It's tempting to put engineers in a cubbyhole: They sit around all day scribbling ideas about how to make stuff work. But it turns out that engineers have very varied work lives, especially when they're free agents. Witness Colonel Mercer, aerospace whiz, and Kirk Harnack, a cowboy on the Southern radio circuit.
A Free Agent with Stars in His Eyes
Robert Mercer is no ordinary free agent. An aerospace systems engineer, Mercer earned his wings as an Air Force colonel and worked on a galaxy of NASA missions from Mercury, to Gemini, the Apollo missions, and more recently, the Hubble Space Telescope.
Over the last 20 years, he has alternated between consulting gigs and permanent positions with some of the biggest names in aerospace and defense contracting. Early in 2000, a headhunter found Mercer a consulting job near Los Angeles at Azuza, California-based Aerojet, an aerospace firm. Now he's chin-deep in the creation of the Space-Based Infrared System, a defense project intended to give timely warnings of ballistic and theater missile firings.
"The first six months on a project, people talk to you and it's like listening to Greek," says Mercer, whose personal glossary of technical acronyms runs to 75 pages. Of his role in developing the system's critical missile sensor, he says: "The problem is so complex, you must break it down into doable pieces that can be handled by individuals or teams." From "a 10,000-piece puzzle," Mercer helps to determine the proper interactions of larger and larger modules of the system.
Mercer says that his status as an outside consultant is no hindrance to collaboration. The project team includes employees of two different defense contractors, Northrop Grumman Corp. and Aerojet; "because you've already got that interplay, my consultant status doesn't really matter," he says. What matters to the team is that "you've become one of the key knowledgeable people."
How does Mercer's fee stack up against compensation for salaried aerospace engineers? "It could be up to twice as much as gross salary for higher-level consulting," he says. He gets his healthcare and 401(k) retirement savings benefits through the professional services agency Acro Service Corp., based in Livonia, Michigan. Mercer does not collect a per diem while on temporary assignment with Aerojet, so he must pay for his own housing and meals. Still, with all that cash, two pensions from earlier careers, and Social Security retirement benefits, Mercer's income is in a very comfortable orbit.
He Plies His Trade with Torch and Song
Kirk Harnack's engineering practice is much more hands-on, though the product of his labor goes out on the airwaves. He has spent 16 years as a contract engineer in the broadcast industry, serving radio stations across wide swathes of Kentucky and Tennessee. (Harnack recently took a full-time job as a broadcast industry evangelist in Boyle, Mississippi, but continues his free-agent practice on the side).
"I got started in radio as a board operator and announcer at age 15," Harnack says. A few years later, after he began fixing studio equipment on his own, Harnack relates that "I found out that I was better at that than at being a disc jockey."
So Harnack bought $1500 worth of broadcast engineering equipment and put in a half- or full day at several radio stations each week, testing and maintaining their studios and towers. "In the smaller markets, a lot of stations can't afford a full-time engineer," he explains. "After two or three years, I had more work than I could do." For a while, Harnack had up to four employees. But he eventually tired of having to fix his staff's mistakes, so he returned to practicing solo.
Harnack has had some interesting scrapes with Mother Nature over the years. Once, after a monstrous ice storm, he found himself wielding a torch to deice a radio tower and "dodging 50-pound chunks of ice falling from 1200 feet." But now he's settled down to a safer existence. "I pick and choose the jobs that I want to do," Harnack says.
