Reason #45: Temp-to-Hire’s Permanent Maybe

This is another common enemy of the mechanical engineer. Like the MET, it doesn’t look like a threat at first. It sounds helpful, even promising, a bridge to stability, a “foot in the door.” But once you’re on it, you realize Temp-to-Perm (AKA Temp-to-Hire) was built to move, not to hold.

You sign on for three months with the promise of six, maybe twelve, and then “conversion.” The badge is gray, the laptop is borrowed, and your email starts with a number. Everyone says this is how companies hire now. In mechanical engineering, they’re right. Contract staffing follows ME’s boom-and-bust cadence, so labs add hands for DV/PV sprints and unwind them just as fast. See Reason #15 and Reason #33.

The pitch sounds reasonable. Try before you buy. If the fit is good and budgets hold, they’ll make it permanent. What you live instead is an audition with moving criteria. You catch ECO cleanup because you can start tomorrow. You cover the off-shift because you’re “flexible.” The gate you keep alive is one you don’t own. Industry coverage has said the quiet part aloud: ME is particularly well suited to contract placements because projects surge and recede (Puente, 2023). Meanwhile, the staffing channel is massive, with 12.7 million temporary and contract workers placed in 2023 and penetration rates that employers watch like a weather report (American Staffing Association, 2024, 2025).

At-will employment already lets either side walk. So what is the employee’s benefit in temp-to-hire? Speed, maybe. Access, sometimes. Protection, not really. “Contract workers are usually not eligible for paid time off, health insurance, retirement accounts or other benefits that full-time employees receive.” HR guidance repeats versions of this because temporary and part-time staff often fall outside core benefit eligibility, and independent contractors lack many statutory protections altogether (Symplicity, n.d.; SHRM, 2023; U.S. DOL, 2024). You can buy your own coverage. That is the point.

Then the back end bites you. References and verifications run through a third-party agency with a name no background vendor recognizes. Your proof of work lives in disabled portals. You ask the agency for a letter and get a help-desk ticket. The client manager is happy to vouch for scope, but HR wants dates from whoever issued the W-2. You discover that the paperwork version of you is as contingent as the job.

Temp-to-perm can land. People convert. But the risk sits squarely on your side of the table. If the product hits its window, someone will pencil you in. If it slips, you slip out, and the audition resets at the next turnstile. The market calls that flexibility. You will call it expensive.

References:

American Staffing Association. (2024, Mar. 21). Staffing employment fell in 2023. https://americanstaffing.net/posts/2024/03/21/staffing-employment-fell-in-2023/

American Staffing Association. (2025). BLS monthly employment situation: Temporary help penetration rate. https://americanstaffing.net/research/asa-data-dashboard/bls-employment-situation/

Puente, J. (2023, Dec. 21). Contract staffing is popular, but has its downsides. ASME. https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/contract-staffing-is-popular%2C-but-has-its-downsides

Symplicity. (n.d.). Employment laws for part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers. https://www.symplicity.com/employers/campus-recruiting/resources/employment-laws-for-part-time-temporary-and-seasonal-workers

U.S. Department of Labor. (2024). Fact Sheet #13: Employment relationship under the FLSA. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/13-flsa-employment-relationship

SHRM. (2023, Apr. 12). Full-time to part-time: Educate employees about ramifications for benefits and compensation. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/employment-law-compliance/full-time-to-part-time-educate-employees-ramifications-benefits-compensation

Reason #44: Worse Than the Job Is No Job

You think it cannot get more demoralizing than being a mechanical engineer in today’s market. It can. Being a mechanical engineer without a mechanical engineering job is worse. The degree isn’t just a line on your résumé after six stretched years; it becomes your name tag. Then one day you are “unemployed engineer,” which reads like a punchline even to you. Oversupply did not just bruise your offers (see Reason #34). It erased your introduction.

The identity problem arrives first (see Reason #15). You trained to be the person who knows how things are made, and now you’re the person explaining a gap. Hiring managers do not hear “market correction.” They hear “why couldn’t you stick.” ME is supposed to be the broad degree that goes anywhere, except most elsewhere wants direct experience doing that elsewhere. Your portfolio is locked behind NDAs and disabled logins, so you can’t show the one fixture you nailed or the one system you debugged at 2 a.m. Software applicants ship demos; you redact filenames.

