Career Contentment: Encouraging (Albeit Confusing) Survey Results

Speaking of information overload, late last summer (or, depending on your perspective, early last fall) I published some admittedly inflammatory commentary on a competitor’s survey of readers’ career characteristics and satisfaction ratings. While I unfortunately wasn’t surprised by the percentage of respondents that reported regularly working 50 or more hours per week, especially those outside the United States, what shocked me was that:

More than 80% of respondents felt engineering was a "grand profession", and more than half of them (and more than 70% of them, excluding folks in Japan) would steer their kids towards engineering. This even though a significant number of the respondents were working 10 or more hours per week beyond the conventional 40 hour timeframe, were leaving significant numbers of unused vacation days on the table at the end of each year, were single-handedly doing jobs formerly handled by two or more people, and had employers that expected them to be on call day and night, weekdays and weekends, even while on vacation.

EDN published its own career survey results last week, along with editorial director Maury Wright’s commentary on them. I admit that I was pleasantly surprised with the reader feedback, although since the survey was Internet-based, I don’t believe that we’re able to subdivide the raw data on a geography-specific basis (and I suspect a high percentage of the respondents were North America residents). Some notable points (aside from the H1-B stuff that Maury’s already discussed):

• 65% of the 517 respondents reported ‘only’ working between 40-50 hours per week on average (and 5% worked less than 40 hours per week…highly paid consultants? Part-timers?).
• 63% of respondents felt that project schedules were reasonable.
• 63% also felt that they were reasonably compensated.
• 81%, if they could ‘do it all again’, would still pursue an engineering career, and
• 66% would advise their children to pursue an engineering career.

The results (like those of the earlier survey) surprise and somewhat baffle me, particularly because I’ve long observed that folks with an ‘axe to grind’ are much more likely to provide feedback on a product, service or situation than those who are content with their lot in life. In reaching out to you for additional feedback that’ll help me better understand the data, I’d like to reiterate the questions I posed in part 2 of last year’s diatribe:

What’s the underlying motivation for the praise of the engineering profession, folks? I’d really like to know where your minds are on this….I’ve got some ideas, but I suspect many of you have motivations that I haven’t considered. Are the lucrative (compared to many other professions) salaries (even after you consider that they’re spread out over far more than a 40 hour workweek for most of us) and/or benefits packages the primary salve? Is it the opportunity to work on intellectually challenging projects, or to maintain academic competency in topics that you find fascinating?

Or more darkly, are you fundamentally motivated by fear….of losing your job to a younger, lower-salaried coworker and being unable to find another, of being outsourced, of being without managed healthcare? What are you giving up in order to satisfy your employer’s expectations and your personal tech passions? And are you at peace with the tradeoff? Is your family? Are your friends? Do you even have adequate time and energy outside of work to cultivate meaningful relationships with others?

I’m sincerely curious, and I welcome your comments.