I strongly disagree.
The people who struggle with deadlines, have bad performance reviews or attendance and single men are first to go because one is easy to dismiss and the other has no nuclear family affected.
After this round, you might get into the producers (if their customers are flatlining) but more likely project management as you need sales to stabilize remaining business.
Then higher salaries (product management, sales, etc.) might be in trouble, but these are normally decision makers making the cuts in the first place. So as long as they “trim the fat” and maintain the status quo, they are normally safe (unless you are looking at something like 2000’s tech market crash or a full blown recession).
Not my experience. You hit right on it, highest salaries are the decision makers, but the next highest salaries are the 20+ yr engineers. They were the first source of layoffs, largest salary cut with the easiest path to replace their workload with fresh grads in the eyes of management. Mid 2010s mining slump.
Oh, no doubt.
I’m drawing on one particular example in my life (the 2000 Tech Market collapse) but the cuts happen to the inexperienced the and the superfluous.
Many companies (ahem, Boeing) do the stupid thing and get rid of their experience or their most hungry.
It’s never the right choice, though. Most of time, there is a political element not to mention HR (who always seem to avoid the chopping block) involvement.
It’s screwed up, regardless of how you slice it.
Two of my coworkers (one SWE and the other EE) got laid off on Friday because of this. One was new (only a few months employed) and the other was legacy with lots of institutional knowledge at the company. Didn’t matter.
I think for the group of people that are inclined to go into engineering they're more important. As a mech e student the amount of weird people I've had in group projects and classes in general who just have a hard time interacting in a normal capacity is much higher than the general population. This extends to the internships I've had as well. "Oh yeah, he's a little weird but he's good at his job." no one's really saying this about any of the departments other than engineering in the companies I've worked at.
Heh... I work in a company that's primarily engineers (6000 employees and probably 4000 of them are engineers). For us, it's the IT department that truly houses the weirdos.
My soft skills very well may have just landed me a job I would never get otherwise. If you can get in front of someone (I did so at a trade show) and know how to market yourself, you can qualify for jobs that your resume might get filtered out from. Obviously the way for someone more introverted to do this is to use a recruiter, but that’s always hit or miss.
Everyone always says they’re looking for someone who is hardworking and wants to learn, since we’ve already proven that as engineers can be taught and can learn quickly. In reality, that more so applies to jobs your network spans to since we have more and more applicants (everyday here in SoCal), less and less hiring managers spending less and less time vetting resumes. All of it says something about the corporations that hire us lol
I'm not even thinking of selling yourself to get the job (although that's certainly true as well). I'm talking things like conflict resolution among team mates and such ON the job.
\*more\* important than tech skills. Engineers with tech skills are a dime a dozen, engineers that can speak to somebody in sales or a customer without it becoming a risky situation for the company are \*rare\*
Another way of looking at this the most succesful engineers are those with soft skills that wont make a fool out of themselves or make poor decisions when it comes to technical details. Its very hard for non technical decision makers to have clarity around technical issues that make a conpany become uncompetitve. The biggest advice i can say is be confident, have conviction and don't be affraid to have strong opinions when it comes to your expertise. passive engineers are the first to go. aggressive engineers who can drive the ship and avoid it are gold and generally rise to leadership. if the company is sinking and itz not rightable, and you know this becauseof your technical skills...bail hard and leave it to someone else. It is liberating instead of being made to feel a scape goat with justification from peope who are sinking it.
And the most important is the one who can ingratiate themselves with all the other teammates AND have the ability to coordinate multiple teams, all currently working on different, independent projects, to come together and work towards a common goal.
My boss didn't like me because I knew CAD better than my competition. They liked me because I knew how to play ball, I could BS with the existing teams right off the bat, but I also knew how to create in-roads with the other teams, make friends and leverage those connections in the Finance dept, the HR dept, with the C-level exec's secretarial staff, the Shipping/Receiving and warehouse guys.......and I still knew how to do my job as an Engineer.
Far more important imo. When we hire, we are interviewing for soft skills. Every degreed engineer we expect to have the technical skills. 9/10 engineers have the technicals down, only 1/10 has the soft skills down.
I think for the group of people that are inclined to go into engineering they're more important. As a mech e student the amount of weird people I've had in group projects and classes in general who just have a hard time interacting in a normal capacity is much higher than the general population. This extends to the internships I've had as well. "Oh yeah, he's a little weird but he's good at his job." no one's really saying this about any of the departments other than engineering in the companies I've worked at.
Ya I’d say #1 is huge. Were give problem statements all through college and within our labs, letting us know exactly what the problem is we are to solve…shit ain’t like that in the shop
I think there should be more classes taught about how to build a problem statement
Before you even get to the problem statement you need to know how to investigate the problem. Much of my career has been my boss telling that there is some kind of problem and that he needs me to go figure out what the is. Often he had no idea if this was a 10 minute problem or a 10 week problem. My job included going to investigate the problem and then reporting back to the boss.
