Read the industry news and you would think engineering happens in a few dozen famous places. Count the actual jobs and they are somewhere else entirely, inside a hospital group, a haulier, a water utility, an insurer, a council, a factory that makes hinges. Organisations whose product is not software and whose business now runs on software they could not buy ready made.
That share is going to keep growing, and I would rather you heard it now than after two years of applying to the same shrinking list as everybody else.
Be honest about what the work is. Less green field, more joining things together. Systems older than you are. Constraints that come from law, from safety, from a warehouse that opens at five, rather than from a design document. And a domain you will have to learn properly, which is the part people dismiss and the part that later makes them hard to replace.
The advantages are real and rarely advertised. You can see the consequences of your work, because the person it broke is two floors up and will tell you. The problems are genuinely difficult, since nothing is standard and everything connects. Cycles are survivable. And the systems matter in a plain way, which sounds sentimental until you have spent a year making a screen load faster for somebody who has no alternative.
The trade offs are real too. Smaller teams. Thinner tooling budgets. Fewer people to learn from, so you have to go and find them outside. And a ceiling that arrives sooner, because the top of an engineering career inside a hinge factory is not the top of an engineering career.
So keep one foot in the wider craft. Read, go to things, know what the rest of the field is doing, and do not let all of your expertise become a description of one building.
And when you look at one of these places, ignore the careers page. Ask who owns the systems, whether engineering reports to somebody technical, and what they have built in the last two years. The answers vary enormously, and they tell you almost everything.
– Asael Shinder
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