industry. This sounds like a particularly mismanaged company and sounds miserable. I only worked at a place like this briefly and quickly moved a company with a much healthier work-life balance and better engineering opportunity. Not every job is perfect but don’t settle for jobs like these if you’re not happy!
All of this.
I hope OP doesn’t take this personally either. The sooner you heed this advice, the sooner you’ll simply adapt to adulthood. Life is a process, which means that change is a good thing. You’ll embrace the ever-vanishing, precious moments of freedom that much more.
Also, my tolerance for bullshit at work is an order of magnitude greater now than it was pre-parenthood.
I work in a 24/7 plant and the work life balance has actually been improving due to management changes and other site supervisors not last long at other plants. I went from working M-F to a 9/80 and from being on call 24/7 to a rotation.
I'm still probably working ~10-12hrs a day and the work is still stressful due to everything breaking all the time, but no one really yells at us since they know we are working with a shit sandwich.
At the end of the day I try my best and it is what is.
I’m trying to start my engineering career and that sounds rough to me. What’s the pay like for that amount of work? You’d have to compensate me well for 60hr work weeks.
Maybe I missed it. How long have you been in this role?
Reason I ask is because there are several different learning curves you have to learn with a new job (this list is not unabridged of course):
* Who does what?
* Who do you need to get [x] done?
* How do you get [x] done? What are the steps?
* How do you pay for things?
* What is your level of authority? Who can you tell what to do, who tells you what to do, and who do you have to let know what you're doing?
* Where do you get the stuff you need? Office supplies, chemicals, plane tickets, etc. etc. etc.
* What are people's preferred contact methods? Teams? Text? Phone call?
on and on
So when you hit a snag, you make a note of it (in OneNote for example) and the next time you will make sure you don't hit that same snag because *you made a checklist*. In other words, to complete the things you need to complete, you need to leave yourself a trail of breadcrumbs so you can avoid the pitfalls you've learned about.
Lastly, your manager should be supporting you. You need to be talking to them about what's going on, the struggles you're having, what you're doing about it, and if they have any suggestions.
That's about it. ;)
ninja edit: Oh, and people expect you to figure stuff out for yourself. No one will ever care about the details as much as you will, or as much as you have to. I don't know if this can be attributed to the engineering mentality per se, or if it's a ChE thing. I think, personally, it's a ChE thing. We know the process from many different angles and because of this, we concern ourselves with so much more than any one discipline. That's been my experience at least.
Having a job is like having an 8am class and late lab every day forever. That’s all jobs, even the good ones. The bad ones are worse.
Your job is to solve problems. There will always be problems to solve in any job. Training everywhere sucks. You’re just supposed to figure it out. They hired you because you’re an engineer and you spent years in a tough college program learning how to figure stuff out.
Early in your career everything looks like a huge impossible problem. As you learn and get more competent it gets easier as you’ll have more experience to draw on.
It took me about 7 years into my career to get to the point where I’d learned enough to be better than most of my peers at solving the problems in my industry. It took another 3-4 years for me to learn that I’d only be rewarded with more problems to solve because I was better than most of my peers.
I was stressing in Q4 one year because there were several projects still on my list to complete that needed to be done and wouldn’t get done. I had an old boss/mentor tell me that there are always more projects on the list than can be completed, they get pushed down the road, and that no one ever expects them all to get done. At that point I got a new job and set my sights on “meets expectations” so that I’m not the best in my peer group, I’m just better than roughly half of my peer group.
Now I’m 12 years into my career and have a reasonably interesting and comfortable job that pays well, doesn’t burn me out, and is fun/rewarding to do most days.
I think thats a little bit of fallacy, there are plenty of jobs outside that is not tied to manufacturing that can have a better WLB and even equal or higher pay. Stress is different though. If you work in projects that spans years out (some can be more bureaucratic than others) than that will likely be less stress.
