FIRST vs. Engineering?

[ChrisH]

To continue Al's coments:

I am an engineer working for a large aerospace corporation. I figure out how to build parts from composite materials like graphite epoxy and fiberglass. While I do not participate in day to day production, I do spend fair amount of time actually working with the materials and doing my own stuff.

A typical scenario:
Some bright boy in design figures out that it would be a lot cheaper to build the airplane if we could bond the structure to the inlet duct, rather than shooting lot of fasteners through the duct wall at $80 a pop. Somebody (yours truly among others) is detailed to figure out how to do this. The duct is a large structure, 10 ft long (remember this is a fighter aircraft, large is relative). To convincingly demonstrate it the demo article needs to be close to the same size and complexity as the "real" structure.

So a group of us get together, develop a concept, design a mold to fabricate the concept, order materials to do the demo, and start the mold fabrication which will take about six months. While waiting for the mold we try and resolve all those nagging little issues we said "that's a no-brainer" to during concept development. When the tool finally arrives, a small army of engineers and technicians decend on it and working side by side crank out a part or two. With a little luck it turns out gorgeous, the customer is impressed, they buy the airplane and now we get to do it "for real". (OMG! they bought it, now we have to deliver )

So out of a year program I probably spent 8 weeks actually building a part, but I also helped design the tooling used, probably helped build some of it, and figured out how to do innumerable support operations. If I had spent all my time working with the material, none of the "other stuff" essential to the program's success would have happened.

Yes I spend a lot of time in meetings, but mostly it is holding back the designers so they don't draw something that can't be built. That is not a task that can be done by the shop technicians, they don't generally understand the stress guy's langauge well enough to convince him that "That's not a good idea because..." If the shop guys could argue with stress and win they'd have my job and somebody else would be building parts, because keeping the design guys in line is a full time job by itself.

So there are engineering jobs out there that require "hands on" expertise, even in big companies. I just happen to be lucky enough to have one of them.