Just Bill Me.

While the engineering profession may seem to be an honorable and prestigious career, there are times when I wonder why I even bother. Why do I put up with worrying about profitability 24/7 and stress out about billable hours every 15 minutes every single work day? Not familiar with the term "billable hours?" Allow me to educate you...

Because we are essentially consultants and all the work that we do is under contract for clients, we must keep track of what project we work on and specifically what subtasks we work on in 15 minute increments throughout the day. All this is done because the time we charge to a project is then billed to the client on a monthly basis. It sounds somewhat tedious to have to keep track of all this information, but for someone like myself who only works on a couple of a projects at any given time, it's really not all that bad. It's the secretaries and CAD personnel that have it BAD - as they could work on tens of projects in any given week.

Well, what happens when you complete a task or are waiting for data before you can resume working on your project? You better be finding other billable work if you want to keep your job. There's really no "downtime" at all in my position. Ever. We're expected to be busy and STAY busy day in and day out. Which can be grating on the nerves at times.

I recall talking to an acquaintance a while back who did some sort of IT type work. He told me that while they were working on a project and was waiting for data to be processed, they killed the time by playing networked computer games. WTF is up with that?? If I'm running a computer model that takes a couple of hours to finish, I'm expected to fill up that time by working on something else that could be billable, even if it's a completely different project.

Now, I'm not really complaining about the work ethic or the fact that you should work hard to make your company profitable - I'm just mostly ranting at the fact that we don't get "downtime" in my field and that we're expected to stay busy ALL THE TIME.

A company-wide email went out recently from one of the senior staff urging employees to give up a couple of hours each weekend to try and get our billable hours up. It wasn't very well-received. Personally I think it's a 'test' to see where people stand in the company.

With little or no downtime during the week, doing work that requires intense concentration and complex analytical problem solving, and staring at numbers all day long, I find that my brain simply cannot handle that sort of work for more than 8 hours every day. By the end of the work day, my brain is pretty much mush and mind-numbing cannot even begin to describe how I feel. Now they want us to work even more hours on the weekends when I'm recharging my batteries so I can get through the week? It's true that it's possible to work more hours in a day if it's short-term, but doing it day after day for weeks on end takes a toll.

I suppose I should be glad that I'm not working for a company that keeps track of billable hours in