I've been working at a very large American defense contractor company here in Canada for about a year now. I recently graduated last year as an Electrical Engineer and have been working as a junior Hardware Engineer since then with this company.
Since I've started working here, I've been given more and more responsibilities and tasks that are not exactly related to my position. Over the course of the last few months, they have put me on a systems engineering team as they had nobody with any electrical background on their team. I would like to mention that I had been not given a timeline of how long I'd be on this team, and what tasks I'd be given. As such, I was now on two teams, with equal responsibilities and deadlines, with no pay increase and was expected to deliver results on both ends. So far I am on 4 different programs, only 1 of which actually relates to my position.
That being said, I brought this up to my manager, whom also had given me her lead role in investigating a new software package that I had been given to work with since day one. As such, on top of what I am working on now, I am expected to present a case study with metrics on why we should choose this new software.
When I asked about compensation, I was told that these extra duties/responsibilities would only be temporary.. yet as far as I can see, none of the programs I am working on will finish in the next 1-2 years. As per raises this year, I was only given a 3% raise, which brought up my salary to about 60k per year.
Comparing my salary to my friends/peers from university in equal engineer fields, I am by far the most underpaid and overworked. Not to mention, the company I work for is by far the biggest amongst all the other companies my peers work for.
I haven't looked into applying to other jobs just yet, but I am wondering if this is normal for a new engineer in this field? It seems that everyone on my team is overworked, and has no time to help with anything. Even my lead engineer doesn't have time to answer my questions, or even review my work…