Mechanical Engineering Employment and Pay

Continuing this week's theme of jobs jobs jobs for all you hardworking engineers, I was curious what the outlook had been in my own discipline. I already covered employment and salaries in most disciplines between 1999 and 2010 but wanted to zero in on the mechanical engineers.

Mechanical engineers have had a bit of a bumpy past. The general trend is up but it hasn't been easy. My personal theory for the boost is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have acted as stimulus programs for mechanical engineers. Our own Works Progress Administration putting us to work building tanks and humvees and fighter jets and bombs. The first major climb lags us entering the wars but is pretty strong. I give the delay to the delay in starting Department of Defense contracts and actually funding companies.

Maybe the post 2006 boom is due to the surge (I'd have to look it up). Trends in the automotive industry could also be strongly responsible as well as oil drilling, coal mining, etc. I think the strength even in the recession shows the numbers benefit from more than just commercial development alone. For comparison I pulled the civil engineer's chart over the same period of time.

So same boost up from about the same period on. This one has got to be thanks to housing. The quick and consistent line up and the drop right at the housing crash has had a big effect on the employment of civil engineers. How about our friends the sparkies?

It ain't easy being a sparky. The dot com bubble burst and it hurt. A couple of little climbs later and the recession hits and they are knocked back again. Still, given how heavily commercial electrical engineering is it's probably got a much more sustainable path to growth than defense dollars and government bailouts of the auto industry. Something to keep in mind.
Next a quick look at pay for mechanical engineers:

The bottom line is inflation adjusted. Without that the skyrocketing wages look pretty crazy. But even with inflation engineers managed a 10.5% increase to their mean annual salary over the last ten years. What? You're probably thinking. I'm a sprocket and my salary hasn't been going up. Could be what with the recession and choosey employees they're more likely to hang on to somewhat older and more experienced engineers in lieu of hiring younger ones or keeping young ones on. That may not be the personal experience of older engineers, but even if we're taking very minimal trends it can add up. And 10% increase over 10 years for the gain of 10 years of experience seems kind of like a bargain on the employer's side of things.

Still, the war might be to thank (or blame) for the strength in mechanical engineering employment. ME employment is up over 15% from 1999. Despite the bust civil engineers are employed at 19% more than 1999. And as you can see in the graph electrical engineers broke just about even (actually a drop of two tenths of one percent). I don't think engineers should go into a field based on national numbers and national salaries. Locality can make a huge difference. And of course it's important not to chase money but to do something because you think you'll enjoy it.

Engineering Employment Over Time

How has engineering fared as a career during this recession? How has it been doing over time? Must be jobs week here at Design. Build. Play. Since I was so hard on software "engineers" before I made a separate category from today's Bureau of Labor Statistics data. I'm including programmers separately (but still there) from computer/software engineers (which here includes both systems software and applications). So how do we engineers do?

As you can see computer and software engineers have done particularly well. I'd grant the decline to programmers as being employers are ever more demanding specific degrees from their programmers so it's more just a transfer between categories. The recession has only continued the downward trend from before.

In comparison, civil, electrical and mechanical look almost flat. Of course they aren't really. So maybe you went into engineering for the money, how's that been doing? Here's some not adjusted for inflation salaries over time.

Again it's the same breakdown by discipline and again you see the obvious levelling off of the programmers' salaries. Mechanical and civil seem tied like in the previous graph and now electrical has a definitely higher salary. Is this because it has lower employment compared to the other disciplines as seen in the first graph? Does scarcity drive electrical engineering salaries up?

Engineering Jobs by Discipline

I talked before about what states are hiring engineers and where all the engineering jobs are. Best estimate there are something like 44,000 engineering jobs open nationally right now. The census says that in 2008 84,000 people graduated with engineering degrees. Engineering shortage? I think not. Probably my 44,000 search was not broad enough to include the kinds of jobs engineering graduates might go into. But still, that's nowhere near a shortage, is it Corporate America?

So what kind of engineers are being hired right now? Software engineers.