Then come the filters. HR sorts by last-title match and present-tense employment. Recruiters “circle back” when your last drawing release is older than their requisition. Meanwhile you are told to “keep skills sharp,” as if FEA seats grow on trees and chamber time is free. You chase contract gigs that only count if you already have them. Your old team forwards your “open to work” post with a sad emoji. The inbox fills with technician roles at your old pay minus benefits (see Reason #10).

The pivot stories sound inspirational until you live the part where you are junior again. Product manager interviews want customer wins you were never allowed to own. Manufacturing wants TPS playbooks that died when your plant moved. Sales wants accounts. Even the “adjacent” jobs quietly prize people who never were you. You will work harder to explain what an ME can do in their world than you ever worked to pass fluids (see Reason #8).

This is the quiet truth: the market can reduce a broad, proud credential to an awkward sentence you rehearse before every call. The work was invisible when you had it. And, it is invisible now that you don’t. 

Reason #43: 8:1 at Work, 5:1 at School

Start with the math. In mechanical engineering, women earn about 17.9% of bachelor’s degrees. That is roughly 5:1 men to women (American Society for Engineering Education [ASEE], 2024). 

It does not balance after graduation. In the U.S. workforce, women are 11.4% of employed mechanical engineers, which is about 7.8:1. Call it 8:1 if you like (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], 2025). Compared with the usual suspects, ME is near the bottom. Among branches with published workforce shares, only aerospace is lower. Electrical sits a bit higher. Civil and chemical are higher still. Industrial is higher again (BLS, 2025).

Those ratios matter when you are young and building your life. College and the first few years of entry-level work are where most people form friend groups, meet partners, and find early mentors. In ME the pool is skewed before you show up, and it narrows as you move through labs, clubs, and late projects. The social world that rides along with your major has fewer mixed-gender spaces and fewer same-gender peers for women in particular. The long hours do not help.

If you are a man, you will spend four to six years (see Reason #2) in rooms that feel like a sausage fest, then step into offices that feel the same. If you are a woman, you will look for same-gender classmates to team with and for mentors who look like you, and find fewer. That is not a single bad course or a single bad shop. It is the standard mix for this field in this country, repeated each fall when the next cohort arrives with the same ratios (ASEE, 2024; BLS, 2025).

You can build a career here. Many do. The shape of your days will still reflect the headcount. Fewer options for who to study with, fewer options for who to ask hard questions after a design review, fewer informal networks where people pull each other along. That is not neutral background. It is the water you swim in.

Eight to one is not a community. It is a headcount. 

References

American Society for Engineering Education. (2024, October 27). Engineering & Engineering Technology by the Numbers, 2023. https://ira.asee.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Engineering-Engineering-Technology-By-the-Numbers-2023-27-October-2024.pdf

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, January 29). Table 11. Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity (2024 annual averages). https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

Reason #42: Meetings, Not Machines

You picture torque curves and heat sinks. You get calendars and portals. Most days in mechanical engineering, the work that moves is the work you schedule, summarize, route, and sign. Slides go out, trackers go green, and the machine is a rumor you visit between standups, (see Reason #9). 

The cadence is administrative by design. You inherit DV/PV plans across three owners, reshuffle a thermal soak because the chamber is booked, then paste a tidy roll-up for a manager who will skim the bullets and ask for a risk line. A supplier flips a flange spec and your day becomes ECO forms, updated GD&T, and a DFMEA revision that must stop blinking before Purchasing can issue parts. Nothing here is fake. It is simply not engineering as you imagined it. The technician fixes the wobble; you narrate why the deviation can ship and collect signatures that prove diligence (see Reason #16).

