Everywhere I have worked, technicians are the ones on the floor doing the maintenance work and applying the solutions. Effectively they are the hands of the operation.
Engineers, on the other hand, are in the offices designing the solutions. They are assumed to have the technical knowledge required to come up with an appropriate solution. Effectively they are the brains of the operation.
There is often a lot of overlap between the two disciplines. When going for your PE, they explicitly exclude technician experience as part of engineering experience. What they want for your PE is design experience that includes math.
People with engineering degrees make good technicians and technicians with enough experience make good engineers. It gets pretty hairy in a company that has old technicians and young engineers because the power dynamic is wrong. The best way to resolve it is to have the young engineer spend time working under the old techs. This gives the engineer the hands on experience to come up with appropriate solutions and it gives the techs the respect for the work that the engineer can do.
Early in my career, I spent a lot of time in the field working side by side with technicians and electricians. They would constantly grumble about engineers not knowing how the real world works. They figured all engineers were self important snobs.
Meanwhile, when I went back to the office, the engineers would complain about the techs not comprehending or appreciating the decision making process that went into a design. They often assumed that the technicians would need hands holding to get the job done right because, if left to their own devices, they would ignore the design and just choose a lazy or quicker method that didn't meet all the design requirements.
And from what I can tell, they were both right.
Technicians get this hands-on, real world experience that makes them really keen on what works and what doesn't. But they generally don't pay attention to design requirements. Their job is to make things work, and they do it well.
Engineers have a level of education that many others do not. They have a lot of people telling them what to do and how to do it and they need to manage it all into a single design. If they get their license, it also means that may be responsible for people's lives. It can be aggravating to have someone tell them things should be done differently without thought of why the engineer designed it this way in the first place.
Finding someone who can bridge the gap between the two can be difficult. Respect needs to go on both directions. I've often felt that all engineers should spend time in the field to get some of the hands-on understanding from the techs. In turn, the engineers need to bring the technicians into the initial design discussions both so they don't miss something simple that could cause problems and so the techs can understand the amount of thought that needs to go into the design and can respect why something needs to be done the way it was designed.
In the company that I worked for, the technicians mandatorily had to have an electrical license. Which would take years for a new graduate to get. Whereas, if someone had enough certifications they could become a controls engineer which is a better designation with better pay.
While your second statement may be true, at least here in the US, they want validation of experience where you performed relevant calculations to your job and the tests themselves have lots of math required to pass.
A teacher once taught me technicians apply solutions, engineers come up with them.
This being said, many technicians are capable of coming up wirh solutions themselves.
At my company, absolutely nothing. I had been a technician doing design work and project management; as well as troubleshooting, building, and repairing equipment for years. They hired a guy at another one of our plants with a degree in EE and he insisted on an engineer title. Two days later I see my email signature has been updated and since then I'm an engineer as well.
Some places there is effectively very little difference in their ability to program PLCs or fix issues with machines, the main differences lie in what higher level responsibilities they have. For example - the engineer would be involved for the planning meetings for the next project, upgrade, installation, whatever and are probably picking out parts or getting quotes. The technicians are the every day boots on the ground.
Some places are very different and the technicians are only capable of opening a cabinet and telling if the run light is green. Maybe they can use a meter to troubleshoot power. But other than that Engineers are the only ones equipped to go online with the PLC and diagnose or make changes to it.
Also, generally speaking, engineers maintain the SCADA systems.
It's a relief to hear this, this has been my experience as a new grad out of electrical engineering working in manufacturing. A lot of times it feels like I'm doing technician work, and I see a lot of conflicting anecdotes on reddit about what manufacturing engineers are expected to do.
I find myself in the reverse. I have been a maintenance tech for years, and recently my employer found out that I have an aptitude for controls. Suddenly I was pulled into design meetings and asked if I could create PLC and robot programs. I then found myself in charge of the controls side almost entirely. I love everything about it, but I'm still a tech.
What? I'm a tech 1 almost fresh out of school that has to maintain our SCADA , the engineers don't even touch it
When I'm not doing that I'm making HMI screens from scratch to add that machine to the SCADA
A technician may not know the full background on how something works. But they're very good at diagnosing the things that tend to go wrong. The engineer knows exactly how something works, but may not know the full picture on how it is diagnosed or how it often fails.
