What are good companies for Engineers in Southern California?

Question

I am looking for good companies to apply for an engineering job in Southern Cali. Maybe San Diego area? What companies would be good for product development, R&D?

Answer 1

Generally the smaller companies (< 250 employees) will have the best environment for growth and more opportunities to 'spread your wings' a bit beyond whatever discipline you were trained in. Management opportunities are also generally better.

Big companies are constantly going through 'hire and layoff' cycles and there is very little job security and even less chance to get into management.

What's the big deal with management opportunities? It's where you want to be by the time you're late 30's to early 40's. Why is that? Engineerings 'dirty little secret' is that age discrimination is alive and well. When you hit 50-ish, for what a company would have to pay you at your seniority and experience level, they can afford to hire *two* kids, half your age, fresh out of school, and trained in the very latest and greatest technologies.

The only exception to this is if you're into some specialized and fairly 'exotic' technology and you have one helluva track record with a bunch of patents and publications on your CV.

As far as R&D, There are *very* few companies that are constantly working on truly new products. Probably 99% of all commercial products developed are 'improvements' to, and / or 'evolutionary' changes in, existing products. And, even then, the Project Engineer in charge of the design group that produces the new product usually finds themselves becoming a 'Product Line Manager' for that product and spending more and more of their time solving production problems.

If you want to do a lot of R&D stuff, get an MSc or a PhD in your discipline and go to work on a University Campus. But, even then, most 'research' projects live and die by outside funding (usually commercial or governmental) and an R&D project can fold out from under you in the blink of an eye. Your only salvation there is if you are also on the faculty and have tenure.

But, as I said, if you stay in the straight commercial world, get out of the technical end of it ASAP.

Yeah, it sucks. But there it is ☺

My credentials? Enough degrees in Math, Physics, Computer Science, and Management Science (and one oddball, undergrad degree in Psychology) to wallpaper a small room, and 35+ years of experience in the private sector (both large and small companies), the Military / Aerospace cluster f*ck, and several years on a University campus.

Good luck.


Doug

Answer 2

Psomas is in several Cities in California. I wor for their Office in Salt Lake City, Utah. They have 14 or 15 offices and have many jobs to choose from. They evenjust wentinternational by opening anoffice in Mexico.

They beleive in growth from within and do surveys twice a year to see how the employees rate them and what they think they need to do better. For such a large company they still treat the employees well like a smaller firm. Their Stock grew 14% last year alone so that says something about them.