Making up almost half of open jobs software engineers have it made. If we have a shortage of engineers, maybe it's that kind of engineer. The problem is we're recruiting people into a very diverse field without specifying what we really want or really need. I was curious how this stacked up to major choice and pulled a some numbers from a local university to give a breakdown:

You can tell mechanical and civil/structural majors are heavily overrepresented. People are probably going into these fields and finding the jobs aren't there. This is all magnified when certain geographic areas (Detroit vs Silicon Valley) have very different focuses even when colleges might be more diverse. Chemical and electrical engineering majors are a little closer to the national average of open jobs and software/computer engineering heavily underrepresented.

I'm a bit torn by including software engineers here. There's a big difference between "computer engineer" and a programmer. Many job openings ask for a degreed engineer when what they really need is a programmer. But if they're asking for an engineering degree that becomes a part of the requirement that job seekers have to meet even when it's unlike other engineering disciplines. Given the low numbers though it's possible those with other degrees, or no degrees at all, are filling the gap for these open software jobs. That is if anyone is even hiring.

Future of Spaceflight: No single point sollution

Too often we look for a single perfect answer to our problems. In the energy crisis people are often disappointed when hybrid batteries are found to be so environmentally unfriendly or that wind power is often incredibly harmful to local bird life or that solar cell arrays often use a lot of water in areas that are pretty arid to begin with.

Researchers looking into the future of space flight looked at combining a rocket propellant with an electric sail. An electric sail has some similarities to a solar sail in that they are both low mass propulsion systems however a solar sail uses the acceleration of photons to create slight accelerations to the apparatus while an electric sail uses an array of long, thin positively charged tethers that repel solar wind protons while attracting solar wind electrons. These arrays have all been proposed as a method of space flight that would require no additional propellant as accelerating and decelerating more mass requires more wasted energy. However an electric sail would only function in space and the gains to acceleration can sometimes be minute.

The researchers used the Hohmann transfer numbers as a starting point for interplanetary travel between Earth and its neighbors. Typical planet to planet rendezvous would include a period of time where the spacecraft was accelerating to give it a necessary velocity delta to escape Earth's orbit, then a period where it would coast to reach the orbit of the planet it's attempting to reach. Minimum flight times were calculated for this basic transfer orbit as between 0.289 years to reach Mercury and 30.613 years to reach Neptune.

The authors looked an ideal thrust-on time in comparison to minimum flight time because while shortest flight would generally be ideal you would also want to reduce your thrust time in case of your propulsion system failure. So it was better to look at a ratio between the two. They looked initially at having a secondary thrust phase after an initial coasting phase but found using the total time and thrust time ratio meant it was always optimal to have only one thrust phase followed by a coasting phase.

Their initial starting point was an object in circular orbit around the earth to which they then simulated times it might take that object to reach planets in the solar system using either a typical rocket propulsion system or the hybrid rocket and electric sail option. In the first option the rocket propellant and inertia allow it to reach the escape velocity. But in the case of the electric sail, the sail's acceleration can contribute during the thrust time towards achieving the delta velocity which of course reduces the amount of propellant the spacecraft would have to carry. I summed up their results in a slightly more clear graph.

Perhaps not surprisingly flights to Mercury and Venus were worse with the hybrid system. Though, an electric sail only system would save considerable fuel and mass and could be considered to Mercury and Venus. The major time savings were seen the farther out into the solar system. The hybrid system doesn't solve long term space flight concerns but it does add another weapon to our arsenal that perhaps future spaceflights will employ multiple methods of propulsion.

Quarta, A., Mengali, G., & Janhunen, P. (2011). Optimal interplanetary rendezvous combining electric sail and high thrust propulsion system Acta Astronautica, 68 (5-6), 603-621 DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2010.01.024

Humanoid Robots

Or how foolish scientists will open the doors to Skynet and a future in which we run from robots trying to kill us. Perhaps literally so. Boston Dynamics, who brought you the infamous "Big Dog" robot (here's a video) have been in the news this past month for the DARPA funding of their new cheetah robot. Supposedly the thing is designed to chase down human prey. Luckily in CAD form it looks less menacing so far.

