I picked the one engineering discipline most useful to society and not dedicated to the sole purpose of treat making…..
I WAS TOLD I’D BE A FUCKING BEAVER BUILDING DAMS BUT I’M MORE LIKE A FUCKING BUREAUCRAT EDITING WORD DOCUMENTS FOR TYPOS WHAT THE FUCK
EVERYWHERE I GO, ITS A BULLSHIT JOB. ENGINEERING IS THE MOST USELESS LIB INCREMENTALIST BULLSHIT OUT THERE.
KILL EVERYONE WHO SAYS ‘YOU SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN USEFUL DEGREE IF U WANTED MEANINGFUL WORK AND HIGH PAY.’
PROGRAMMING GATCHA GAMES IS NOT USEFUL U FUCKING NERD
The most essential engineering discipline is also consistently the lowest paid engineering discipline.
HUH HOW ABOUT THAT. STUDY STEM(tm)
From what I can remember, you just stand next to it in a patch of grass in front of the engineering building. Just sort of stand there with a clipboard with a puzzled look on your face.
oh i've done that for a living a while back, its actually a lot of work both in the field and in the office. it was pretty fun because we got to go to different parts of the city every day and measure shit then use cad software to draft it. only issue was of course i was not getting paid the full amount because i didn't have the degree necessary to practice it so i eventually gave up on it. not a bs job though at least
I've still yet to hear about a job that isn't either soul sucking, useless, or shit paying and shit working conditions
Being the idle son or daughter of the wealthy seems to be a pretty sweet gig, but I haven't been able to figure out where to apply for it.
well you could marry into it but typically rich people only actually marry other rich people
even if you did marry in, you'd never be accepted as one of them, you'd be an eternal outsider
I mean for me personally, I literally would only want the money. The lack of acceptance from shitty rich fucks would be a good thing.
LOL the money wouldn't be for you. Except in the divorce settlement, and they'd require a pre-nup anyway.
We humans are social animals, we crave acceptance into the ingroup. Being in the outgroup all the time with only your husband to include you would be misery-inducing. Plus he'd be creeped out by your family and wouldn't want to be around them, even though you want him and your children to be a part of them. He'd say they're a bad influence on his children and he'd probably be right.
Lotta assumptions here about what a hypothetical relationship between me and an unreasonably wealthy person would look like, almost none of which are true.
For one thing, I wouldn't marry a rich fuck unless they were a class traitor. Full stop, I wouldn't be able to deal with it otherwise. So we would certainly have non-rich friends and the relationship would absolutely not be me as a house spouse never seeing anyone except my partner and rich people who hate me. Second, there is zero chance of me ever having kids. I will never reproduce and have taken steps to ensure that, in fact, I physically cannot. Third, we're jumping straight to my hypothetical spouse being a man. Why? Women and enbies can also be rich, you know.
This is all super silly, of course, I'm never going to marry a rich person, because I'm in a very happy relationship with a great human being who I love a lot and also because rich people tend to marry other rich people. I wouldn't have even bothered responding except for all the, dare I say patriarchal, assumptions you're making about me.
Bruh they usually haaaate themselves. Like the people in the front of the train on snowpiercer. Take away their treats and they go feral and self destruct. They are hollow shells of people.
I think the only people who are really doing it are people in co ops. Even then im not too sure though
it does sound like a great life being able to pursue anything knowing that if you “fail” it won’t wreck you financially and you can just try something new.
We should all be able to live like that
Leave it to capitalism to turn arguably the most important role in a modern society's infrastructure into something useless.
Holy shit I feel that though. I gave up on a computer science degree twice, and finally put it behind me the second time after realizing I can't think of a tech job (that I could get anywhere near) which even serves a purpose beyond "process data in an office to help another office process their own data, etc etc etc." Any job opportunity I saw was about 3 steps removed from having any coherent purpose you could explain to the average person. It's endlessly fucking frustrating that thousands of young people, in search of a meaningful life, are tricked into wasting their talents on serving that worthless industry instead of using them for something worthwhile.