Tools tell the story better than titles. Teamcenter or Windchill for PLM. SAP dates fighting the MRP. A PPAP packet that wants FAIRs, control plans, and a capability slide nobody reads twice. CAPA closures that live in SharePoint. Jira tickets that are really email with numbers. The plant asks for a deviation before lunch; Compliance asks for a UL note before close. You spend your afternoon re-exporting a PDF because the vendor portal rejects embedded fonts. The “design” lives in the margins: resize a gasket land, bump a fillet, add a keeper washer so the drop test clears.

This is what “cost center” work feels like from the chair (see Reason# 23). You are measured on variance and on-time artifacts, not on authored mechanisms. The tasks that count are custodial: keep the fixture repeating, keep the bill of materials aligned with the ERP, keep the document control clean so Audit has something to file. When the shaker queue slips, you defend schedule on three calls, not with a wrench but with calendar triage. What part of this resembles “engineering” as you pictured it.

You can tell yourself the meeting is where decisions happen. Often the meeting is where decisions are recorded. The real calls were made upstream, yesterday, by people you do not see (see Reason #32). You will keep the paper moving. The paper will keep the product moving. Your title will keep you in the room.

Reason #41: Your Electives Are Someone Else’s Core

You keep being told you can “customize” ME with electives. What you discover is that the menu is a sampler platter. Controls is two courses and a lab. Mechatronics is a tour. CFD is a taste. Composites is a seminar with pretty color plots. Meanwhile whole departments across the hall call those the spine of their degree (see Reason #2).

The split shows up early. Classical control in ME still lives in Bode plots and second-order toys. State-space gets a week at the end. In EE, control runs four deep and ends in observers, optimal control, and code that actually ships. Your “mechatronics” elective is wiring, sensors, a PID that behaves on a benchtop. Their embedded systems sequence is scheduling, safety, and timing analysis for hardware you will never own. You claim a CFD elective and learn to nurse a mesh. Aero majors climb from potential flow to turbulence modeling until the solver is a research topic. You make a laminate panel in one composites class. They design an airframe.

The math tells on the structure. ME front-loads calculus, differential equations, and the canonical thermodynamics and fluids that never stop being canonical. By the time the catalog finally lets you wander, you are almost done. The sales pitch says flexibility. The calendar says late, see Reason #29.

Industry reads the transcript the same way. Recruiters treat your electives as interest, not competence. The real depth sits with the disciplines that own the pillar. If a project needs serious control, signal processing, embedded work, high-order CFD, composite certification, or modern power electronics, the leads come from somewhere else. You help at the edges and write the report that proves you helped, see Reason #33.

Electives are great for curiosity. They are poor scaffolding for a career when they are everyone else’s foundation.

Reason #40: If It’s Admin, It’s Automatable

The more your job looks like a packet, the less it belongs to you. The meeting minutes, the PPAP uploads, the ECO route, the SharePoint CAPA closure. Once the work becomes artifacts and checkboxes, it becomes portable. First to another building, then to a shared-services center, then to a script (see Reason #9 and Reason #33).

You feel it in the tools. PLM gates that anyone with permissions can push. ERP/BOM alignment tasks that live in a queue. APQP deliverables that read like tax forms. Supplier portals that care more about filename rules than design intent. A nonconformance gets three disposition codes and a PDF trail. A DFMEA churns until the matrix stops blinking. None of this requires your badge. It requires availability and patience, which are cheaper in another time zone (see Reason #21 and Reason #24).

Automation enters through the cracks you paved. A macro exports drawings, stamps revision blocks, and repackages PDFs for the portal. A script compares BOMs and raises a ticket. An AI meeting bot writes your action items and drafts the risk slide in your voice. A template swallows lab logs and spits out a test report with the right boilerplate and plots. The more you standardize to survive your load, the easier it is to make you optional.

The plant learns the same lesson. Deviations become dropdowns. FAIRs become uploads. Control plans become clones. When your “design activity” is entering structured data so Quality, Compliance, and Purchasing can see the same rows, the job stops being where you sit. It becomes where labor is cheapest or where compute is free. The remaining “engineering” is calendar triage and stakeholder email, which read well on a rate card and even better as a bot (see Reason #26).