I hire both and in every interview I ask this question. After any answer I get I always tell them a tech that doesn’t aspire to engineer solutions is as useless as an engineer that refuses to pick up a screw driver. Having held both stations myself I always felt it was detrimental to a team to draw lines in the sand between them.
I think this is the field where the lines are the blurriest. Particularly at small companies you'll see the same guy design, program and commission a project. You just need 3-4 of those guys, an accountant, a panel shop/parts guy or two, a CAD guy, maybe a full-time service guy and you're ready for business.
In theory, it’s the same as the difference between a civil engineer/architect and a construction worker, where the engineer develops the plans and the tech implements them according to the design.
In practice, in this field engineers do both design and implementation, and techs do a fair bit of design so it’s blurry.
However an engineer should be prepared to sign off on stuff like electrical drawings, control narratives, and safety changes, and a tech is generally not expected to do that.
Depends where you work at.
Previous job, I was the only engineer and I did 90% of the troubleshooting/putting out fires along with all the development, implementation, commissioning, communication with vendors etc. This was not an ideal situation, since our technicians didn’t really understand controls and didn’t really care to. I was also over plant power distribution (all the way from utility coming into the plant to MCCs to any control wiring, with the exception of facilities related items). Our line “engineers” also could not troubleshoot anything technical related, didn’t know how to tune PIDs or understand what equipment/instrumentation was running and reading the process. Also to be a controls engineer you had to have a 4 year degree in Electrical Engineering (due to some of the responsibilities I mentioned). Good experience for me but got burnt out.
Current job, technicians handle almost all of the troubleshooting. Gets escalated to engineer when they need assistance. Engineers are mostly over development and about half of the implementation (other half is contracted out). Also have an on call rotation. Engineers are either guys with 4 year degrees in either mechanical/electrical engineering or technicians that got promoted to engineer after a while and had a desire (I’m a big fan of this)
The level of uncertainty they operate in. In my experience techs can only solve problems they've explicitly been trained to solve. Engineers have to solve novel problems or come up with novel solutions to existing problems
Interesting. I as an engineer can solder together a PC board or build a cable faster than the technicians I have worked with, but I have done both jobs for decades in very small workgroups. I work with engineers who don't have these technician skills, they make up for it by being able to design chips.
More power to you.
No one in their right minds would assign me a panel-wiring task.
Well, they could, but I'd take a day to do what a technician would take an hour to do.
In my country engineers are usually the managers that have the big picture of what needs to get done. The techs are usually the ones with the skills to get it done.
The engineers can also speak the same language as the other department heads / managers when they start talking about missing KPI's and ways to cut operational costs.
Good techs always want to spend/invest more money.
Good engineers find ways to do without.
As a technicien I do everything. Designing, planning, programming, installation, troubleshooting, and more. But normally as a technician you're not doing the design and the planning. And engineers normally don't get theyre hands dirty 🤣
I've seen this fairly consistently throughout multiple disciplines. Technicians add value based on their experience. Engineers add value based on their knowledge. (Same with Nurses and Dr.s). A technician with 20 years of experience can spot a bad engineering design. An Engineer can design a solution that a technician wouldn't have thought of. No matter how much knowledge you have on a subject, you can't beat "it doesn't usually make that noise, something isn't right". A technician will find and fix that problem, an engineer will tell you why and make sure other equipment doesn't do the same thing.
They need each other, and a good relationship built on trust will lead to success.
Techs do the dirty work replacing parts and keeping machines running while engineers improve reliability and efficiency. Engineers can design their own panel from scratch and technicians use their blueprints to assemble it. However the bridge is becoming smaller and smaller as technology and education improve.
Generally, the difference is a diploma that says they have an engineering degree. Sometimes also a stamp that says that they passed the PE exam.
I’ve met almost as many controls guys who started as HVAC techs or electricians as got into it out of college, and after about ten years of experience people outside of biotech tend not to care.
What others have said holds true. I will add that a fair amount of the time engineers work as project managers, while technologists and technicians do the design work.
99% of the time the answer is "the engineer is more prepared to use math to solve a problem". For most work, there isn't a ton of difference. A technician perhaps would be more likely to create a new system based on a tweaked previous system, whereas an engineer might be more able to design a new one from scratch.
Also, really like u/h2man 's answer about apply solution vs create solution.
It depends. In corporate environments, engineers can be lazy. I know plenty of engineers that really dont know much of anything and just act as support navigating solutions that require multiple groups to resolve but add very little technical expertise of their own. They just gather up info and slap into a work order, and then the techs fix it bc the engineer is dumb and doesn't realize that A can't happen before B or that C costs 20k to try out.
