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Engineering seems cool, exciting and awesome in the grand picture, but that is not always true. For non-engineers, engineering can seem like a smart people field, but engineers are ordinary people who have learned a few concepts and techniques to develop something of value. Engineering anything can take time and patience, which makes engineering boring and repetitive.
Not all aspects of engineering are interesting. Although engineering looks cool when you look at the final product, many aspects of the job can be considered boring and repetitive, especially the technical details that require debugging, troubleshooting and refining. Trial and error are repetitive jobs that engineers must go through to improve the products and services to become safe and usable by the consumer.
Not every day is a cool day as an engineer. Repetition can turn interesting tasks into boring, mundane tasks that eventually get boring. However, Repetition is an important aspect of engineering. Without product testing, there will not be any product to use.
In general, there are three types of tasks that can make engineering boring.
What tasks make engineering boring?
Engineering work aims to make something robust, cost-effective, and useable, which is why testing multiple versions of the product takes time before you get to the final version. This includes a lot of technical work, which becomes boring to many engineers who are used to this type of work.
For engineers, there are multiple levels of boring:
1- Challenging tasks
It might seem that working on challenging tasks seems interesting, which is right for most situations until there is an error that you can not debug and takes hours of troubleshooting. This challenging task can quickly become a nightmare of finding a solution and eventually boring of having to repeat the process and retrace your steps to solve the problem.
Things are not so easy when trying to make something from scratch or work with limited resources, which is very common in engineering projects.
2- Admin tasks
Those mundane tasks that every engineer has to go through that have nothing to do with engineering, things such as meetings, marketing or forecasting that engineers go through that not only can be boring and repetitive but also time-consuming.
3- Repetitive tasks
These technical tasks were challenging at first, but after repeating the same task multiple times, it became extremely boring and repetitive. These are the most common types of tasks that become boring to many engineers.
In any industry, engineers aim to maximise profit and output. This trend has become very common in tech companies that iterate on their old inventions with few new tweaks to produce a new product. This is common in smartphones, automotive, and general consumer tech.
What to do if you feel bored in your engineering job?
Comfort can make things boring and is also the enemy of progress. Working on engineering projects might look interesting at the beginning, but once you feel that you have reached a point where you only go to work for the paycheck, maybe its time to consider one of the following options:
1- Transfer to a different department
If you feel that you have learned everything that needs to be learned in your current position, maybe it is time to transfer to a different department and work on new challenging things. You do not want to be stuck doing the same thing repeatedly, so if your company is big enough to allow you to transfer to a different department, it can be very beneficial and add to your engineering experience.
2- Avoid complacency
Complacency is where you reach a point of complete laziness and an uncaring attitude. This might have multiple reasons, but the most prominent is when the job feels boring. It might also mean that you have become so comfortable in your position that you do not want to improve your skills or progress to the next level of your engineering career.
This can result in losing passion for engineering, which is very common among engineers. If that is you, we check our guide on the 8 Reasons You Are Losing Passion For Engineering-How to Fix?
3- Change jobs
Changing jobs is the final resort where you feel that you have progressed as far as you could in your current job, and the only way to move forward now is to change careers to avoid complacency and boredom.
Changing jobs in engineering is perfectly normal, and most engineering changes their job at least once throughout their career. In fact, in one of the studies we did to find out how often engineering changes jobs, we found that 25% of engineers change jobs due to the work environment and the nature of the work. You can check out the full results here: We Asked 1000 Engineers How Often They Change Jobs.
