r/Engineers

Hi,
I’m considering industrial engineering, but I keep hearing mixed things. Some engineers say IE has fewer jobs and that most of IE-type roles get taken by mechanical engineers or even business majors. I was highly advised against it because of lack of opportunity after graduation. Is that actually true in practice, or is IE still a strong major if I want to go into operations, business, and management, system, consulting later? I was more advised to pursue mechanical engineering for the same roles or Civil engineering as a different path that could also be a good fit based on my interest. I liked IE because I found it as a balance between soft skills and hard skills, moreover I’m more interested towards the management and business roles like supply chain management or operations. So I was wondering if it would be better to purse a bachelor in finance and later a master aswell.

Thank you guys

Thank you,
Reza

Hi All,

Posting here again to look for a founding engineer role.

Quick context on our startup:

Stage: Two paying SaaS customers (investment management + insurance verticals). Three active pilots and self-funded to date. $2M seed round in active VC conversations.

What we build: Production-grade AI agents for real estate deal documents, offering memoranda, PPMs, tour books, lender packages as our initial wedge. The thesis is narrow-and-deep vertical AI vs. horizontal foundation-model deployment.
Engineering problem: Structured extraction from messy source documents (40+ different rent roll formats, T-12s, broker packages), agent architecture with human-in-the-loop validation gates, brand template fidelity per customer, source-traceable output.

What we'd offer:

Founding-engineer-tier equity
Cash accrued as backpay during pre-funded period, paid in full at seed close or specific revenue milestone
Real product ownership, direct customer relationships, no enterprise overhead
Open to contract-to-hire if that's a better starting structure for you

What we're looking for: Engineer who's shipped real LLM/RAG/agent systems end-to-end with platform-architecture instincts. Specifically someone who thinks about both vertical execution today and horizontal platform tomorrow. Strong candidates have built or contributed to:

Multi-tenant agent architectures (per-customer configuration on shared infrastructure)
Document processing pipelines (extraction, transformation, structured generation)
Agent orchestration with state management, validation gates, and observability
Evaluation infrastructure that scales across document types and customer configurations
Production LLM ops (cost/latency optimization, retrieval/context management, version control)
Familiarity with emerging standards like MCP, function calling architectures, or similar

That idea didn’t come from nowhere—but it’s also exaggerated. Not all engineers are jobless; the issue is more about mismatch than lack of opportunities.....

I’m sure there are a million other posts on other forums about this, but I’d rather go straight to the depression source and get some realistic answers.

Forewarning, this is going to be a very personal post asking for personal advice. To preface, I’ve always been a problem child in school, I grew up super lazy and never did my work, but I was just smart enough to not have to try to pass and get put in “advanced” classes. That being said, I’m not stupid, just an ADHD riddled undisciplined child. Eventually I ended up dropping out my 11th grade year to pay bills.

I wound up getting my GED and going community college for Comp. Sci. till I realized I was wasting my time in a subject I hated, which led me to drop out of that too.

Now all of this being said, as I have got older I really really want to go back to school and ever since a kid I have LOVED cars, math, design, chemistry, and physics. This combination of interests has pushed me to do a pretty hefty amount of individual study and for the first time in my life I have been able to read textbooks and enjoy taking notes and learning about the inner machinations of something I love.

HOWEVER… reality is harsh, and my blockade at the moment is that I have no idea if going to college at this point in my life is feasible. I have no support system, no family to live with, nobody to help me if I fall on hard times, and I will somehow have to figure out a way to pay for college while also working full time to be able to survive. As it is I barely get by, and live paycheck to paycheck in a world where its very hard to get a decent job. Another thing I’m terrified of is if I go through all of the circles of hell to get into and through college, then I fail.

Is this an attainable dream? Is it too late for me to spend 4 years full time in college with no scholarships or a family to financially support me? This is more of a scream into the void but any support would be great, thanks to anyone for reading.

Have anyone had any success with an Engineer Degree from the University? Any information or assistant you provide me with will be greatly appreciated.

Hey everyone, I am contemplating advancing my heavily mechanical technical career with a D.Eng in Systems Engineering. I have a BS in Civil Engineering and MS in Engineering Management but most of my professional time (7+ years) has been spent in mechanical technical operation roles across Nuclear Propulsion Plants and Data Centers. I also have 3-ish years of MEP Project Engineering and I've recently started to pivot to more of a commissioning role with some systems reliability while also pursuing Mechanical PE.

My main reason to pursue SE is to stay relevant in the increasingly digital and data-driven engineering landscape. Systems Engineering really interests me, but I’m struggling to evaluate the ROI of pursuing it for my industry in particular: critical facilities & engineering operations. While I am familiar with some systems principles in industry, I have mainly found formal Systems methodologies to be more prevalent in aerospace, defense and manufacturing settings.

There are a lot of high-paying roles with “Systems” in the title, but the terminology across engineering and tech feels extremely broad and sometimes inconsistent. I’m trying to figure out what paths are actually worth pursuing versus titles that just happen to include the word “systems.”

Bottomline, my primary interests are in operational analytics, critical infrastructure systems reliability, and lifecycle management. From my perspective, many of these areas seem naturally connected to Systems Engineering principles, even if the formal SE terminology aren't always used directly.

Does anyone have ideas about the relevance of SE in critical infrastructure operations such as data centers, pharma, or related operational environments? Or does anyone have insights if there is a growing need for critical operations to adopt SE methods over traditional facilities engineering and maintenance approaches?

Seeking advice for high school senior from Illinois making college decision. Committed to UIUC Grainger school of engineering May 1 with some merit scholarships, but out of pocket cost estimated around 30k for the first year. Was just offered a full ride at MSOE for 4 years and feeling very conflicted.

UIUC-
Friends and girlfriend attending
Higher ranked engineering program
Larger student body/ more social opportunities
Specific major offered (systems engineering)

MSOE-
FREE
Closer to home
In a big city
Rigorous and career focused

Having a hard time looking past the free aspect. Career opportunities are good from either university degree but I want him to have a good college experience as well. Advice from anyone who attended either of these schools would be greatly appreciated.