If you are an electrical engineer who went to college because you enjoy electrical engineering, there are many boring, soul-sucking career paths that you may find trying to pull you in. There are many reasons for someone to be a technician, to spend their days dealing with the mind-numbing tedium of Windows network troubleshooting, PLC ladder logic, and packaging machinery. To be sure, those jobs are important and someone has to do them. Some may even find them interesting.
That someone doesn't have to be you. There's also no reason to feel that you are doomed for life if you find yourself in a blind alley of a job. But there is a catch.
In the early 1980s, there was a pair of telling studies of engineers. One was performed by the National Research Council, who found that there were more engineers in the United States than there were supporting technicians. Puzzled members of the NRC re-checked their data and found the answer: large numbers of engineers were working in sub-professional tasks, meaning they were trained as engineers but working as technicians. This made sense when seen in the light of another study, this one by the IEEE, which found that a slight majority of polled engineers were dissatisfied with their careers, claiming they lacked opportunities to perform real engineering work. These engineers were probably capable of much more than they were asked to do, but found no way out of the tar pits they had been drawn in to: HR specialists and hiring managers don't care what your potential is; they only care what you've done already.
It has been my goal during the last couple of months to rectify this situation in my personal life, and I've been having a hard time of it. What I've learned from the experience is this: the moment you find yourself performing sub-professional work, stop immediately. Don't give it time to improve; it won't. If you fell into a river, you would immediately fight your way to the surface to preserve your life; you must let the same instinct take over to fight for your career. In both cases, your future depends on quick decisions, quick actions, and maybe a little risk. Taking a calculated risk may be the best thing you can do for yourself. You may be intelligent; you may be more intelligent than the average BSEE; you may be hard-working, productive, and well-meaning. None of that will matter if you spend two years doing menial labor. Do yourself a favor: run away while there's still a chance - otherwise you may well find yourself doomed, and that's a horrible feeling.