Blue compared to White collared jobs.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Any prospective engineers who never want to get their hands dirty are going to be in for a rude awakening when they hit the job market and find out just how many jobs involve going out into the field/machine shop/whatever.

[this post was written while sitting in a trailer in the middle of a shipyard]

That's awesome! I come from a family of hands-on engineers I've only gotten horror stories of not being allowed to touch anything. My dad worked at Raytheon, and got in trouble for moving a cart between labs after it sat unmoved for several days with a fast approaching deadline (unionized lab techs). A family friend worked at Caterpillar, and said the rule was if you were an engineer, you couldn't do anything that required two hands. (i.e. all wrenches must be turned by techs, all heavy things must be moved by techs, etc.).

I imagine this probably changes with company size (i.e. smaller companies you get lots more hands on time), but I'd imagine a fairly significant portion of engineers are hired by these larger companies.

I can't believe how much the US is throwing away it's trade infrastructure. It seems like all the schools around me have eliminated their machine/wood shops. While it's great for picking up decent equipment at cut-rate prices, it's bad for business because fewer kids get introduced to them, and don't have the opportunity to get interested in the field. Anyone with a job can (and should!) become a hobbyist machinist.

I TA the freshman introduction to shop class at RPI. It has given me a great respect for the machine shop teachers in high school, those guys have nerves of steel.