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telarium4 posted:Anyone have a pulse on the current market for Civil Engineers in/around Phoenix? AZ PE here! I work in the Water/Wastewater industry in Phoenix, and at least for this industry, experienced PEs are still in pretty hot demand. I spent over 8 years in private consulting before I needed a break for life quality, and went to the municipal sector, but pretty much every consulting firm that we work with, large to small, seems to be looking for people due to the sheer amount of work that is available. I think the same is true for other areas like heavy civil, transportation, etc., but if you're willing to learn, water/wastewater is pretty cool, especially since the Phoenix area is about to push heavily into toilet to tap, I mean, rear end to glass, I mean, direct potable re-use. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions in particular.
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Oct 31, 2023 05:36
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 00:10 |
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TrueChaos posted:Not in phoenix, but another poo poo engineer over here in Ontario. I'm on the consulting side, and we'd hire 3 more of me if we could find them. There's massive amounts of work out there right now due to lack of infrastructure spending over the preceding decades, which has meant tons of municipal infrastructure on the water/wastewater side with deferred work that can't be deferred anymore. Yeah, it's amazing (but not surprising) how few staff/project-level design engineers are currently available in the water/wastewater industry; it's basically like perpetual demand. I've also noticed that for my age group, a lot of engineers seem to be going more to the public sector over time, largely due to the quality of life improvements and also the fact that at least in the US, there has been a lot of consolidation of the major consulting firms, which also means that what used to be actual partnerships/employee-owned, where you could do the (ridiculously stressful amount of) time and eventually become a principal and partner, where you'd just chase work and make bank. Instead now though, you still are expecting to chase and win work and keep people billable, but that top-level partner option has basically gone away, so there's effectively an upper bound most will reach; I was doing 50-60 hour work weeks pretty consistently for the firm I worked for, and they were pushing me to go the PM track, but I really hate the idea of having to chase/win work, keep people billable so they're employed, etc. I also hated how much the firm exaggerated design efforts so that they could crank up the profit multiplier on projects, not that the lower-level staff doing all the work really saw much of that... But it's a neat industry in general, and given the importance and all the deferred work like you said, isn't one that really hurts for job security during downturns.
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Dec 24, 2023 06:50
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TrueChaos posted:I'm very lucky to be at a firm that is entirely employee owned. The way we're set up is a bit different - probably about 1/5th of the employee's have an ownership stake, and the amount of shares you get to purchase each year is dependent on performance. Last year, the shares returned about 50% - roughly 30% increase in share price, plus a dividend of about 20%. I'm both the PM and lead design engineer for my projects, and for the most part it's fun. The consistent 50+ hours a week (with some hitting 100) isn't great though. I've gotten to the point where I know how to say no to the stupid weeks, and I have less of an issue issue with 50 hour weeks because I'm now WFH and I spent more than 10 hours a week commuting before switching, so I'm still coming out ahead. Can't make what I make on the public side, I've looked - it'd be a >30% pay cut before considering the bonuses & dividends. From what I've seen, the higher up I get the less time you spend working, though that seems to flip again at the VP level. I think you said you are in Canada, right? It makes me wonder on the differences of Canadian vs. US employee-owned consultants. The firm I worked for had about 15,000 employees worldwide when I left, though most were in the US and its HQ is here. It's an S-Corp, but since it's private, we didn't get dividends, etc., and the bonus' were rather paltry for a company clearing several billion dollars a year. In general shares weren't performance-based, and you could buy as many or as few as you wanted. What was lovely though, to me at least, was that if you used the 401K that was available, the company would match it, but as their company stock, not as actual funds going towards investment. The company's "stock" price was set via comparison to other large, publicly traded peer firms and how they were performing. I was generally doing 50-60 hour weeks, yeah. If there was some type of critical startup or operation that was occurring, that'd get us up to 90-100 hours/week too, but in general, if just doing design or analysis, yeah, 50-60 hours. The firm as structured though was fairly rigid in terms of job titles/classifications/etc., in that if you were a PM, you were expected to solely be doing PM-type work generally (billing, schedule management, winning client work), and little to no actual engineering effort. What I've noticed is that what a lot of firms call their "PM", my old firm called the EM - Engineering Manager, who often would still be involved in designs, while also managing the various discipline efforts into the project, doing the day-to-day schedule management, and handling the initial monthly pay app process before it went to the PM. I was at the EM level when I left but was being pushed to go to the PM level, which I absolutely did not want. I took a pay cut to go to the public sector, but in some ways it wasn't as bad as it looks purely off the take-home pay, because I am saving a fortune in benefits, there's additional 401 contributions the city makes on top of the pension system, etc. Moving from the insurance we had at my firm to the city, saved us around $11,000 a year right there. Plus more time off, unlimited sick time and not-unlimited but very highly capped vacation time, that accrues and rolls over year-to-year and gets paid out when you leave or retire, etc. Sometimes I have been tempted to go back, because I've had some offers, including my old firm that basically offered what would amount to about a 40% increase, but I'm not sure I could take the stress at this point.
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Jan 11, 2024 18:07
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He might have to effectively start over and I’m not sure if he’s requiring a specific salary or not, but he could probably get a job as a low level design engineer in a number of industries such as power, water, etc. fairly easily just by explaining his past and such. I used to have a supervisor who was a ME for several years at a firm doing lighting and such and he eventually got into water/wastewster, eventually got a masters in Civil, and practices now as a Civil PE.
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Jan 24, 2024 02:49
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spwrozek posted:Excluding software, every engineering industry I interact with is dying for engineers. Literally just bodies, they don't even need to be good. Hopefully he can get his poo poo together and realize how much work is out there, stop pigeon holing himself, and get a job. Any job. He can keep looking if he doesn't like it, always easier to get another job when you have a job. A few days late, but seconding this. There seems to be a significant structural deficit across a number of sectors/disciplines. Some friends of mine and I were discussing this last week, and we're not sure why a deficit exists, but it seems to be there. We have a couple of open positions on the team I work on, and we've been struggling to get applicants. We did get someone who just got their PE last year, and on paper only has around 5 years of experience total, but we offered around $105K and they wanted $110K and turned us down. So there's absolutely demand, but also significant wage potential.
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Feb 4, 2024 21:42
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Anti-Hero posted:Hopefully your big brained HR people compromised and gave them what they asked for. Of course they didn’t! They wanted to give them $100K to begin with, the $105K was the counter. So instead, the two positions remain unfilled and the workload adding up.
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Feb 7, 2024 19:25
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Anti-Hero posted:Ooof. Last page/a month behind, but they recently adjusted the overall salary band to account for local market conditions, largely as it relates to the other municipalities and with some consideration of the private sector. So it used to be that starting salary was somewhere around $65K for basically some with 4 years of experience and a PE, and it would go up to about $108K after 9 years, with annual bumps of around $5400. Now, the starting salary for a 4-year experienced PE is $97K, and tops out at around $130K after 6 years of annual increases. So in terms of the salary band, they basically offered her what her resume basically supported, and what she wanted was more like someone with 6-7 years of experience. Because of the nature of the breakdown, they'd have probably offered her either $103K or 108K roughly, but whatever. The worst part is that I feel like I'm often having to train younger consultant staff during project meetings, etc.; I've been joking with some of the consultants at times that they need to give me their accounting department contact so I can send my invoices to.
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Apr 9, 2024 06:52
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 00:10 |
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Also, it's ok to fail. It seems like too many young engineers are worried about messing up and that hurting their long-term career goals, but failure can be the greatest teacher (as long as someone learns from it). It also tends to humble someone, which is also a good thing.
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May 1, 2024 07:44
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