Bi-Weekly CAREERS Mega-Thread [Jun 13 2016]

I'm tired of my current job and the field that I work in;

Recently I have graduated from electrical (power) engineering and I have also gained some work experience in the industry, where I performed research and development jobs in the scope of modeling & testing of electrical machines, algorithm development, machine learning, signal processing, statistical analysis and programming. However, I realized that these tasks simply aren't for me. Firstly, in above-mentioned fields I actually needed all my advanced math knowledge taught on university and I always hated math, while development of algorithms turned out to be one of the most demanding tasks in engineering I have ever experienced. But the biggest issue is that work in these fields demands heavy analytical thinking skills , abstract thinking along and strong problem solving abilities , while mine are poor or mediocre at best.Not to mention that the speed which I perform these tasks with, is straight awful and everything challenge is pretty much an irritating hassle. Sometimes I stare in monitor for hours and ask myself " what the hell am I doing here " or just uncontrollably curse in my head , while there are occasions when I want to punch someone in the face, including my boss. Then after 8 hours of intense thinking I come home and straightly jump in bed, feeling totally worn out as I just came from 2 shifts of construction work. But that's not all - instead of having a nice sleep, the problem from job is still hunting me in head, it's like a nightmare. Sometimes I truly feel that I prematurely aged because of the hassle involved with this type of work. It's true that I can earn of pretty good bucks with this stuff, but when you take in account the amount of thinking, skills , knowledge and effort and mostly hassle which I am experiencing, the salary range is on the border of being ridiculous. That's particularly the case, when you compare my salary-effort-knowledge-skill ratio to other google-like departments (e.g. HR, sales...), where everyone looks good, is having coffee breaks all the time and all what they can do is to show fancy powerpoint presentations and run excel, and often they get a better salary. On the bottom line, the work I'm doing is insanely boring and I have zero passion to continue my presence in "hardcore R&D", yet this doesn't necessarily mean that I want quit R&D, or engineering in general. There might be other engineering jobs available which are less mind-intensive, and it also doesn't matter that much, if they're significantly less paid, because the key is to find a nice balance between amount of hassle, boredom of work and salary, eventually increasing my quality of life bar. Also the non-engineering jobs for engineers are to be considered. Some questions: - Which jobs should I take a look in? Jobs where you need to do some measurements, calibrate something, adjust according some standards, install something, sounds like a good thing to consider. No heavy duty thinking, yet engineering knowledge required. Which non-engineering jobs for engineers may I consider?

/r/engineering Thread