Now I've switched to an applied arts program where I do alternating terms at uni and a craft college. I know exactly what the typical reaction to that is, but I'm not falling for that guilt-tripping bait just to waste years working towards abstract fucking IT field "accomplishments" that no one will ever benefit from. That illusion of success only works if you still believe the fullness of your life should be measured by how much value you've produced, not to mention in a closed corporate system which ironically loses any real-world significance the moment you step outside of it. I do think hard work is often necessary to truly succeed in life, but the kind of work that must be done to save this society won't be found there. I'll probably have to find it myself, learning from others along the way.
IDK what I'l end up doing in the long run. Who knows. But the least I can do is tell the world some stories to help others make sense of life, or find a way to turn my beliefs into politically-charged art as unapologetically as possible (ideally through graphic novels or 2D animation). Even though the platform for an aspiring radical artist is pretty much guaranteed to be smaller than I'd hope, I want to give it everything I have and reach as many people as possible.
I find comfort in knowing that if change is really coming, then someday it won't be this hard.
:juche-WPK:
Any job opportunity I saw was about 3 steps removed from having any coherent purpose you could explain to the average person.
This hits hard. I’m an accountant though and work in systems and project management. Equally unintelligible work to explain to the average person.
It would help if the projects being managed under capitalism actually meant something. I feel like the ideal takeaway from this thread is that many of these jobs could be useful or at least satisfying, but never will be until the current system is gone and dealt with. Accounting is a great example imo.
Right. Making sure data is correct and can be used for decision making is as needed for a large company as it is for a planned economy. The type of work I’ve done in my career has been more nakedly in service of the owners than anything else. At my current company “shareholder value” is part of the credo
I'm getting major office space vibes. Torch the cubicle farm. Embrace the hard hat. :blob-no-thoughts:
Yet, when you meet someone for the first time what’s the first question they ask after learning your name?“and what do you do?” every single time, and nobody can explain their jobs to anyone else because they’re all bullshit so I just say something to move the conversation along
The whole purpose of that question is, “where in the class hierarchy in my head should I place you?”
They’re so many levels abstracted from anything concrete coupled with their own jargon that the average person correctly assumes you’re just shuffling (digital) papers around all day which is entirely true.
I worked in e-commerce consulting for a while and it was draining my soul through my nostrils so I left to work at various startups making different kinds of treats. It might be equally meaningless in the long run but writing the firmware for a weed vape is a lot more satisfying than writing customer retention data crunching blah blah blah
Huh, I'm in the beginning stages of a job search and I had honestly more or less entirely written off startups. You've made me reconsider slightly. I'm just worried about stability, you know?
Yeah we're going into a recession so I might be fucked, but a startup that's done Series B is a lot more stable than one running on seed money
All my engineer friends hated their jobs. They where all people that built cars and thought they would be building things. Instead they where doing math or checking math.
Most have quit and gonr back to trade like jobs where they actually build shit.
Lots of them it wasn't even math it was watching over the ai making sure it's doing the math right.
Also that's not how people where sold on engineering as a career 20 years ago. It was sold as this much more glorious job.They thought it would be more rewarding and well paying along with easier on their body. Many of my then realized they like the physical aspect much more than the design desk work.
it's all math and checking math because that's most of design work.
me as an architect :side-eye-1: :side-eye-2: "haha yeah... yeah..."
Lol very true, you'd think that going through an engineering program at school would give them a clue
Someone should have told them way sooner that if they wanted to work in a factory they don't need a degree for that. And also that working in a factory is way more boring than doing math
I thought it was the degree that makes money for people who like science, which is mostly accurate. I now realize it's just a series of hurdles and challenges which protect the class system and at the end you get a largely meaningless piece of paper that entitles you to not have to sweat as much earning money.
Lmao yeah
ChemE, working in construction, and like, even though my work results in actual stuff getting built, it feels like its 90% paperwork. Invoices, purchase orders, payroll, quibling over contracts and payment, trying not to sign anything describing scope outside of how I priced the scope, etc, etc, etc
Real struggle not feeling like even ''''real'''' trades aren't mostly capitalist filler most days
did recently catch a bullshit building owner pushing us to break building codes and accept switchgear that'd be a bomb though, so that's cool. Like, it'd legally be bad for us if it did kill someone, so even CHUD's should have been motivated to say 'fuck no', but it's still nice to be able to say 'WTF, no; we need to delay this job and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting better gear so we're not accessories to fucking murder'. Fun part is is saying that should be the actual EE's job, but they signed off on it (like morons), so I got to be the one to say it, which like, getting to flip out on people when you're legally and morally justified in doing so is a pretty good high
On the flip side, my grandfather was a bench chemist who became a ChemE pushing paper.