I have been thinking about the Uncanny Valley in robot design lately. I like Disney's Wall-E and of course I'm waiting for this KeepOn robot to go on sale so I can purchase him and have more moments of squee in my day. But then robots go past the divide. There are plenty of scary looking singing Japanese robots out there. Even a German company has gotten into the race with their "fembot" that can lift things and do factory work. [As an aside, I hate how we have to sexualize all our robots. "Dude-bots" are not called "man-bots" or whatever, if it looks male it is male and the difficult and that doesn't need to be mentioned. In this case I'm not even sure why the AILA was given some approximation of plastic human female hair and vaguely human female curves. Reminds me of the exec in 30Rock complimenting Liz Lemon on being "a good businessman." "You mean businesswoman?" "I'm pretty sure that's not a word."]

While Boston Dynamics was busy making a robot that would hunt down human prey (I'm not sure what kind, or why...terrorists? illegal aliens? Convicts when we finally implement a "running man" or "the gamer" type of future where falsely convicted hero-types must compete for their freedom and lives on a gladiator-like gameshow that bloodthirsty Americans just eat up?). You might have missed their introduction of a bi-pedal robot, ATLAS.

Boston Dynamics already has a two-legged robot, and the video is seriously creepy. It doesn't help ATLAS looks like a freaking Terminator but imagine it walking around non-chalantly like their existing robot Petman and you'll see what I mean with uncanny divide. When the operator shoves him to the side (see me using masculine pronouns for this thing? dammit) I really expected the robot to finally go psycho after being pushed around one too many times and kill the guy.

It's only missing a nice big HAL light on the front of it. So sure Boston Dynamics I'm impressed. But I'm also creeped out. I'm going to go back to watching your snake robot and this weird climbing robot that looks like a lizard. I bet audiences in the 1980s seeing the movie Terminator for the first time wondered how stupid humanity could be that it created the thing that became self aware and destroyed us. But now I see it! We'll make them for coolness factor! Coolness factor is going to be humanity's downfall. Good thing my fallout shelter doubles as robot defense shelter.

DARPA Thursdays: Underwater Sensors

A lot of DARPA's interesting marine projects relate to anti-submarine warfare, like this pilotless ship I talked about last year. Now they're looking for an underwater sensor array. I've done some quick CAD of what this might look like, as seen in the photo above. Underwater arrays are nothing new. They can look like buoys, capsules floating underneath the surface, they can even be disguised in something that looks and floats like kelp.

Here DARPA has in mind something that would be in deep ocean, at or near the bottom. This brings to mind my rough idea for a series of pressure resisting domes you could drop to the ocean floor. Sensor arrays are kind of a neat thing to begin with, a bunch of nodes communicating with each other and sharing information. So its a two fold problem of designing something that's mechanically hardy in not only high pressure environments but also cold, corrosion and have to be long lasting or incorporate some clever mechanism to surface itself and be easy to replace.

Working in the ocean is not unlike working in space; you can send your hardware into it but if something fails it's best to have as many possible methods of fixing it from a distance as possible. Meaning communication between nodes and to your surface point would not be trivial. And by the way the FBO is written you can tell DARPA's not looking for amazing innovation, they're just looking for something that works. Seems like a good opportunity for a small interdisciplinary unit to make something effective.

New Venture

There's a new blogging game in town that I'm quite proud of. Myself and a few other of the engineer bloggers have banded together to form Engineer Blogs. So go check it out.

 

Chris Gammell asks Do you prefer to work on projects on your own? Cherish writes an introduction to metamaterials and Fluxor gives us the long awaited (by me anyways) list of transistor interview questions that he either typically asks candidates or has encountered in his work. I have even contributed my modest writing skills where I talk about where this economy is headed and a government workshop's attempt to outline the future of manufacturing while we struggle to compete with China in What the World Needs Now.

 

I will still write here, but head on over and add Engineer Blogs to your reader or feed aggregate to get the full effect of three fantastic writers (not sure why they invited me). I'll continue to link over there for new posts or when there's a fantastic post you need to run over and read. You can continue to stay and read here for whatever I don't spotlight over there which might still be engineering related, or might be my amateurish economic predictions, discussions on caffeine, or pictures of my cat.

Too many wires for me

What's with all these phooey electrical things cropping up in my studies? My boss even asked if my project was for a "mechatronics class." It's interesting how much senior projects can vary based on what the specialty is of the professor who designed the series. We'll see if the machine shop portion is gritty and mechanical enough for me. For now, my MCU (Microprocessor Control Unit) and my motor driver board in all their spaghetti glory.