Careers: Money vs. happiness?

[GLC1968]

I can appreciate GLC's desire to get out of pure engineering technical aspects. My dearie pulled himself out of it after being in pure engineering work for first 5 years of his career..he moved into analyst, then management and contract negotations. (He loves the latter and is quite skilled at it.) He found technical engineering work too narrow. He liked jobs which dealt more with people and organizational strategy.

Yes! When I got my BS/MS degrees - I knew, without a doubt, that I could not be a design engineer. That was never my plan. I cannot work in such a confined environment (confined to one aspect of one project at one time). I opted for systems engineering first - and then product engineering (where I'm responsible for taking multiple products from the design stage into production). I need big picture. I need human interaction. My talent is in managing multiple personalities, multiple tasks and multiple time schedules at once. I have excellent communication and interpersonal skills (particularly for an engineer!). Maybe I need to look into that MBA again.

I've been thinking about this thread a lot in the past couple of days and kind of smacking myself in the head for even choosing EE in the first place. At least a ton of good has come from the past 10 years' worth of experiences...even if the actual career path was the wrong choice.

[shootingstar]

It helps that dearie has a formal civil engineerinig degree and experience, when he deals with municipalities on cycling matters, both infrastructure design and "softer"/more complex issues of advocacy, program planning.

He can see very clearly sometimes anal thinking of some engineering departments and firms, where in university engineering programs, engineers normally aren't trained, to look after the human factor at all nor psychosocial matters in the cycling experien/mode share.

In his words they're, just taking their "slide rule", prescriptive engineering standards and not being flexible.