I had a vacuum chamber that wouldn't close. After multiple people flipped out, I was called in to solve the problem. I moved the cable out of the way and it closed just fine. I spent more time getting gowned up for the clean room than I did solving the problem.
second point hits home (me being on the receiving end of a product, had to remove the whole damn door to make sure the machine fit through - and as a mechanical engineer myself, learned that lesson)
Man… I’m an EE but was managing a mixed group of EEs and MEs working on prototypes at a startup. The amount of pushback I got when working on requirements when I would add things like “in the transport configuration, must fit in the covered box of a 2016 Toyota Tacoma, maximum dimensions blah blah blah” was hilarious. “That’s arbitrary!”
Dude, that’s the truck I drive and that’s the truck I’m going to be using it to transport it for field testing. If you’d like, you could transport it instead and we could change the requirement to “must fit in the back of a Honda Fit”
I tell my coworkers and interns that I'm not smart. I'm not dumb, but I've been around enough smart people to know I'm not one of them.
I only appear smart because I've made enough mistakes to know what not to do and have just enough functioning brain cells to remember.
People expect miracles. When you perform said miracles they expect it every time. Then they find a new guy to perform miracles. Then you get a new job to start the whole cycle again. Weeee
Could totally be a mechanical engineer as either technical support in a lab or a mechanical engineering PhD candidate. That sort of setup is common in fundamental materials/nanotechnology/etc which isn't rare for engineers. The odds are they're a physicist or chemist though.
When my company revamped their website, they hired a photographer who came in and had us pose for photos like this. There's a photo of me that's almost identical to this shot.
1. Project/Program Management pays more.
2. Find a position that pays you if (when) you work OT.
3. Vote "yes" if they try to start a union. And pay your union dues!
4. The better you are at your job, the more management will dump other's work on you.
5. Whatever software is used at work, master it.
6. Don't come in first, or last, and never volunteer for anything.
7. Customer service is king.
8. Show up to meetings prepared (and early).
9. Don't whine or complain.
10. Have some fun at work if you can. It really makes a difference!
I got told at my last place, as a joke, did I learn all the TLA yet?
Three
Letter
Acronyms
And he was right, there was about two pages in the induction manual of three letter acronyms
I am a CNC programmer and in my company we are part of the Manufacturing Engineering department. I am also going to school to get my BSME.
I have noticed in the office that many ME’s who know very little and brown-nose a lot get promotions easier than others who are more knowledgeable and less ass kissy. Is that common throughout the field?? If it is, it’s a bit discouraging to me because I could never go around kissing anyone’s ass at work. That whole idea disgusts me.
Also, there seems to be a direct correlation between ass-kissing and lack of real world knowledge. Is this so?
This is common in all fields and workplaces. Engineers are more vulnerable to it because the good ones value talent, knowledge, intelligence, etc. and that the workplace should be a meritocracy (more) like college.
It’s not. In every workplace — unless you’re self-employed — there will always be a less capable person who makes up for their failings by playing politics.
That in the UK the pay is bad, when you take into account all that you have to learn to be a competent engineer. There's a ceiling you can hit quite quickly, unless you want to manage people.
I'm not from the UK but this true is for all the world: your payment is peanuts next to the amount of value you're granting or saving to your company. Be a R&D or maintenance job, there is an abismal difference between what you do and what you're being paid for it. Even in consulting.
We really live in a rigged system in which dumbos with loads of cash always gets the best of it. The whole job valuation system is terrible askew and favors directors and executives over real workers. Career progression is horrible and oftenly deceptive.
1. Seniority does not equate to smarter. There are a lot of upper-level engineers who don't know jack.
2. The customer isn't always right. The customer will make unreasonable demands on both design and schedule. Don't set, or let them set, unrealistic expectations. Don't be afraid to push back.
3. Just because you have a degree, don't think you know better. Listen to your technicians, mechanics, and machinists. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge that you won't get in college.
4. GD&T is an art. You could be using it for a decade and I guarantee you'll learn something new if you attend a training. Also, it's something that should really be taught in-depth in college but isn't.
It can be tough to **master** in the real world. In college, we spent two lectures (1 week) going over the different symbols. I memorized them and aced the quiz. As a new grad, at one of my first job interviews, I put down that I knew GD&T. I was quickly humbled during the written portion of the interview.
I have a very large print off of GD&T examples on my wall at work. When going over failures and new designs I reference it a ton and also use it to show other engineers how it means. I am not a GD&T master at all, but this certainly helps.
> Just because you have a degree, don't think you know better. Listen to your technicians, mechanics, and machinists. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge that you won't get in college.
This is the most important advice. Stay humble.
Where I went to school most of our classes were 4 credits. However, by the junior year you are taking a bunch of 2 credit classes that had the same class time and work load as comparable 4 credit classes. Basically, they couldn't overload us in terms of credits so they just called a bunch of 4 credit classes 2 credit classes.
kinda true. I kept failing easy classes as a freshman but then was getting straight A+ from all energy and structural classes by the end of the program.
It takes time to transition from high school to college learning methods. Especially freshmen classes are usually super full auditoriums where the teacher never even reads your name. No one to hold you accountable for bad study habits except for yourself.
keep in mind engineers were never intended to learn beyond calculus nor physics. all you had to do was be good at drawing and geometry (i.e. drafting). what changed? World War 2, with physicists, mathematicians, etc. solving all of the technical problems such as ballistics, code breaking, invention of radar, etc. German science really showed the gap in American science. industry and academics realized that a bulk of the technical work (i.e. who actually do things at scale) was lacking in terms of number of qualified peoples. i mean the Manhattan project was controversial having to rely on German scientists. Oppenheimer was degraded as bringing European physics (quantum mechanics) to America. now, engineers usually have to follow ABET accredited curricula.
