The stereotypical engineer is a dull boy-all work and no play. Holed up in a cubicle into the wee hours, knee-deep in gooey takeout cartons and empty Diet Coke cans, he suffers as little human contact as possible without losing his job. Accurate picture? Probably not. Perhaps it's time to update-and upgrade-the caricature.

The composite portrait depicted in the EE Times "2005 State of the Engineer Survey" shows an engineer who is male, relatively wealthy, fortysomething and married. He's someone who likes to devote almost 45 percent of his (fairly ample) free time to his family. His second greatest interest-in time and money spent-turns out to be hobbies, rather than dining out, nonbusiness traveling or attending sporting events.

In the United States, 91 percent of the engineers who responded to the survey said they are homeowners, and 76 percent have two or three cars.

Compared with the average Joe, engineers have a greater passion for new technology and cutting-edge gadgets. They have beaten the general public to such things as DVD systems, digital cameras, MP3 players and iPods, and flat-screen TVs. According to U.S. market penetration data tabulated by the Consumer Electronics Association, only 39 percent of U.S. homes own a digital camera, but 74 percent of engineers said they use digital cameras a lot. Similarly, 23 percent of U.S. engineers already watch their favorite shows on flat-screen TVs and 22 percent own high-definition TVs, at a time when only 5 percent of U.S. homes overall are equipped with flat screens and 15.3 percent have HDTV.

The fascination with new technology is even more pronounced abroad. Fully 88 percent of our respondents in Europe said they are avid users of digital cameras, 44 percent own flat-screen TVs and 36 percent have iPod/MP3 players.

Our sample is family-focused, charitable and diverse politically. And they're opinionated. Nearly 80 percent feel they and their engineer colleagues are above average in intelligence, while fewer than one in three believes nonengineers have above-average smarts. Engineers see themselves as less socially active, less stylish-and more introverted-than non-EEs, according to a separate survey done by EE Times and the advertising public relations firm McLenahan Bruer (Portland, Ore.).

Engineers have a high degree of confidence in the success of the scientific community, while holding a generally dim view of the abilities of people in other professions. In particular, respondents view television and organized labor in the worst light.

Both at home and at work, engineers are well-wired to broadband connections. Fifty-three percent of the U.S. engineers in our sample also use wireless connections at home.

As more engineers connect to e-mail and the Internet wherever they are, a bigger question is looming over the balance of work and play. How is the "always on" culture changing engineers? When it's possible to work 24 hours a day, if need be, how does an EE keep his sanity? How does he refresh himself with diversions other than work? Or does that matter to him at all?

Enter the world of Chris Fournier, techno-marketing engineer at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Fournier is an engineer by day and an electric-bass player who owns and operates his own recording studio by night.

Skilled in power measurement, Fournier works at AMD's design and support center in Colorado, where he benchmarks AMD's Geode processors. He also does research on the competition by attending conferences and trade shows, and does teardowns on rivals' development systems. "I create presentations to show how we stack up against our competitors, and to educate internal and external customers," he said.

Nights and weekends, though, are another story. In a third of the space originally designed for a three-car garage at his home, Fournier built a small recording studio that includes a control room and an isolation room, complete with an acoustic wall treatment. The studio, called Earth Shaper Audio, offers production services for making studio-based albums and live-event recordings. Fournier does everything from mixing and mastering to multitrack digital recording-using up to 24 tracks-both in-studio and at remote locations. A veteran of seven CD albums released on independent labels in the 1990s, Fournier is also a musician. At Earth Shaper Audio, he offers studio musician services (bass guitar, drums, keyboards) and songwriting.

Like most engineers who took part in the EE Times survey, Fournier is a family man. He's married with three daughters ages 1, 3 and 5. While acknowledging that his AMD job can be draining, Fournier makes a point of spending a couple of hours a day with his kids-mainly in the end-of-day activities of baths and bedtime stories.

Although Fournier says he couldn't live without music, he also affirms that he would never leave engineering-not because it pays the bills, but because "if I quit, I know I'd miss it so much." Engineering has taught him the joy of problem-solving, and he doesn't want to lose it. Indeed, Fournier appears to be at peace with splitting his time between career and avocation. "Both are part of me," he said.

Fournier is one engineer who has decided that a healthy life cannot be just about the job. Although he takes pride in being regarded as a "high-output worker" at AMD, he says that having something else-a hobby, a passion or whatever-outside the profession makes him a more "rounded person."

Fournier strives to completely separate one world from the other. He stressed, "When I am doing one thing, I am definitely switched from doing another." He also copes by keeping to a rigid schedule. Fournier gets up at 5:30 a.m. and goes out to his studio while the rest of his family sleeps. There, he spends about an hour handling studio-related e-mail and noodling around with music. Then he showers and gets ready for work, leaving at 7:30 a.m. without eating breakfast. After a peaceful drive to work, mainly over back roads, Fournier is in his office by 8, ready to work, with his first cup of coffee in hand.

His office at AMD is a 10 x 15-foot lab crowded with a lab table, computers loaded with databases and a lot of power-measuring equipment. He works alone: "I am pretty much my own boss." But his day is often interrupted by colleagues or his boss, who come to him with some hot issue or a new project that needs immediate attention. Fournier says he responds to every demand, but he also quietly sustains his long-term projects-benchmarking and writing reports.

"I do get pulled into many projects," he said. The key to managing all the chaos is "multitasking. When a new thing comes up, I simultaneously think about how I can advance my other projects in the background. I try not to get hung up on one thing too much."

Three-mile run
Fournier punctuates his daily routine by going out at noon on a trail in the business park where AMD is located for a three-mile run. He comes back to the office, showers and eats his brown-bag lunch-usually a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a bag of tortilla chips. He does some e-mail at his desk while eating and is back to work after an hour. The last couple of weeks have been a crunch time for him, as many new projects have flowed in. But crunch or no crunch, Fournier usually leaves the office at 5 p.m. He said that he would work late into the night if necessary, "but what I do often requires other people to move things forward."

After dinner with the family, he plays with his kids and tucks them into bed. By 8:30 p.m., he is back in his studio.

However, Fournier does burn the midnight oil when he's on the road. He travels six to 10 times a year, usually to conferences and trade shows. "I visit booths, mingle with other people and go to seminars during four- to five-day conferences. But once I return to my hotel room, I often work all night long, catching up with my work e-mail, finishing long-term presentations and writing conference reports."

Fournier's approach to work-whether at his office or in his studio-is consistent. He's focused and methodical. And his engineering skills stand him in good stead at the studio. He can usually figure out the problem when a harried recording engineer calls in the throes of a technology crisis, Fournier reports. Generally, he said, he can tell whether it's a software driver problem, signal-routing glitch or something else. And, if necessary, he can reconfigure the whole system.

"I don't know how a nonelectrical engineer can do all these things by himself," he said.

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