Is this an impossible aspiration for an Electrical/Controls Engineer?

[danton133]

Is there (or will there be) some specific fields or roles within electrical engineering that support the ability to work fully remote? To escape the 9-5, location dependent norm.

This could be as a employee, contactor or maybe self employed?

More info: my current background includes panel design, plc's, and some experience with instrumentation and I'm looking for opportunities to steer my career towards remote work.

 

[anorlunda]

Any kind of a desk job should be suitable for remote written. Direct injection of materials our products is not.

I once meet a patent examiner living on a boat as she cruised the country. Every Friday she had to fly to DC, walk into the office and say, "Hello," then fly back.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Never, ever, ever leave your home no matter what? That is a lot less likely than working primarily from home.

 

[berkeman]

More info: my current background includes panel design, plc's, and some experience with instrumentation and I'm looking for opportunities to steer my career towards remote work.

A couple thoughts come to mind. In general if you need to work in the lab (on prototype circuits, design validation, device troubleshooting, test fixture design, etc.), you will need to go in at least a few days a week. That is pretty much my situation. You can mitigtate that a little by bringing some of those setups home, and by using VPN access to the company network to be able to work on your setups from home.

For our company, it's mostly the software engineers who can avoid going into work completely. Also, there are some CAD-intensive jobs where you can work mostly remotely as long as you have those (expensive) tools at your home or again use VPN access to run them from home. PCB layout is one such specialty, for example. But straightfoward layouts can generally be handled at the talented technician/specialist level, rather than needing a full EE to do that work. There are some exceptions for very complicated high-speed designs and RF design work.

 

[CalcNerd]

With your background you should be able to work mostly from home aside from prototype work or proofing your code (PLC) in the field. What area of the county do you currently work ie East coast?

 

[Mark44]

Any kind of a desk job should be suitable for remote written. Direct injection of materials our products is not.

The above seems pretty garbled. Spell check gone wrong?
"written" = "work"?
"injection" = "inspection"?
"our" = "or"?

 

[anorlunda]

The above seems pretty garbled. Spell check gone wrong?
"written" = "work"?
"injection" = "inspection"?
"our" = "or"?

Yikes! Very mangled. Yes, your guesses are all correct. I must stop using my phone on PF.

 

[Mark44]

I must stop using my phone on PF.

My philosophy (very Luddite) is that phones are great for making or receiving calls or texts, but they are inferior for typing and viewing images. But that's just me...

 

[Jody]

I'm an electrical engineer. I think my work has a baseline plan to get me back into the office although currently I'm pretty much not even allowed to go there... I work fully from home for nearly a year now.

I'm in the same situation as @berkeman described most of my work is using EDA so a lot of CAD work as well as simulations.

 

[paralleltransport]

I'm an electrical engineer. Since most of my work involve designing stuff on the computer, I actually don't have to be in the office a lot. I could definitely see a 50-70% work from home arrangement work, although 100% work from home would be difficult (sometimes every now and then you still need to get your hands dirty). This is entirely up to your employer actually and how good you are.