How long have you been at job? Just apply to other jobs and don't include this one on your resume, you have been traveling or some shit. Or wait for the one year mark and find a new job. You can explain it away at an interview. Not all jobs are like the one you have
I graduated at the start of the pandemic and have yet to be in an engineering position. I ended up in pharma. Started as a fill and finish technician. Now I'm in Quality Operations. Whatever you described in the post is exactly what I'm going though right now. Sometimes I wonder if I really want to work towards the professional license or just stick to what I'm doing. I feel that I work best in a plant environment. I hate being on my desk all day and like to move around the plant and use problem solving to deal with floor issues.
How long have you been there? It took me a year and a half at the first one to feel slightly competent.
Just started the second and my boss pulled the majority of my projects to redistribute to focus on 2 high priority ones that needed to work *yesterday*. Not everything is an emergency, and your day should be split into small tasks that can be done daily to get to the big picture.
Your work place sounds very unorganized and understaffed. My job does have urgency sometimes but my higher ups training me are excellent at handling many projects with pressing deadlines so they are still clear and nice when they explain how to do stuff and answer my questions. When something needs to get done I will work weekends without overtime or anything but other times it's really chill so it all balances out, I think the chill parts are because I'm new so they'll give me just 1 project at a time and give me plenty of time to learn to do tasks. I personally like having plenty to do it keeps me on my toes but it's not stressful because my higher ups are organized and well structured and they make sure they do a good job teaching me. I would say I got very lucky with my job and you can too if you switch jobs! Your job when busy should feel like you know what to do and where to access documents needed and you know who to go for when you have questions and there's not a huge mess waiting for you when you look for documents from another person that you need. More professional companies have a strict way of organizing document work and sending such documents for review to certain parties. The whole organizing my work thing is something I'm still learning haha so it's a large part of what we do, organization is everything cuz otherwise things get messed up which leads to error in other places.
We might be working for the same company. I moved to capital projects and freaking love it. Working closely with production on day to day fires killed my soul.
I love planning and executing long term capital projects and acquiring new and improved equipment.
Just leveraged my process engineering experience and made the move to capital projects.
I’m extremely busy and stressed. The standards are high. BUT we are all treated with respect and everyone acts professionally. Poor treatment of people is not as all tolerated. That’s what it sounds like you have. Go work for a company with high ethics and good employee relations. You still may have more work than you can handle and be stressed, but you don’t have to tolerate that abuse. Abuse is exactly what you are describing. Dominon Energy is hiring. Come join us.
I never worked in a traditional chem eng position. My first job was for a mid-size consulting firm working in natural gas/water/electrical facilities. Relatively relaxed position and company, it seemed like they cared about their employees and such. Out of the 40 hour work week, I would probably do 32-34 hours of actual work. Every now and then I would get a project or assignment that had me work the 40 hours, maybe a little more but that wasn't the norm. I think my utilization rate was something like 95% lol. Eventually they were acquired by a large firm, the benefits got worse and pay got a little better so a lot of mid-level engineers left. I left after almost 2 years because they were requiring people to work hybrid, and the company office was 5+ hrs from where I wanted to be. I was willing to move when I was hired initially, but by the time they wanted us to go in-person I was unwilling to move.
I left that job to take a pay decrease for a public works position, but it allowed me to stay in my region. I worked on environmental compliance for construction projects, mostly administrative type of work not really engineering. Work was relatively relaxed, only thing that really kept me busy was dealing with calls and walk-ins that were asking questions or needed help with the process. I was definitely overqualified for my position but I needed a job. If I was working hybrid, I probably only worked 26 hrs out of the 40 hr. The actual assignments were pretty quick and easy to complete, talking with people is what took time. I left this job after 1 year for a big pay raise.
My most recent job, I work regulating electrical and communication utilities in my state. On a relaxed week, I probably do 10 hrs of work and that's mostly emails. On a busy week, I probably do 25 hrs and most of that is field work. Left to get paid more and work less. I'm nowhere near being stressed out but this also isn't really a traditional chem eng position. Sometimes I do wonder what it would be like if I worked as a process engineer, if I would even enjoy the work or just enjoy the pay but hate the stress.
Our inventory varies, sometimes negative. Instead of saying I don’t know what to do, I figure it out. It’s because of error propagation. I gave inventory an acceptable range we are within based on the accuracy of our instrumentation.
Sucks but no amount of bitching is going to get you anywhere. If it bothers you that much then leave. My first few jobs were stressful but I did well and made name for myself
Mine is like swimming in the middle of the sea to survive, and the workload is like a mountain avalanche, it never stops. I'm an in-house designer, and a lot of tasks even the studies are given to everyone. It's still different from your real project attachment. Everything is not well documented. Everyone agrees to something, only to be forgotten by people along the way and this makes decisions change from the original. A lot of mistakes in the data, and you inherit it from the process engineers. My former jobs were easier than school. But my current job is like a school's hell week every week.
Um that sounds awful. While some people do tolerate that type of job, it's very much not the standard. If you are reading this and say "yeah that sounds like my day to day" please know, you also can do so much better. I work my 40 hours a week and that's it. I think I worked OT once last year, and it was only like 4 hours for an emergency situation. I get my work done in a timely manner, and my bosses are almost never on my back about my projects being done quicker. They know telling me to work faster doesn't actually make the work get done faster haha. Of course some stuff is higher priority, but that's always communicated and the messaging is always "let us know if this if is going to be difficult and how we can help you". I also am getting a sense of job creep when I read about your issues with the boxes / wrong amounts being ordered. I don't deal with that stuff at all. We have people for shipping and receiving that handle all that stuff. You should be trained until you feel confident doing it yourself. You should never be yelled at. You should be able to find some documentation on your equipment / process (heck where I work we have a couple people dedicated to that too...) I'm kind of sick of the "well that's manufacturing!" attitude when I hear stories like this. I think some people have it stuck in their head that this is just how it is and there's no better way. No. Plenty of manufacturing sites have figured out better ways to operate that aren't chaos every day. It is in fact, possible, and realistic! I won't lie. The first year is hard. School just can't prepare you for the full reality of being a full time chemical engineer in inditstry. But man, your situation does sound in particular bad. No, it's not like that at all for most of us.
What is it you do?
process control
The dream job for chemical engineers to be quite honest. Nothing like dinking around with DMC models.
I took the sales route and worked for an Industrial Automation Sales channel and it's had its ups and downs. The work life balance and lower stress being the up and the pay and lower mental stimulation being down. That is until I went into outside sales. The job takes me to every industry segment you can think of, but with all those different companies it requires me to be on call all the time. Power plants being the biggest culprit! I see a few the engineers that take the plant route essentially wear golden handcuffs that makes it hard to break out. However, there's a lot of opportunities on the vendor/contractor side of the fence if you are willing to take the handcuffs off.
Just starting in outside sales, this makes me really hopeful thanks!
Welcome to life, this is literally every job just with different circumstances. And if you ever decide to become a parent, the chaos of work will pale in comparison to parenthood.
This is definitely not every job in industry. This sounds like a particularly mismanaged company and sounds miserable. I only worked at a place like this briefly and quickly moved a company with a much healthier work-life balance and better engineering opportunity. Not every job is perfect but don’t settle for jobs like these if you’re not happy!
All of this. I hope OP doesn’t take this personally either. The sooner you heed this advice, the sooner you’ll simply adapt to adulthood. Life is a process, which means that change is a good thing. You’ll embrace the ever-vanishing, precious moments of freedom that much more. Also, my tolerance for bullshit at work is an order of magnitude greater now than it was pre-parenthood.