Everyone he worked with previously as a chemist died before the age of 70, except him.
Momma and Daddy told me I should be a painter. But, no, I was obstinate and followed my dreams of being an engineer instead.
:shapiro-poplar:
I don't think you're really viewed as an engineer proper until you get your PE. Sometimes you'll be doing design work but often you'll be picking up the menial work that needs to be done by someone, and you just happen to be the newest
Fellow CE btw
u can’t be a PE unless you’ve worked 4 years under a PE doing ‘engineering work’. In other words, forget about actually getting the jobs, you need a proper job for 4 years to get a proper job. Like, it makes sense, we need training to sign off on damgerous projects and things of enormous importance but nobody told me this shit would be like medical school lol
But software devs writing control software for surgical assistance robots and autonomous vehicles can work at any level of a project straight out of senior year
The one thing I think every engineering disciple got right is not being like tech
Depends on the industry and the discipline. In school the only people I knew in my discipline getting their EIT were people who wanted to work as Power Engineers. No one else gave it another thought
As a machinist, when the mechanical engineers drop oddball shit on me to figure out on my own, it is at least more interesting than doing production. All that basic trigonometry I learned for video game shit finally pays off.
That's not true for all fields. For example, PE is useless for aerospace engineering. You can be a chief engineer with a PhD at NASA and there is zero requirement/expectation for you to have a PE. It's really only for civvies.
not to dox myself too hard or anything but i literally write enterprise software that would definitely still have to exist in some form even in a communist society without regressing in technology, which is about as close as you can get to genuinely meaningful and helpful work in comp sci next to writing software for planes and MRIs, and there’s still so much bullshit to slog through. bureaucracy and excessive meetings about business and marketing that really aren’t that relevant to me writing code, it’s a lot sometimes, and even the parts of my job that aren’t bullshit are still pretty much busy work a lot of the time. anyway i really just want to say there’s more useful disciplines of engineering than building bridges, it’s a little reductive to limit being useful to society to just that, some of us going on the computer guys are still trying to do good work yknow? thank you
Yes. After fang its the banks, then the mic, then the trashfuture bit tech startups, then finally the internal software department at a non tech company. Even at the non tech company youll still be like 4 steps removed from production
God fucking dammit. I'm trying to go back to school and I was like "Fuck this cleanroom work, Civil Engineering sounds like it would be a nice change of pace and I'd be doing something good"
Fuck. I gotta get started on something soon before I get too damn old.
Of the engineers I know, most eventually sold out to become business yuppies or finance bros. One became an architect which is pretty tight. One douche actually really liked his gig of being employed by a mining firm, cuz he got to see all the big trucks and make fun of the overworked miners while being on the inflated white-collar payroll of the extraction industry. But he decided that it wasn't exploitative enough to make the weekly flights to the middle of nowhere worth it, so he switched to finance and became a crypto bro. God that dude sucks.
cuz he got to see all the big trucks
:sicko-yes:
make fun of the overworked miners
:sicko-no:
I have a friend who used to be a civil engineer. After the '08 crash he quit to get his PhD in conservation biology. He now restores habitat for the city after they flatten it replacing power lines.
It depends on where you work, at a lot of large firms you really are just a human cog, doing the same types of analysis over and over again. Smaller and more specialized firms usually provides more independence and opportunities to run projects and is probably some of the more rewarding work in our economy. Although I don't want to universalize becuase there are plenty of shitty firms of all sizes who work their people to a nub, throw them away, and wonder why they can't hire anyone.
That being said, engineering is generally terrible everywhere before you get your PE.
I feel you. You will never do the most meaningful work for a company or firm under capitalism. Engineering as a discipline is perverted under capitalism. You will not feel fulfilled from your engineering job alone, that's true for 95% of engineers in the US.
I don't have any advice, but it does feel better to know we're all on the same page :red-fist:
