Hey all,
To preface, I’m not really sure what I’m looking for with this post, but advice would be appreciated. I’m just feeling very lost after a sobering realization that I am not saving well towards retirement.
Backstory:
I graduated from UMass in late 2019 and struggled to find employment during the pandemic until late 2020. I’m now in what I would otherwise consider to be a dream job here locally in Mass, but the pay is subpar for living where I am, and it doesn’t come with benefits outside of health insurance. For reference, I make $30/hr (gradually increased from $22/hr when I started in 2021) and I take the bus to work. Ideally I’d be making $62k/yr off of that, but I had an event happen in 2023 that left me feeling gradually more and more depressed, and I started missing buses more often from all the lost sleep. (Extremely) Thankfully I have an incredibly forgiving boss and have become very important at work. This year I’ll have made probably closer to $50k because of it, but I’m steadily climbing out of that hole in my sleep/hours and considering a car to become more consistent.
I went through extreme burnout from academic overload in college and have been feeling very imposter-ish post-graduation. Really I feel like I’ve mostly lost any passion I might’ve had for work outside of what I do, and even now I’m very distractible. I’ve since been diagnosed with ADHD as of this year (explains a lot of the burnout; I’m on meds now that help me concentrate better but come with their own issues) and have social anxiety/possible cPTSD issues that tend to make me deeply self-isolating. Realistically though, this job is so accommodating that if it even just came with benefits, I don’t think I’d ever want to change a thing about it.
Now:
I’m 29M (although recently gender-questioning, so that’s another fun layer on top of all this), have a bachelors in mechanical engineering, and 5 years experience with what I guess you could call project engineering — although at times it feels like a glorified drafting engineer position. I handle mostly CAD work, create fab drawings for parts made either on our shop floor or via subcontracted tube/sheet laser (flat or folded), coordinate pricing and purchasing for subcontracted laser work and occasional steel ordering, create quotes & submittal drawings for customers, do very light coordination with customers directly, perform costing for components, and make occasional CAD renders for products on our website.
We have a niche creating brackets for customers in the entertainment industry (mostly), and some business relationships with major manufacturers that help keep our business afloat during entertainment’s dead season.
For the most part, there is minimal real, creative work that happens in my role specifically; my boss interfaces with customers almost exclusively to determine what hardware they need from us and then feeds that information down the line. We do a lot of custom work, but the boss comes up with 90% of our designs and basically tells me loosely what I need to draw, in keeping with our design factor. I will sometimes provide input to streamline a design or suggest alternatives when we aren’t meeting our design factor, but for the most part he just has an incredible knack for this stuff that I couldn’t even come close to. He’s worked in the industry we provide for and has developed a superpower for it as his special interest. I hardly need to perform any involved mathematics outside of basic tear-out calculations for bolts, and picking adequate cuts of steel for the weight load limits we need our products to carry. I try to apply basic rules of thumb for welding applications to determine what stitch to specify on welded components too, but for the most part it’s just making sure that our brackets will hold the weight we need it to hold within our product-wide safety factor (double checked by our in-house PE). Jobs with custom hardware and jobs where our customers need drawings for either submittal purposes or stamping purposes are most of what sustains my work, and in the lulls of that kind of work I tend to be more involved with making our standard products more presentable to the industry via our website or via brochures to companies that refer our hardware to their customers.
It’s deeply prideful, fulfilling work to be able to see the things I do create being made on our shop floor, and to be able to provide for an industry that I enjoy being on the consumer side of; at concert venues, I always find myself looking around to see if our hardware was specified. I am especially thankful not to be working in the defense industry (apologies if that’s a divisive perspective here) — but in lieu of proper benefits, and with the local housing crisis + lack of rent control causing my landlord to jack my rent up $250 in the last two years (despite living in designated low-income housing!), I’m finding it very difficult to see myself meaningfully saving towards retirement, or feeling secure if anything ever happened to make our business go under (or if, for any reason, I specifically lost my job). Truthfully, sometimes I worry that if my boss (in his early 60s now) either died or retired, I might be facing a significant restructuring in my work that leads to me becoming more obsolete. Admittedly we’ve been experiencing staffing issues on our shop floor too that have been stressful to not really have a pulse on, all on their own. All in tow, if anything WERE to happen, I don’t know how the skills I’ve acquired translate to the greater field of engineering; but I feel terribly that I may only be just past entry level after all this time, in a field that I know all too well experiences dozens if not hundreds of applicants for any given job.