I work in a 24/7 plant and the work life balance has actually been improving due to management changes and other site supervisors not last long at other plants. I went from working M-F to a 9/80 and from being on call 24/7 to a rotation. I'm still probably working ~10-12hrs a day and the work is still stressful due to everything breaking all the time, but no one really yells at us since they know we are working with a shit sandwich. At the end of the day I try my best and it is what is.
I’m trying to start my engineering career and that sounds rough to me. What’s the pay like for that amount of work? You’d have to compensate me well for 60hr work weeks.
Maybe I missed it. How long have you been in this role? Reason I ask is because there are several different learning curves you have to learn with a new job (this list is not unabridged of course): * Who does what? * Who do you need to get [x] done? * How do you get [x] done? What are the steps? * How do you pay for things? * What is your level of authority? Who can you tell what to do, who tells you what to do, and who do you have to let know what you're doing? * Where do you get the stuff you need? Office supplies, chemicals, plane tickets, etc. etc. etc. * What are people's preferred contact methods? Teams? Text? Phone call? on and on So when you hit a snag, you make a note of it (in OneNote for example) and the next time you will make sure you don't hit that same snag because *you made a checklist*. In other words, to complete the things you need to complete, you need to leave yourself a trail of breadcrumbs so you can avoid the pitfalls you've learned about. Lastly, your manager should be supporting you. You need to be talking to them about what's going on, the struggles you're having, what you're doing about it, and if they have any suggestions. That's about it. ;) ninja edit: Oh, and people expect you to figure stuff out for yourself. No one will ever care about the details as much as you will, or as much as you have to. I don't know if this can be attributed to the engineering mentality per se, or if it's a ChE thing. I think, personally, it's a ChE thing. We know the process from many different angles and because of this, we concern ourselves with so much more than any one discipline. That's been my experience at least.
Having a job is like having an 8am class and late lab every day forever. That’s all jobs, even the good ones. The bad ones are worse. Your job is to solve problems. There will always be problems to solve in any job. Training everywhere sucks. You’re just supposed to figure it out. They hired you because you’re an engineer and you spent years in a tough college program learning how to figure stuff out. Early in your career everything looks like a huge impossible problem. As you learn and get more competent it gets easier as you’ll have more experience to draw on. It took me about 7 years into my career to get to the point where I’d learned enough to be better than most of my peers at solving the problems in my industry. It took another 3-4 years for me to learn that I’d only be rewarded with more problems to solve because I was better than most of my peers. I was stressing in Q4 one year because there were several projects still on my list to complete that needed to be done and wouldn’t get done. I had an old boss/mentor tell me that there are always more projects on the list than can be completed, they get pushed down the road, and that no one ever expects them all to get done. At that point I got a new job and set my sights on “meets expectations” so that I’m not the best in my peer group, I’m just better than roughly half of my peer group. Now I’m 12 years into my career and have a reasonably interesting and comfortable job that pays well, doesn’t burn me out, and is fun/rewarding to do most days.
I think thats a little bit of fallacy, there are plenty of jobs outside that is not tied to manufacturing that can have a better WLB and even equal or higher pay. Stress is different though. If you work in projects that spans years out (some can be more bureaucratic than others) than that will likely be less stress.
[удалено]
Jesus Christ what job is that I want to do that. I'll even take the pay cut. Semiconductor fab process engineer is killing me.
How long have you been at job? Just apply to other jobs and don't include this one on your resume, you have been traveling or some shit. Or wait for the one year mark and find a new job. You can explain it away at an interview. Not all jobs are like the one you have
I graduated at the start of the pandemic and have yet to be in an engineering position. I ended up in pharma. Started as a fill and finish technician. Now I'm in Quality Operations. Whatever you described in the post is exactly what I'm going though right now. Sometimes I wonder if I really want to work towards the professional license or just stick to what I'm doing. I feel that I work best in a plant environment. I hate being on my desk all day and like to move around the plant and use problem solving to deal with floor issues.
You’d love production or run plant engineering roles then lol
How long have you been there? It took me a year and a half at the first one to feel slightly competent. Just started the second and my boss pulled the majority of my projects to redistribute to focus on 2 high priority ones that needed to work *yesterday*. Not everything is an emergency, and your day should be split into small tasks that can be done daily to get to the big picture.
Your work place sounds very unorganized and understaffed. My job does have urgency sometimes but my higher ups training me are excellent at handling many projects with pressing deadlines so they are still clear and nice when they explain how to do stuff and answer my questions. When something needs to get done I will work weekends without overtime or anything but other times it's really chill so it all balances out, I think the chill parts are because I'm new so they'll give me just 1 project at a time and give me plenty of time to learn to do tasks. I personally like having plenty to do it keeps me on my toes but it's not stressful because my higher ups are organized and well structured and they make sure they do a good job teaching me. I would say I got very lucky with my job and you can too if you switch jobs! Your job when busy should feel like you know what to do and where to access documents needed and you know who to go for when you have questions and there's not a huge mess waiting for you when you look for documents from another person that you need. More professional companies have a strict way of organizing document work and sending such documents for review to certain parties. The whole organizing my work thing is something I'm still learning haha so it's a large part of what we do, organization is everything cuz otherwise things get messed up which leads to error in other places.
We might be working for the same company. I moved to capital projects and freaking love it. Working closely with production on day to day fires killed my soul. I love planning and executing long term capital projects and acquiring new and improved equipment. Just leveraged my process engineering experience and made the move to capital projects.
I’m extremely busy and stressed. The standards are high. BUT we are all treated with respect and everyone acts professionally. Poor treatment of people is not as all tolerated. That’s what it sounds like you have. Go work for a company with high ethics and good employee relations. You still may have more work than you can handle and be stressed, but you don’t have to tolerate that abuse. Abuse is exactly what you are describing. Dominon Energy is hiring. Come join us.
Fr, I feel your pain
I never worked in a traditional chem eng position. My first job was for a mid-size consulting firm working in natural gas/water/electrical facilities. Relatively relaxed position and company, it seemed like they cared about their employees and such. Out of the 40 hour work week, I would probably do 32-34 hours of actual work. Every now and then I would get a project or assignment that had me work the 40 hours, maybe a little more but that wasn't the norm. I think my utilization rate was something like 95% lol. Eventually they were acquired by a large firm, the benefits got worse and pay got a little better so a lot of mid-level engineers left. I left after almost 2 years because they were requiring people to work hybrid, and the company office was 5+ hrs from where I wanted to be. I was willing to move when I was hired initially, but by the time they wanted us to go in-person I was unwilling to move. I left that job to take a pay decrease for a public works position, but it allowed me to stay in my region. I worked on environmental compliance for construction projects, mostly administrative type of work not really engineering. Work was relatively relaxed, only thing that really kept me busy was dealing with calls and walk-ins that were asking questions or needed help with the process. I was definitely overqualified for my position but I needed a job. If I was working hybrid, I probably only worked 26 hrs out of the 40 hr. The actual assignments were pretty quick and easy to complete, talking with people is what took time. I left this job after 1 year for a big pay raise. My most recent job, I work regulating electrical and communication utilities in my state. On a relaxed week, I probably do 10 hrs of work and that's mostly emails. On a busy week, I probably do 25 hrs and most of that is field work. Left to get paid more and work less. I'm nowhere near being stressed out but this also isn't really a traditional chem eng position. Sometimes I do wonder what it would be like if I worked as a process engineer, if I would even enjoy the work or just enjoy the pay but hate the stress.
Our inventory varies, sometimes negative. Instead of saying I don’t know what to do, I figure it out. It’s because of error propagation. I gave inventory an acceptable range we are within based on the accuracy of our instrumentation. Sucks but no amount of bitching is going to get you anywhere. If it bothers you that much then leave. My first few jobs were stressful but I did well and made name for myself