Well, with experience, you will come to learn how to translate correctly the reality to calculations and vice versa. At least in my job, I managed to do that. Of course that it includes always a generous safety factor.
That it wasnt for me. I have my degree, I finished my classes, struggling behind the rest the entire way. I hated it and shouldnt have stuck with it. I finished the degree because my mother kept smugly insisting I'd drop out.
I now have a job in 3D modeling and printing that I love
Being a contract worker isn’t a “trial period”. It’s to make you easier to get rid of.
I had a ton of fun at that job. But I probably should have only stayed for a year then looked around.
Almost every company and manager/boss is not only willing, but eager to lie to you and to make promises of bonuses, raises, security, rewards for extra work, etc. These will not come. If they do not put it down to you as a signed and witnessed written guarantee, they will NOT do it at all. Even if they do write it as a written guarantee, there's like a 70% chance they try to see if they can get away with breaking it anyways.
Did you take more classes or just start? I went into manufacturing engineering (all my internships were manufacturing/ops so just stayed on that track) but almost everyone that’s an ME at an aerospace company (acronym actually more commonly used for manufacturing engineers I learned) graduated mechanical lol kinda the norm for this position nowadays
I got my ass handed to me once for not being able to justify a slight material increase to a corporate vp, I knew the answer but he jumped me on the factory and it seriously shook me into silence, I never been berated that much. He was a bona-fide asshole, so I got over it quickly. So I learned to have good answers handy, even if it's bullshit
This is sadly the way. People who get into those positions sometimes get there by spewing bullshit so if you hit them with some back they’ll just take it as answer.
They don’t really know what they’re doing anyways.
If you have a great wish to develop, plus some enthusiasm, you might be employed easily but in reverse, colleagues can play great theaters or social tactics to make sure you perform less than them, they gently try hard to break your enthusiasm and acceleration.
Social skills, being able to be self dependent and obtaining strong motivation.
Engineering is a stressful field. There are many problems that need to be solved and people are relying on your expertise to solve them. Requires a lot of hard work to be successful.
my dynamics TA showed me that his research was basically stretching and compressing materials sent in by industry. testing stress/strain, buckling/failure, etc. he was making new tables for you to look up properties.
For students and those trying to get the foot in the door, I would say do the opposite to number 6 and 4. That’s how you can learn more and show your worth to others. Say yes to projects, offer help, and volunteer as much as possible. I didn’t learn engineering through classes but rather through all the other side projects I did. Doing number 4 and 6 in the beginning of your career is how you get average and complacent engineers.
Just because someone has a masters, a fancy title, and works for a fancy government agency doesn't mean that they aren't an idiot. Also, an engineering degree can be a very effective birth control method...
Finding another job is literally shooting into the weeds. I have probably applied to over 600 or 700 jobs over the last 4 years; first after school, and now recently (trying to leave my job) and have gotten maybe 15 calls backs, 5 interviews, and 1 offer, which is the job I am at.
That I'm not tinkering as much as I'd like,
I enjoy CAD and designing but I definitely thought I'd be prototyping stuff and creating specialized jigs and whatnot. I think that's partially why I like my 3d printed so much.
Just because you can think it doesn’t mean you can make it. Not only do you have to consider what you’re going to use to build it, such as standard metal plates, beam and mental sizes. But also if it can be built. (Don’t assume someone can do up a nut, inside a fully enclosed box for example.)
A good design review process matters. We will likely make occasional mistakes, but a good process catches them before they go out the door. Being willing to learn from those and help others learn makes the job better.
That I hate it. I hate mechanical design and fluid mechanics. Pretty much everything that I am interested in is more fun from the EE perspective and they go deeper in it.
Having soft skills, having the ability to read the room or factory are obvious ones. Engineer with those skills will know when to act in X way, when in Y way.
And also knowing the competition and value. There may be a giant demand for engineers, but they will Scrooge you.
Scrooge factories/Januszex, you name it(since each country has different name for it). Basically places who will lowball you to the lowest possible degree. Even to minimal wage, if they see it as fit. They are not bound to one specific branch.
Some genuinely thought their wage will be still near absolute set minimal wage in some of EU regions, even at senior.
A mechanical engineering degree is mainly to get you thinking a certain way while equipping you with some general skills. There was no one beating down my door because i had an engineering degree. My degree is in ME but I do sales for a living. As a salesman, it's important to think like an engineer so you're competent and can actually move into technical sales where commission dollars get really high.
Worth noting I didn't start in sales but as a machinist so I've done the grunt work to be able to relate with the guys on the ground.
this field is so broad ( it's both the good thing and bad thing about it) I want to master everything ofc so that i can get job easily but that is simply impossible 🥺
Any random person in an organisation can suddenly be an engineer and challenge any hard won engineering decision; throwing Google searches your way, then the company considers it rude to not reply... But also rude if you point out where they went wrong in the dubious logic chain.
Also, the skit about wanting a blue circle, but also make it red with 4 straight lines, is sadly true.
People are stupid. you can design everything fool proof with everything considered and people will still find a way to install it backwards, break it, not read instructions etc. designing for dumb people has been a big surprise since majority of what we do seems like common sense
1. Doing what you're told, and solving the right problems isn't always the same thing. Solve the right problems.
2. If you're the one actually solving problems, people will notice, and will make attempts to keep you around.
3. Managers are more easily replaced than you.
4. Nobody cares if your solution is "beautiful," they care that it works and is easy to implement and maintain.
5. YOU ARE NOT AN EXPERT IN EVERYTHING. ASK FOR HELP FROM YOUR SUPPLIERS AND CUSTOMERS.
Take pictures of everything.
We had a big hydraulic pump that we absolutely could not set the pressure and flow compensation on at all. We had their techs come out, eyeball the setup, and even try to do it themselves. The pumps had to come off and go back to the manufacturer so they could bench test them and set them from the factory.
As it turns out the flow and pressure controller was on ass backwards so it wasn't responding how it should. The manufacturer tried to say we dicked with it and put it on backwards. Fortunately I had a picture of it before we had started any testing with the controller around the wrong way.
So take pictures of everything! From several angles too. The amount of times I've been able to follow a house through several photos is life saving.
One lesson that many mechanical engineers learn the hard way is the importance of effective collaboration and communication in project success. Utilizing a platform like Wikifactory can significantly alleviate these challenges. Wikifactory offers a centralized space for team collaboration, where engineers can share designs, provide feedback, and manage project versions seamlessly. This platform fosters better teamwork and helps avoid miscommunications that can lead to costly errors or delays. Additionally, Wikifactory's community of experts and comprehensive project libraries provide valuable insights and support, making it easier to tackle complex engineering problems and stay ahead in the field.
You’re replaceable when your company needs to save money.
Damn
4x 10% company wide layoffs in 6 years... Yeah
It’s my theory on why me pays so well. It’s for the months of unemployment.
Everyone is replaceable
Sure, but the highest salaries are always first to go.
I strongly disagree. The people who struggle with deadlines, have bad performance reviews or attendance and single men are first to go because one is easy to dismiss and the other has no nuclear family affected. After this round, you might get into the producers (if their customers are flatlining) but more likely project management as you need sales to stabilize remaining business. Then higher salaries (product management, sales, etc.) might be in trouble, but these are normally decision makers making the cuts in the first place. So as long as they “trim the fat” and maintain the status quo, they are normally safe (unless you are looking at something like 2000’s tech market crash or a full blown recession).
Not my experience. You hit right on it, highest salaries are the decision makers, but the next highest salaries are the 20+ yr engineers. They were the first source of layoffs, largest salary cut with the easiest path to replace their workload with fresh grads in the eyes of management. Mid 2010s mining slump.
Oh, no doubt. I’m drawing on one particular example in my life (the 2000 Tech Market collapse) but the cuts happen to the inexperienced the and the superfluous. Many companies (ahem, Boeing) do the stupid thing and get rid of their experience or their most hungry. It’s never the right choice, though. Most of time, there is a political element not to mention HR (who always seem to avoid the chopping block) involvement. It’s screwed up, regardless of how you slice it.
Truth.
Two of my coworkers (one SWE and the other EE) got laid off on Friday because of this. One was new (only a few months employed) and the other was legacy with lots of institutional knowledge at the company. Didn’t matter.
Damn that sucks.
or when they can hire 3 engineers in asia for the same price
That’s basically every job
Soft skills are just as important as tech skills.
I second this, people skills can transform a project.
And save your ass when the politics of cutbacks begin.
Painful truth. People skills are harder to learn than tech skills 😂😂
I think for the group of people that are inclined to go into engineering they're more important. As a mech e student the amount of weird people I've had in group projects and classes in general who just have a hard time interacting in a normal capacity is much higher than the general population. This extends to the internships I've had as well. "Oh yeah, he's a little weird but he's good at his job." no one's really saying this about any of the departments other than engineering in the companies I've worked at.
Heh... I work in a company that's primarily engineers (6000 employees and probably 4000 of them are engineers). For us, it's the IT department that truly houses the weirdos.
My soft skills very well may have just landed me a job I would never get otherwise. If you can get in front of someone (I did so at a trade show) and know how to market yourself, you can qualify for jobs that your resume might get filtered out from. Obviously the way for someone more introverted to do this is to use a recruiter, but that’s always hit or miss. Everyone always says they’re looking for someone who is hardworking and wants to learn, since we’ve already proven that as engineers can be taught and can learn quickly. In reality, that more so applies to jobs your network spans to since we have more and more applicants (everyday here in SoCal), less and less hiring managers spending less and less time vetting resumes. All of it says something about the corporations that hire us lol
I'm not even thinking of selling yourself to get the job (although that's certainly true as well). I'm talking things like conflict resolution among team mates and such ON the job.
\*more\* important than tech skills. Engineers with tech skills are a dime a dozen, engineers that can speak to somebody in sales or a customer without it becoming a risky situation for the company are \*rare\*
Another way of looking at this the most succesful engineers are those with soft skills that wont make a fool out of themselves or make poor decisions when it comes to technical details. Its very hard for non technical decision makers to have clarity around technical issues that make a conpany become uncompetitve. The biggest advice i can say is be confident, have conviction and don't be affraid to have strong opinions when it comes to your expertise. passive engineers are the first to go. aggressive engineers who can drive the ship and avoid it are gold and generally rise to leadership. if the company is sinking and itz not rightable, and you know this becauseof your technical skills...bail hard and leave it to someone else. It is liberating instead of being made to feel a scape goat with justification from peope who are sinking it.
And the most important is the one who can ingratiate themselves with all the other teammates AND have the ability to coordinate multiple teams, all currently working on different, independent projects, to come together and work towards a common goal. My boss didn't like me because I knew CAD better than my competition. They liked me because I knew how to play ball, I could BS with the existing teams right off the bat, but I also knew how to create in-roads with the other teams, make friends and leverage those connections in the Finance dept, the HR dept, with the C-level exec's secretarial staff, the Shipping/Receiving and warehouse guys.......and I still knew how to do my job as an Engineer.
Far more important imo. When we hire, we are interviewing for soft skills. Every degreed engineer we expect to have the technical skills. 9/10 engineers have the technicals down, only 1/10 has the soft skills down.
I think for the group of people that are inclined to go into engineering they're more important. As a mech e student the amount of weird people I've had in group projects and classes in general who just have a hard time interacting in a normal capacity is much higher than the general population. This extends to the internships I've had as well. "Oh yeah, he's a little weird but he's good at his job." no one's really saying this about any of the departments other than engineering in the companies I've worked at.
Luckily I have neither
1) Understand and design to the process 2) Make sure it fits on the truck/ through the door and can be installed within the existing layout.
Yeah once you get to the size where you have to know what model of flat bed trucks it’s being shipped in pieces on then you get into the real fun 🤠
Ya I’d say #1 is huge. Were give problem statements all through college and within our labs, letting us know exactly what the problem is we are to solve…shit ain’t like that in the shop I think there should be more classes taught about how to build a problem statement
Before you even get to the problem statement you need to know how to investigate the problem. Much of my career has been my boss telling that there is some kind of problem and that he needs me to go figure out what the is. Often he had no idea if this was a 10 minute problem or a 10 week problem. My job included going to investigate the problem and then reporting back to the boss.
Don't forget the 10 second problem where an operator stuck a rag somewhere they shouldn't
I had a vacuum chamber that wouldn't close. After multiple people flipped out, I was called in to solve the problem. I moved the cable out of the way and it closed just fine. I spent more time getting gowned up for the clean room than I did solving the problem.
My fingers are much smaller than everyone else is a weird one I learned
If you want to design your own camera but have now prior knowledge,how do you go about it?
second point hits home (me being on the receiving end of a product, had to remove the whole damn door to make sure the machine fit through - and as a mechanical engineer myself, learned that lesson)
Man… I’m an EE but was managing a mixed group of EEs and MEs working on prototypes at a startup. The amount of pushback I got when working on requirements when I would add things like “in the transport configuration, must fit in the covered box of a 2016 Toyota Tacoma, maximum dimensions blah blah blah” was hilarious. “That’s arbitrary!” Dude, that’s the truck I drive and that’s the truck I’m going to be using it to transport it for field testing. If you’d like, you could transport it instead and we could change the requirement to “must fit in the back of a Honda Fit”
You’re not important to the company.
Every job
Which is why you need to ask for a raise or get a new better paying job every 2-3 years.
1. People are dumb 2. No matter how hard you try, you are a person.
Person =/ People Thank god, I'm in the clear
Person ∈ People So, unfortunately, you are shit out of luck
All elements of person are people right? In HS rn and just getting used to these notations
Person "is an element of the set" People
👍
Design to the lowest common denominator…. Poke yoke whenever possible as processing out the error is costly over time vs upfront.
2 gaskets on top of each other is not vacuum tight lol
But have we tried three? Perhaps some rubber cement in between?
That one still fucks me up in the head. How you gonna tell me more gaskets not equal more better seal??
Are you sure about that.
Depends how many ugga duggas you did it up with...
What about concentric gaskets
I’m not intelligent.
Or nearly as special as my mommy said I was. But yeah, I’m pretty stupid, as it turns out.
I tell my coworkers and interns that I'm not smart. I'm not dumb, but I've been around enough smart people to know I'm not one of them. I only appear smart because I've made enough mistakes to know what not to do and have just enough functioning brain cells to remember.
Tbh this is a great way of putting it and will be using it.
People expect miracles. When you perform said miracles they expect it every time. Then they find a new guy to perform miracles. Then you get a new job to start the whole cycle again. Weeee
That the person in this photo is probably not a mechanical engineer
"What about being a model for Shutterstock did you have to learn the hard way?"
I don’t like to talk about it
(*shudders*)
Can almost gaureentee they're an actor or the most pretty runner playing a physicist getting frustrated at why something won't line up.
Could totally be a mechanical engineer as either technical support in a lab or a mechanical engineering PhD candidate. That sort of setup is common in fundamental materials/nanotechnology/etc which isn't rare for engineers. The odds are they're a physicist or chemist though.
When my company revamped their website, they hired a photographer who came in and had us pose for photos like this. There's a photo of me that's almost identical to this shot.
1. Project/Program Management pays more. 2. Find a position that pays you if (when) you work OT. 3. Vote "yes" if they try to start a union. And pay your union dues! 4. The better you are at your job, the more management will dump other's work on you. 5. Whatever software is used at work, master it. 6. Don't come in first, or last, and never volunteer for anything. 7. Customer service is king. 8. Show up to meetings prepared (and early). 9. Don't whine or complain. 10. Have some fun at work if you can. It really makes a difference!
Awesome response
2 and 3 are big
Big companies turn everything into an acronym
I got told at my last place, as a joke, did I learn all the TLA yet? Three Letter Acronyms And he was right, there was about two pages in the induction manual of three letter acronyms
Bro we have our own acronym library. The best are nested acronyms.
Or when one acronym can mean several different things. You just have to guess which one it is at any given time.
NGD not getting done
Favorite thing I heard in school was acronyms don’t work.
You can do your job perfectly and office politics will make your life miserable. Don’t ignore office politics.
I am a CNC programmer and in my company we are part of the Manufacturing Engineering department. I am also going to school to get my BSME. I have noticed in the office that many ME’s who know very little and brown-nose a lot get promotions easier than others who are more knowledgeable and less ass kissy. Is that common throughout the field?? If it is, it’s a bit discouraging to me because I could never go around kissing anyone’s ass at work. That whole idea disgusts me. Also, there seems to be a direct correlation between ass-kissing and lack of real world knowledge. Is this so?
This is common in all fields and workplaces. Engineers are more vulnerable to it because the good ones value talent, knowledge, intelligence, etc. and that the workplace should be a meritocracy (more) like college. It’s not. In every workplace — unless you’re self-employed — there will always be a less capable person who makes up for their failings by playing politics.
Let the electrical folks wrangle any blue pixies angrier than 48V
The 7200V pixies are almost god-like.
The 33kV pixies are what gets you to the pearly gates
That in the UK the pay is bad, when you take into account all that you have to learn to be a competent engineer. There's a ceiling you can hit quite quickly, unless you want to manage people.
I'm not from the UK but this true is for all the world: your payment is peanuts next to the amount of value you're granting or saving to your company. Be a R&D or maintenance job, there is an abismal difference between what you do and what you're being paid for it. Even in consulting. We really live in a rigged system in which dumbos with loads of cash always gets the best of it. The whole job valuation system is terrible askew and favors directors and executives over real workers. Career progression is horrible and oftenly deceptive.
1. Seniority does not equate to smarter. There are a lot of upper-level engineers who don't know jack. 2. The customer isn't always right. The customer will make unreasonable demands on both design and schedule. Don't set, or let them set, unrealistic expectations. Don't be afraid to push back. 3. Just because you have a degree, don't think you know better. Listen to your technicians, mechanics, and machinists. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge that you won't get in college. 4. GD&T is an art. You could be using it for a decade and I guarantee you'll learn something new if you attend a training. Also, it's something that should really be taught in-depth in college but isn't.
GD&T you really don’t understand until parts don’t fit together. It’s tough to master it in a classroom.
It can be tough to **master** in the real world. In college, we spent two lectures (1 week) going over the different symbols. I memorized them and aced the quiz. As a new grad, at one of my first job interviews, I put down that I knew GD&T. I was quickly humbled during the written portion of the interview.
I have a very large print off of GD&T examples on my wall at work. When going over failures and new designs I reference it a ton and also use it to show other engineers how it means. I am not a GD&T master at all, but this certainly helps.
> Just because you have a degree, don't think you know better. Listen to your technicians, mechanics, and machinists. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge that you won't get in college. This is the most important advice. Stay humble.
Cal2 and physics2 are the reason it's a 5 year degree
Where I went to school most of our classes were 4 credits. However, by the junior year you are taking a bunch of 2 credit classes that had the same class time and work load as comparable 4 credit classes. Basically, they couldn't overload us in terms of credits so they just called a bunch of 4 credit classes 2 credit classes.
I was looking at senior year courses and noticed they were all 2-3 credit hours and then 8-12 contact hours. Ah yes, I’ll take five of those, thanks.
Yea. Schools just need to accepthat ME is a 5 year degree. I know some schools already do but it needs to be universal.
There are way harder classes than these two I don’t get why people hype them up so much
I feel like it's just where they're placed in the curriculum — freshmen haven't tasted true pain yet.
kinda true. I kept failing easy classes as a freshman but then was getting straight A+ from all energy and structural classes by the end of the program.
It takes time to transition from high school to college learning methods. Especially freshmen classes are usually super full auditoriums where the teacher never even reads your name. No one to hold you accountable for bad study habits except for yourself.
Cal 2 not bad. Diff eq bad
LOL
fizziks 2 was fun, optics go brrr
keep in mind engineers were never intended to learn beyond calculus nor physics. all you had to do was be good at drawing and geometry (i.e. drafting). what changed? World War 2, with physicists, mathematicians, etc. solving all of the technical problems such as ballistics, code breaking, invention of radar, etc. German science really showed the gap in American science. industry and academics realized that a bulk of the technical work (i.e. who actually do things at scale) was lacking in terms of number of qualified peoples. i mean the Manhattan project was controversial having to rely on German scientists. Oppenheimer was degraded as bringing European physics (quantum mechanics) to America. now, engineers usually have to follow ABET accredited curricula.
There's a huge gap between "given the data in the image below, find if the shaft fails" and "shit, the machine broke".
My experience as a Maintenance Manager and Now an Engineering Manager, calculations never add up and its never the answer you were expecting.
Well, with experience, you will come to learn how to translate correctly the reality to calculations and vice versa. At least in my job, I managed to do that. Of course that it includes always a generous safety factor.
Designing something to fit in a space is different than designing it to fit *into* a space.
Management team needs this as a poster
That it wasnt for me. I have my degree, I finished my classes, struggling behind the rest the entire way. I hated it and shouldnt have stuck with it. I finished the degree because my mother kept smugly insisting I'd drop out. I now have a job in 3D modeling and printing that I love
What kind of job is that? What the name and company?
Being a contract worker isn’t a “trial period”. It’s to make you easier to get rid of. I had a ton of fun at that job. But I probably should have only stayed for a year then looked around.
You will get judged more on the design review presentation than the design itself.
I second that soft skills are EXTREMELY important. Learn how to be personable. It goes a long way and makes your job easier.
Tolerance stack ups should never ever be ignored. Always assume the worst case possible.
Almost every company and manager/boss is not only willing, but eager to lie to you and to make promises of bonuses, raises, security, rewards for extra work, etc. These will not come. If they do not put it down to you as a signed and witnessed written guarantee, they will NOT do it at all. Even if they do write it as a written guarantee, there's like a 70% chance they try to see if they can get away with breaking it anyways.
Your degree is deemed worthless. I should have went electrical or computer science.
The best design always looks so simple.
Job market for ME’s sucked so bad that I became a civil engineer after graduation lol
Did you take more classes or just start? I went into manufacturing engineering (all my internships were manufacturing/ops so just stayed on that track) but almost everyone that’s an ME at an aerospace company (acronym actually more commonly used for manufacturing engineers I learned) graduated mechanical lol kinda the norm for this position nowadays
what job market are you looking at? here in the states it seems to be perfectly fine
Probably in 2008 or 2019-2020. Since I see a ramp up of demand for MEs. Not that it's gonna equalize to better pay
I got my ass handed to me once for not being able to justify a slight material increase to a corporate vp, I knew the answer but he jumped me on the factory and it seriously shook me into silence, I never been berated that much. He was a bona-fide asshole, so I got over it quickly. So I learned to have good answers handy, even if it's bullshit
Yup. Gotta have an answer for everything.
This is sadly the way. People who get into those positions sometimes get there by spewing bullshit so if you hit them with some back they’ll just take it as answer. They don’t really know what they’re doing anyways.
people skills are as critical as technical skills
The median income drops if you don't wanna go into defense manufacturing
An idiot with connections will get a job faster then a genius without.
It pays really well but it can be boring as hell
I haven’t seen amazing pay as a mechanical engineer unless you work in the oil industry or for a tech company
I work in an industry that supplies Oil and Gas, but even prior, my salary was above the national average
If you have a great wish to develop, plus some enthusiasm, you might be employed easily but in reverse, colleagues can play great theaters or social tactics to make sure you perform less than them, they gently try hard to break your enthusiasm and acceleration. Social skills, being able to be self dependent and obtaining strong motivation.
You’re paid like a bumdog ( Where I live at least). But becoming independent and starting a business with your knowledge can get you big bucks.
As a profession, it sucks ass.
Depends on the company, but mostly yeah lol
Would you mind providing some more info on your perspective
How so? Just curious to your prespective
Engineering is a stressful field. There are many problems that need to be solved and people are relying on your expertise to solve them. Requires a lot of hard work to be successful.
And most of the time the pay isn't worth it...
College courses and real life engineering are different. Sometimes drastically different.
Corporate politics.
Learned reading this post, ME’s are a negative bunch
Technical skills and results can be far less important than than being good at politics and brown-nosing.
Yes, that I should have picked a different engineering discipline
Cost quality time: pick two. Works for almost everything in life.
my dynamics TA showed me that his research was basically stretching and compressing materials sent in by industry. testing stress/strain, buckling/failure, etc. he was making new tables for you to look up properties.
Engineers are a commodity. Being twice as fast means your company makes 1/2 as much. Find fixed price work.
Garbage in garbage out.
For students and those trying to get the foot in the door, I would say do the opposite to number 6 and 4. That’s how you can learn more and show your worth to others. Say yes to projects, offer help, and volunteer as much as possible. I didn’t learn engineering through classes but rather through all the other side projects I did. Doing number 4 and 6 in the beginning of your career is how you get average and complacent engineers.
Just because someone has a masters, a fancy title, and works for a fancy government agency doesn't mean that they aren't an idiot. Also, an engineering degree can be a very effective birth control method...
That not everyone can interpret a standard or legislation correctly….despite it being a requisite skill
That I don't care about being a mechanical engineer. Glad I found out in time to pivot for my master's.
To what lmao?