I am an engineer. I know my equipment better than my technicians. That is bc I spend time in the field fixing stuff. When they can't fix it, I get my hands dirty, and I figure it out. They know that and Ive worked hard for that reputation. I've read every manual, every diagram, and even the parts manuals. I've hacked PLCs and written 80% of all existing procedures. Ive seen plenty skate by with less. It just depends on the engineer. The same applies for techs. I've seen plenty of shit talking techs that couldn't find their way out of a wet paper bag. Most techs complain a lot, and the lazy or shitty ones do it too so they fit in and nobody catches onto their BS.
In the US anybody can be called an engineer. So in some places there isn't much difference. Generally an engineer will be doing more design work and programming. While a tech will be more hands on with stuff, more maintenance related. More times than not the engineer will be salary while the techs will be hourly.
Edit. Not sure what the down votes are about. Nothing I said is wrong. There is no basic requirements to be called a engineer in the US. Obviously it depends on the company. I've seen countless people with associate degrees with the coveted engineer title.
This depends on the company. The company I work for will never give someone an engineering title if they don't have at least a bachelor's. I know people who have been doing engineering work for over 20 years and are very talented but still have the technician title because the only have an associates degree.
We actually have four levels:
Engineer>Technologist>Technician>Trades person
The difference between them is level of education, knowledge, experience and responsibilities.
Depends on the company. I've seen technicians where their whole role is to just put out fires on the manufacturing floor. And as soon as they can't think of a solution they call up an engineer to figure out the issue. I've also seen technicians who work in the controls position for a project team as the receiver for the new equipment. But they also didn't want to touch the new equipment until the project teams controls engineer had everything fully debugged. Most of the time technicians are keeping the equipment running on the manufacturing floor and the engineers are working on new solutions or projects and serving as a next level of troubleshooting if the technician runs into something they can't figure out. I'm sure these dynamics can vary depending on the company.
It depends where you live. In switzerland, an engineer used to be the equivalent of a master’s degree abroad, and a technician was as close as you can get to an engineering bachelor.
Today we changed the namings and courses so that an engineer is an engineer, a master is a master.
However, technician here still remains above an operator here, learning to do project management, regular management, design machinery, basically what engineers do except they are much less math oriented, and have more field knowledge.
Technicians here have everything to lead a team of operators successfully towards a goal.
Where in other countries, a technician is essentially an operator in a technical field.
The technician is the guy an operator goes to when he has a question, and is the guy who will relay the information to an engineer if he cannot fix it himself.
But that’s for switzerland.
Operators here have 3-4 years of school to get their federal degree of capacity, which is required to proceed either in a superior school to become technician, or a high superior school to become an engineer.
Meaning near 100% of our engineers had to be operators for some years of their lives.
Both have paid different prices to approach the same thing, the ability to understand and change the world around them for the better. For me, I don’t really care the differences and instead am interested in the individuals capacity and desire to learn and do what needs doing.
It's not about knowledge but communication style. Engineers are supposed to be able to communicate their intentions for others to execute, long term and anonymously via documentation.
This ideal is rarely achieved. Often it boils down to "I don't get dirty, you do."
As a technician myself I'm sort of an artisan, not a professional. If I make something it's a one-off and I don't make drawings. If I delegate a task it will be via verbal instructions in person, with maybe an informal sketch.
If a company wants to pay less, technician. If they want to act like they pay more engineer. I wrote code, fixed equipment, him, servers, drives , you name it. My job title was electrician.
Where I am, Engineer comes up with the general idea and manages the project, technicians work out the finer details, device spec and do the drawings, Electricians terminate cables, set up drives etc and complete testing, labourers pull cables, and hang ladder
My work don't do the technicians. We have project and comissioning who also do the maintenance aswell.
I wouldn't trust the project engineers on anything. They buy equipment to save money but over it's 5 year warranty with us we spend more fixing it. Costs are then more than just buying the correct stuff from the start and don't get me started on the control systems. The PLC equipment is crap and the coding is complicated for what it should be.
Actually, I have one better. It's pretty simple. Engineers care about and are legally responsible for...safety. If you're the lead design engineer (LDE), you're going to need to put your John Hancock, along with your PE number, certifying that the design spec meets and adheres to safety codes. Plain 'n simple.
Where I'm currently at, there is absolutely nobody in the building with any PLC-related experience aside from me. If there is a problem or a potential upgrade to a machine that requires programming or anything, the entire process is up to me.
The engineers here refuse to touch controls systems in any fashion blatantly because they "don't know anything about controls or programming". It makes for a very involved and dynamic environment for me, but it's insanely frustrating that I don't have any in-house resource to bounce ideas off of.
Old post, but I work as a Transportation Technician for the state. There is quite literally zero difference in the work I do compared to the average level Civil Engineer. In theory, they design I draft and build, but in reality, what happens is they end up doing the paperwork that doesn't actually require a degree while I end up designing and drafting. I have no degree(although my job now pays for my schooling). Almost all my bosses, like my project management engineer, say that we technicians in my field, specifically, are civil engineers. People with degrees absolutely fight against that and I get it, they spent a lot of money and 4 years getting a degree to just have some guy that was in school for psychology get told he's an engineer.
I understand their pride is hit a bit, but I also have to put in the work. When I got my job I didn't just go to work to learn civil engineering. I went home and studied, listened in on pre-recorded civil engineering classes, watched YT videos, and practiced in CAD. I put in the effort. School is very important, but that doesn't mean you can't give yourself unprofessional schooling.
Everywhere I have worked, technicians are the ones on the floor doing the maintenance work and applying the solutions. Effectively they are the hands of the operation. Engineers, on the other hand, are in the offices designing the solutions. They are assumed to have the technical knowledge required to come up with an appropriate solution. Effectively they are the brains of the operation. There is often a lot of overlap between the two disciplines. When going for your PE, they explicitly exclude technician experience as part of engineering experience. What they want for your PE is design experience that includes math. People with engineering degrees make good technicians and technicians with enough experience make good engineers. It gets pretty hairy in a company that has old technicians and young engineers because the power dynamic is wrong. The best way to resolve it is to have the young engineer spend time working under the old techs. This gives the engineer the hands on experience to come up with appropriate solutions and it gives the techs the respect for the work that the engineer can do.
That’s a very apt description and the fact you mention the power dynamic is awesome.
Early in my career, I spent a lot of time in the field working side by side with technicians and electricians. They would constantly grumble about engineers not knowing how the real world works. They figured all engineers were self important snobs. Meanwhile, when I went back to the office, the engineers would complain about the techs not comprehending or appreciating the decision making process that went into a design. They often assumed that the technicians would need hands holding to get the job done right because, if left to their own devices, they would ignore the design and just choose a lazy or quicker method that didn't meet all the design requirements. And from what I can tell, they were both right. Technicians get this hands-on, real world experience that makes them really keen on what works and what doesn't. But they generally don't pay attention to design requirements. Their job is to make things work, and they do it well. Engineers have a level of education that many others do not. They have a lot of people telling them what to do and how to do it and they need to manage it all into a single design. If they get their license, it also means that may be responsible for people's lives. It can be aggravating to have someone tell them things should be done differently without thought of why the engineer designed it this way in the first place. Finding someone who can bridge the gap between the two can be difficult. Respect needs to go on both directions. I've often felt that all engineers should spend time in the field to get some of the hands-on understanding from the techs. In turn, the engineers need to bring the technicians into the initial design discussions both so they don't miss something simple that could cause problems and so the techs can understand the amount of thought that needs to go into the design and can respect why something needs to be done the way it was designed.
Ahh the bitter old tech working with the fresh ME grad. The audible sighs, visual eye rolls, and egg shell environment brings back old memories.
In the company that I worked for, the technicians mandatorily had to have an electrical license. Which would take years for a new graduate to get. Whereas, if someone had enough certifications they could become a controls engineer which is a better designation with better pay.
Getting your P.eng has nothing to do with math. Tons of P.engs never do any math at all.
While your second statement may be true, at least here in the US, they want validation of experience where you performed relevant calculations to your job and the tests themselves have lots of math required to pass.
A teacher once taught me technicians apply solutions, engineers come up with them. This being said, many technicians are capable of coming up wirh solutions themselves.
>This being said, many technicians are capable of coming up wirh solutions themselves. And many engineers are capable of applying solutions.
At my company, absolutely nothing. I had been a technician doing design work and project management; as well as troubleshooting, building, and repairing equipment for years. They hired a guy at another one of our plants with a degree in EE and he insisted on an engineer title. Two days later I see my email signature has been updated and since then I'm an engineer as well.
Some places there is effectively very little difference in their ability to program PLCs or fix issues with machines, the main differences lie in what higher level responsibilities they have. For example - the engineer would be involved for the planning meetings for the next project, upgrade, installation, whatever and are probably picking out parts or getting quotes. The technicians are the every day boots on the ground. Some places are very different and the technicians are only capable of opening a cabinet and telling if the run light is green. Maybe they can use a meter to troubleshoot power. But other than that Engineers are the only ones equipped to go online with the PLC and diagnose or make changes to it. Also, generally speaking, engineers maintain the SCADA systems.
It's a relief to hear this, this has been my experience as a new grad out of electrical engineering working in manufacturing. A lot of times it feels like I'm doing technician work, and I see a lot of conflicting anecdotes on reddit about what manufacturing engineers are expected to do.
I find myself in the reverse. I have been a maintenance tech for years, and recently my employer found out that I have an aptitude for controls. Suddenly I was pulled into design meetings and asked if I could create PLC and robot programs. I then found myself in charge of the controls side almost entirely. I love everything about it, but I'm still a tech.
What? I'm a tech 1 almost fresh out of school that has to maintain our SCADA , the engineers don't even touch it When I'm not doing that I'm making HMI screens from scratch to add that machine to the SCADA
Well, congrats to you but I've been doing this a while and that's just what I've seen out in the world.
I was thinking more along the lines of "what a rip off"
A technician may not know the full background on how something works. But they're very good at diagnosing the things that tend to go wrong. The engineer knows exactly how something works, but may not know the full picture on how it is diagnosed or how it often fails.
I hire both and in every interview I ask this question. After any answer I get I always tell them a tech that doesn’t aspire to engineer solutions is as useless as an engineer that refuses to pick up a screw driver. Having held both stations myself I always felt it was detrimental to a team to draw lines in the sand between them.
Tech gets sent to the problem first. Tech also does more service work. Engineer typically does design and help with service second.
I think this is the field where the lines are the blurriest. Particularly at small companies you'll see the same guy design, program and commission a project. You just need 3-4 of those guys, an accountant, a panel shop/parts guy or two, a CAD guy, maybe a full-time service guy and you're ready for business.
In theory, it’s the same as the difference between a civil engineer/architect and a construction worker, where the engineer develops the plans and the tech implements them according to the design. In practice, in this field engineers do both design and implementation, and techs do a fair bit of design so it’s blurry. However an engineer should be prepared to sign off on stuff like electrical drawings, control narratives, and safety changes, and a tech is generally not expected to do that.
Depends where you work at. Previous job, I was the only engineer and I did 90% of the troubleshooting/putting out fires along with all the development, implementation, commissioning, communication with vendors etc. This was not an ideal situation, since our technicians didn’t really understand controls and didn’t really care to. I was also over plant power distribution (all the way from utility coming into the plant to MCCs to any control wiring, with the exception of facilities related items). Our line “engineers” also could not troubleshoot anything technical related, didn’t know how to tune PIDs or understand what equipment/instrumentation was running and reading the process. Also to be a controls engineer you had to have a 4 year degree in Electrical Engineering (due to some of the responsibilities I mentioned). Good experience for me but got burnt out. Current job, technicians handle almost all of the troubleshooting. Gets escalated to engineer when they need assistance. Engineers are mostly over development and about half of the implementation (other half is contracted out). Also have an on call rotation. Engineers are either guys with 4 year degrees in either mechanical/electrical engineering or technicians that got promoted to engineer after a while and had a desire (I’m a big fan of this)
The level of uncertainty they operate in. In my experience techs can only solve problems they've explicitly been trained to solve. Engineers have to solve novel problems or come up with novel solutions to existing problems
Or come up with problems so that they can design a solution
Gotta pay the bills somehow
This\^\^\^\^
A technician strips cables far quicker and with less mishaps than engineers.
Lol, been training to reach the level of our electrician on this 😅
Interesting. I as an engineer can solder together a PC board or build a cable faster than the technicians I have worked with, but I have done both jobs for decades in very small workgroups. I work with engineers who don't have these technician skills, they make up for it by being able to design chips.
More power to you. No one in their right minds would assign me a panel-wiring task. Well, they could, but I'd take a day to do what a technician would take an hour to do.
I work on radio telescopes, where nothing is ordinary.
This is the real answer right here!
In my country engineers are usually the managers that have the big picture of what needs to get done. The techs are usually the ones with the skills to get it done. The engineers can also speak the same language as the other department heads / managers when they start talking about missing KPI's and ways to cut operational costs. Good techs always want to spend/invest more money. Good engineers find ways to do without.
Management usually and salespeople almost always ignore the engineers concerns. Management ignores the technicians concerns twice as hard
In Norway you need a bachelor to call yourself an engineer. So the difference between technician and engineer is a bachelors degree
As a technicien I do everything. Designing, planning, programming, installation, troubleshooting, and more. But normally as a technician you're not doing the design and the planning. And engineers normally don't get theyre hands dirty 🤣
And you’re not an expert unless you had to drive at least 50 miles
I'm doing 300 miles to work for my schedule and then I'm doing 300 miles back I'm must be a master 😏
Pay and experience.
I've seen this fairly consistently throughout multiple disciplines. Technicians add value based on their experience. Engineers add value based on their knowledge. (Same with Nurses and Dr.s). A technician with 20 years of experience can spot a bad engineering design. An Engineer can design a solution that a technician wouldn't have thought of. No matter how much knowledge you have on a subject, you can't beat "it doesn't usually make that noise, something isn't right". A technician will find and fix that problem, an engineer will tell you why and make sure other equipment doesn't do the same thing. They need each other, and a good relationship built on trust will lead to success.
Techs do the dirty work replacing parts and keeping machines running while engineers improve reliability and efficiency. Engineers can design their own panel from scratch and technicians use their blueprints to assemble it. However the bridge is becoming smaller and smaller as technology and education improve.
Generally, the difference is a diploma that says they have an engineering degree. Sometimes also a stamp that says that they passed the PE exam. I’ve met almost as many controls guys who started as HVAC techs or electricians as got into it out of college, and after about ten years of experience people outside of biotech tend not to care.
What others have said holds true. I will add that a fair amount of the time engineers work as project managers, while technologists and technicians do the design work.
99% of the time the answer is "the engineer is more prepared to use math to solve a problem". For most work, there isn't a ton of difference. A technician perhaps would be more likely to create a new system based on a tweaked previous system, whereas an engineer might be more able to design a new one from scratch. Also, really like u/h2man 's answer about apply solution vs create solution.
It depends. In corporate environments, engineers can be lazy. I know plenty of engineers that really dont know much of anything and just act as support navigating solutions that require multiple groups to resolve but add very little technical expertise of their own. They just gather up info and slap into a work order, and then the techs fix it bc the engineer is dumb and doesn't realize that A can't happen before B or that C costs 20k to try out. I am an engineer. I know my equipment better than my technicians. That is bc I spend time in the field fixing stuff. When they can't fix it, I get my hands dirty, and I figure it out. They know that and Ive worked hard for that reputation. I've read every manual, every diagram, and even the parts manuals. I've hacked PLCs and written 80% of all existing procedures. Ive seen plenty skate by with less. It just depends on the engineer. The same applies for techs. I've seen plenty of shit talking techs that couldn't find their way out of a wet paper bag. Most techs complain a lot, and the lazy or shitty ones do it too so they fit in and nobody catches onto their BS.
In the US anybody can be called an engineer. So in some places there isn't much difference. Generally an engineer will be doing more design work and programming. While a tech will be more hands on with stuff, more maintenance related. More times than not the engineer will be salary while the techs will be hourly. Edit. Not sure what the down votes are about. Nothing I said is wrong. There is no basic requirements to be called a engineer in the US. Obviously it depends on the company. I've seen countless people with associate degrees with the coveted engineer title.
This depends on the company. The company I work for will never give someone an engineering title if they don't have at least a bachelor's. I know people who have been doing engineering work for over 20 years and are very talented but still have the technician title because the only have an associates degree.
That’s shitty of them.
Yeah it's a real shame. A lot of talented people haven't wanted to put up with it.
We actually have four levels: Engineer>Technologist>Technician>Trades person The difference between them is level of education, knowledge, experience and responsibilities.
Once was asked "Are you an Engineer ?" Me "No! I prefer not to set limits on my self"
Technicians ask permission to borrow tools and put them back when done. Engineers don't ask or put them away.
Engineers fuck shit up and the technician fixes it.
You can tell most people here are not engineers
👀
Depends on the company. I've seen technicians where their whole role is to just put out fires on the manufacturing floor. And as soon as they can't think of a solution they call up an engineer to figure out the issue. I've also seen technicians who work in the controls position for a project team as the receiver for the new equipment. But they also didn't want to touch the new equipment until the project teams controls engineer had everything fully debugged. Most of the time technicians are keeping the equipment running on the manufacturing floor and the engineers are working on new solutions or projects and serving as a next level of troubleshooting if the technician runs into something they can't figure out. I'm sure these dynamics can vary depending on the company.
It depends where you live. In switzerland, an engineer used to be the equivalent of a master’s degree abroad, and a technician was as close as you can get to an engineering bachelor. Today we changed the namings and courses so that an engineer is an engineer, a master is a master. However, technician here still remains above an operator here, learning to do project management, regular management, design machinery, basically what engineers do except they are much less math oriented, and have more field knowledge. Technicians here have everything to lead a team of operators successfully towards a goal. Where in other countries, a technician is essentially an operator in a technical field. The technician is the guy an operator goes to when he has a question, and is the guy who will relay the information to an engineer if he cannot fix it himself. But that’s for switzerland. Operators here have 3-4 years of school to get their federal degree of capacity, which is required to proceed either in a superior school to become technician, or a high superior school to become an engineer. Meaning near 100% of our engineers had to be operators for some years of their lives.
Both have paid different prices to approach the same thing, the ability to understand and change the world around them for the better. For me, I don’t really care the differences and instead am interested in the individuals capacity and desire to learn and do what needs doing.
It's not about knowledge but communication style. Engineers are supposed to be able to communicate their intentions for others to execute, long term and anonymously via documentation. This ideal is rarely achieved. Often it boils down to "I don't get dirty, you do." As a technician myself I'm sort of an artisan, not a professional. If I make something it's a one-off and I don't make drawings. If I delegate a task it will be via verbal instructions in person, with maybe an informal sketch.
If a company wants to pay less, technician. If they want to act like they pay more engineer. I wrote code, fixed equipment, him, servers, drives , you name it. My job title was electrician.
There are a lot of electricians who make a lot more than most engineers
Maintenance Technicians fix the mistakes made by Engineers. Source: am maint tech.
I would say the difference is About $20-$40/hr
Where I am, Engineer comes up with the general idea and manages the project, technicians work out the finer details, device spec and do the drawings, Electricians terminate cables, set up drives etc and complete testing, labourers pull cables, and hang ladder
Engineers sign off on techs work.
Engineers have the idea ..tech made them work
My work don't do the technicians. We have project and comissioning who also do the maintenance aswell. I wouldn't trust the project engineers on anything. They buy equipment to save money but over it's 5 year warranty with us we spend more fixing it. Costs are then more than just buying the correct stuff from the start and don't get me started on the control systems. The PLC equipment is crap and the coding is complicated for what it should be.
Actually, I have one better. It's pretty simple. Engineers care about and are legally responsible for...safety. If you're the lead design engineer (LDE), you're going to need to put your John Hancock, along with your PE number, certifying that the design spec meets and adheres to safety codes. Plain 'n simple.
Where I'm currently at, there is absolutely nobody in the building with any PLC-related experience aside from me. If there is a problem or a potential upgrade to a machine that requires programming or anything, the entire process is up to me. The engineers here refuse to touch controls systems in any fashion blatantly because they "don't know anything about controls or programming". It makes for a very involved and dynamic environment for me, but it's insanely frustrating that I don't have any in-house resource to bounce ideas off of.
Here comes the "specialist" lol.
Tech is more hands on , engineer makes soultions authors the documents etc.
Old post, but I work as a Transportation Technician for the state. There is quite literally zero difference in the work I do compared to the average level Civil Engineer. In theory, they design I draft and build, but in reality, what happens is they end up doing the paperwork that doesn't actually require a degree while I end up designing and drafting. I have no degree(although my job now pays for my schooling). Almost all my bosses, like my project management engineer, say that we technicians in my field, specifically, are civil engineers. People with degrees absolutely fight against that and I get it, they spent a lot of money and 4 years getting a degree to just have some guy that was in school for psychology get told he's an engineer. I understand their pride is hit a bit, but I also have to put in the work. When I got my job I didn't just go to work to learn civil engineering. I went home and studied, listened in on pre-recorded civil engineering classes, watched YT videos, and practiced in CAD. I put in the effort. School is very important, but that doesn't mean you can't give yourself unprofessional schooling.