What part of this cannot be moved or scripted? The bracket tweak? The fillet bump? Those live in hour six on Friday, after you have reconciled serial numbers and coaxed the vendor portal past its font error. By then, the interesting part is already elsewhere. Outsourcing follows administration. Automation follows outsourcing. You follow the work until the work no longer follows you.

You will be told judgment cannot be automated. Then judgment will appear as a dropdown.

Reason #39: The Party Line Says Everything Is Fine

You will hear the same speech in three places: the open house, the senior design showcase, and the plant floor. Mechanical engineering is broad, resilient, full of options. The chorus is confident. The facts are not. Readers of this site, some of you seasoned professionals, might be reading criticisms of the ME field for the very first time. That is not an accident; it is how the pipeline keeps itself tidy.

Denial has a payroll. Administrators need full sections, so the brochure highlights “strong placement” and “industry partnerships.” Faculty need enrollments, so the curriculum gets framed as the perfect launchpad. Managers need headcount justified, so the requisition praises “great opportunities for growth.” Meanwhile you meet the actual market: “entry level” postings that demand prior internships (see Reason #5 and Reason #12) co-ops that vanish when budgets tighten, and long queues of applicants whose titles say engineer while their duties say technician. The line between willful ignorance and salesmanship blurs because everyone in the pipeline is paid to keep it moving.

Listen to how veterans defend the field. They showcase an outlier role, a lucky niche, a year when their plant was hiring. They skip the rest: DV/PV hiccups that swallow quarters, GD&T conflicts that bounce between teams, packaging drop tests that fail at hour seventy-two, polymer creep that ruins a fixture, UL and CE quirks that hold your shipment at the dock. You get told this is “just part of the job” and to keep a good attitude. That advice costs them nothing and costs you years (see Reason #26).

On campus you are told you will design. In practice you will validate, document, and apologize for lead times you did not pick. The product that ships has your work inside it, but what gets you measured is the packet that proves it. See Reason #33.

The gap between the promise and the calendar is where denial flourishes. It says the paperwork is “ownership,” the drop test is “innovation,” the shim is “architecture.” You nod because the room wants nodding.

Is this ignorance or performance? It hardly matters. The party line keeps you optimistic while the structure keeps you replaceable. Very, very often it rewards timing, geography, and someone else’s purchasing decision.

Reason #38: The Other Engineers (and Techs) are Happier

Feeling the pinch from underpayment, see Reason #27, you look up your job title and see 3.69 out of 5 for job satisfaction. Then you check the neighbors: electrical, civil, chemical, software, even aerospace. They all sit around 3.9 to 4.0. Why is ME the outlier? The daily reality helps explain it. The report is the product, the meeting is the milestone, and the drawing is the deliverable, see Reason #33. 

On PayScale’s own five-point scale, mechanical engineers rate job satisfaction at 3.69. Electrical engineers sit at 3.90, civil at 3.93, chemical at 3.92, software at 3.96, and aerospace at 3.98. Taken together, that non-ME cluster averages about 3.94. ME trails it by roughly 6 percent. Directional, yes, but same method across pages and large enough to notice (PayScale, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, n.d.-c, n.d.-d, n.d.-e, n.d.-f).

Even the technologist variant edges you out. Mechanical engineering technologist shows 4.00. The sample is tiny, so I should keep my asterisk handy, but that stat still sting because it matches what you feel on the floor. The technologist stands the rig up (see Reason #16). You shepherd the ECO, massage the BOM, and close the CAPA log so production can move (see Reason #26). Satisfaction tends to follow ownership of the thing that moves the needle, not the slide that explains why it did not, see Reason #32. (PayScale, n.d.-g)

The roots go back to school and the pipeline you were sold. You were told the math would open the doors, then you watched doors open for people who could make the fixtures repeat by Friday (see Reason #31). That mismatch between syllabus and shop feeds the quiet drag you see in the ratings. It also explains why the longer program and the detour semesters feel wasteful when you land in a role that is mostly validation and status updates (see Reason #2) 

You will not hate it. You will just like it less.