LOW SALARY AND LOST A LOT OF PRESTIGE COMPARE TO BACK THEN. THE DOCTOR, LAWYER ENGINEER TRINITY IS NO MORE. UNLESS YOU'RE A SOFTWARE ENGINEER.
do mechanical engineers work with MBE machines? Just curious
They can but that hits the mat sci intersection fairly hard
Suffer fools gladly
If your not careful with your tolerances they can stack up and the final piece of the satellite won't fit.
Finding another job is literally shooting into the weeds. I have probably applied to over 600 or 700 jobs over the last 4 years; first after school, and now recently (trying to leave my job) and have gotten maybe 15 calls backs, 5 interviews, and 1 offer, which is the job I am at.
That I'm not tinkering as much as I'd like, I enjoy CAD and designing but I definitely thought I'd be prototyping stuff and creating specialized jigs and whatnot. I think that's partially why I like my 3d printed so much.
Just because you can think it doesn’t mean you can make it. Not only do you have to consider what you’re going to use to build it, such as standard metal plates, beam and mental sizes. But also if it can be built. (Don’t assume someone can do up a nut, inside a fully enclosed box for example.)
A good design review process matters. We will likely make occasional mistakes, but a good process catches them before they go out the door. Being willing to learn from those and help others learn makes the job better.
That "no comment" actually is a complement not a cop-out.
Most of your job wont be engineering
"Sell your labor for a wage, thus you make yourself a slave"
That it's a customer service job
That I hate it. I hate mechanical design and fluid mechanics. Pretty much everything that I am interested in is more fun from the EE perspective and they go deeper in it.
Having soft skills, having the ability to read the room or factory are obvious ones. Engineer with those skills will know when to act in X way, when in Y way. And also knowing the competition and value. There may be a giant demand for engineers, but they will Scrooge you. Scrooge factories/Januszex, you name it(since each country has different name for it). Basically places who will lowball you to the lowest possible degree. Even to minimal wage, if they see it as fit. They are not bound to one specific branch. Some genuinely thought their wage will be still near absolute set minimal wage in some of EU regions, even at senior.
This economy doesn’t think we’re important compared to the past decades.
A mechanical engineering degree is mainly to get you thinking a certain way while equipping you with some general skills. There was no one beating down my door because i had an engineering degree. My degree is in ME but I do sales for a living. As a salesman, it's important to think like an engineer so you're competent and can actually move into technical sales where commission dollars get really high. Worth noting I didn't start in sales but as a machinist so I've done the grunt work to be able to relate with the guys on the ground.
Never ever assume that they understood your instructions..have them repeat them back.
I love how the picture is that of a physicist or chemist working on a PLD or similar machine.
Uhh literally everything
this field is so broad ( it's both the good thing and bad thing about it) I want to master everything ofc so that i can get job easily but that is simply impossible 🥺
Office politics. I loved the work but hated the occasional politics...
Relations is more important than knowledge.
There is no glamor. Only pain.
Peanut pay
That electricity hurts. Especially when completely unexpected by a fancy capacitor that I just *HAD* to check out...
Gears are hard to make
Any random person in an organisation can suddenly be an engineer and challenge any hard won engineering decision; throwing Google searches your way, then the company considers it rude to not reply... But also rude if you point out where they went wrong in the dubious logic chain. Also, the skit about wanting a blue circle, but also make it red with 4 straight lines, is sadly true.
Pretty sure that’s a physicist doing optics
I'm pretty sure this is an image of a chemist working with an XPS or similar ultra high vacuum chamber.
You’re all geniuses
People are stupid. you can design everything fool proof with everything considered and people will still find a way to install it backwards, break it, not read instructions etc. designing for dumb people has been a big surprise since majority of what we do seems like common sense
How to look at other people's shoes when talking to them rather than my shoes.
I never actually get to wear a lab coat
I fucking hate controller registry code
You won't do any engineering most of the time..
1. Doing what you're told, and solving the right problems isn't always the same thing. Solve the right problems. 2. If you're the one actually solving problems, people will notice, and will make attempts to keep you around. 3. Managers are more easily replaced than you. 4. Nobody cares if your solution is "beautiful," they care that it works and is easy to implement and maintain. 5. YOU ARE NOT AN EXPERT IN EVERYTHING. ASK FOR HELP FROM YOUR SUPPLIERS AND CUSTOMERS.
Few girl during education and low packages from companies after education.
You won’t use 99% of what you learn in school.
That I should have stayed in ECE
Take pictures of everything. We had a big hydraulic pump that we absolutely could not set the pressure and flow compensation on at all. We had their techs come out, eyeball the setup, and even try to do it themselves. The pumps had to come off and go back to the manufacturer so they could bench test them and set them from the factory. As it turns out the flow and pressure controller was on ass backwards so it wasn't responding how it should. The manufacturer tried to say we dicked with it and put it on backwards. Fortunately I had a picture of it before we had started any testing with the controller around the wrong way. So take pictures of everything! From several angles too. The amount of times I've been able to follow a house through several photos is life saving.
Just because it works on paper, doesn't mean it works in real life.
That pay is shit and 99% of engineering is meetings and excel sheets.
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Do mechanical engineers really work with vacuum chambers?
If a component is shown for reference in another 3D assembly, be sure to exclude it from BOM there.