Moleculo, don't take this he wrong way but this whole thread reads like someone very passive in their state of life. Sounds like you might need a shot in the arm, get yourself on the offensive. You work as a mechanical engineer, with history in an area booming in the medical device field, and need a few of us to guide you to the obvious conclusion of leaving your dying job to shift to that field. Then when a few maintenance items pop up on the car (one of which sounds like > 10 years old) it is the role of the victim.
Some tough love advice -
1) get a bigger e fund, at your station in life it should be at least $20k, where you can absorb unanticipated car maintenance of even a lost job for a while
2) start networking with a goal of getting hired in the medical device field within 3 months. Get aggressive on this. That doesn't mean applying via Internet or searching monster.com, it means attending a conference, aggressive LinkedIn work, finding old colleagues from your last work in that area, and general making it your 1,2,3 priority.
Forget severance, don't be last rat on the ship. If the company closes you now have handfuls of people vying for the same job. You sound like you know enough to sense danger, the time to act is now. I have been through one manufacturing plant closure and laid off twice, so I have some experience here
good stuff. Hate to come off as whiny about the car stuff, it's just the most recent and a source of frustration. On top of the car stuff, my wife has committed to funding the legal defense of my brother-in-law (as detailed elsewhere and previous thread @ FBG since shut down), and we just got done with a a major renovation of our house, and have just started finishing the basement. Framing and rough electrical and plumbing are done. Up next is insulation, dry wall, flooring, trim work. We kind of extended ourselves a little bit thinking things were secure. $8k isn't going to kill me, or even put a huge dent in the grand scheme of things, it just feels like a giant pile of bricks to carry around right now.I talked to the medical device head hunter yesterday. Sounds like a good opportunity; we'll see where it leads. It's not really a sexy company, nothing really ground-breaking there. Spoke to a different head hunter about a position in Pittsburgh that sounds really awesome - I would be the first ME on staff and eventually have my own team, working on some cutting edge stuff. Of course, it's in Pittsburgh, so there's that.
As far as what happens if this place closes - there are only four ME's in my office. It's not like we will be flooding the market.
My boss was out without warning yesterday. He's generally on top of telling us when he is planning on being out. Of course, I suspect he had an interview. Part of my suspicion hat this place is shutting down is my boss and I went out to lunch last Friday and talked about his Kickstarter campaigns - he's had several successful launches, and was asking if I had anything in the hopper. He said several times "
it's good to have options"....reading between the lines, I assumed he was telling me, without telling me, to start looking. It's possible he was just justifying himself looking around instead.
you are right though - I am at a point where I am passive in my career. I don't like this company but had made the decision several years ago to hold my nose and get through it, because this company does have some nice benefits and work/life balance. Basically, I prioritized life outside of work over professional growth. When you make that choice, you lose some professional aggressiveness.
I am attacking monster right now, and am beating around the networking bushes. We'll see what springs up. I'm not going to take the first job that is offered, it's got to be the right job. I've got time. Hell, the office might not even shut down.