References:

PayScale. (n.d.-a). Mechanical Engineer salary. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Mechanical_Engineer/Salary

PayScale. (n.d.-b). Electrical Engineer salary. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Electrical_Engineer/Salary

PayScale. (n.d.-c). Civil Engineer salary. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Civil_Engineer/Salary

PayScale. (n.d.-d). Chemical Engineer salary. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Chemical_Engineer/Salary

PayScale. (n.d.-e). Software Engineer salary. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Salary

PayScale. (n.d.-f). Aerospace Engineer salary. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Aerospace_Engineer/Salary

PayScale. (n.d.-g). Mechanical Engineering Technologist salary. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Mechanical_Engineering_Technologist/Salary

Reason #37: The Vendor Writes Your Design

Your “new product” kickoff starts with a parts list you didn’t write. The motor comes as a package with the gearbox, the controller, and the exact bolt pattern the vendor’s catalog has had for twenty years. Your CAD opens on their STEP, not yours. The meeting ends with assignments to confirm hole clearances and draw a bracket for someone else’s box, see Reason #33. 

This is how mechanical work narrows. Procurement wants NEMA or IEC frames because the shop stocks them. Compliance wants UL-listed assemblies because the test plan is shorter. Quality wants suppliers with PPAP history. All of that is sensible, and all of it moves the lever arm away from you, see Reason #26. The compressor is a vendor skid. The battery is a module with a sealed BMS and a CAN spec you cannot see. The hydraulic power unit is a catalog manifold with port patterns you will not change. You integrate, you shim, you reroute hoses, and you call the outline “architecture.”

Even the analysis comes pre-baked. The vendor FEA drives the wall thickness. Their performance map decides your operating points. Their harness length sets your enclosure and your thermal path. Your drawing says “per supplier print” in more places than it says anything else. When a tolerance stack fails, you revise your plate, not their casting, because their tooling is amortized and your plate is cheap, see Reason #21.

Academia sells first-principles freedom. Industry sells parts that already exist. In the gap (see Reason #32), your creativity turns into constraint management: REACH certificates in the portal, CE clauses on the nameplate, ERP/BOM numbers that make the ECO route clean. You can call this “systems thinking.” It often feels like shopping with paperwork. See Reason #2 if you want to remember how many semesters you paid to be here: 

Glut writes the spec. When ten COTS products queue for one project, managers pick what they can defend: catalog modules with warranties and part numbers already living in ERP. Risk shifts to the vendor, and most choices go with it. You weren’t out-engineered. You were out-supplied by lead times and a price list, see Reason #23.

You will learn a lot about vendor portals. You will learn less about making something from zero, see Reason #14.

Reason #36: Testing Is The Job

Your first “design” assignment is a spreadsheet. You inherit a DV/PV matrix with a hundred rows, a vibration rig queue that runs longer than your project, and a release date that only moves one way. You thought the model came first. The fixtures come first. The plan comes first. The report gets written before anything breaks (see Reason #33). 

This is not an accident. Mechanical work is judged by what survives. So you learn to schedule shaker time, thermal soak cycles, and drop tests before you learn to explore. You machine coupons for fatigue because certification asks for numbers older than your plant. You write acceptance criteria that trace to UL and CE clauses. You buy more thermocouples. You design fixtures that will never be sold and debug chambers that will never leave the lab. The fun part is a sprint. Verification is the marathon.

The language shifts under you. “Design review” means the test plan. “Prototype” means a bundle of fixtures and a work instruction. “Root cause” means fill the DFMEA column that says detection. You manage polymer creep in a clamp, not a new mechanism. You chase a tolerance stack because the metrology says the fixture moved, not the part. None of this reads like the brochure. All of it reads like your calendar.

Oversupply makes the pattern stick. When there are ten résumés for every seat (see Reason #24), the safest task wins the headcount. The safest task is proving the last thing works one more time. You can call that quality. You can also call it the cheapest way to keep a line running while the new ideas live somewhere else (see Reason #21 and Reason #7).

Management loves testing because testing is visible. Schedules track green boxes that say complete. Finance loves it because the spend is traceable to requirements (see Reason #23). You will love it on the days when the fixtures repeat and the plots behave. What part of that sounds like design?

If you picture yourself drawing the future, prepare to spend most days measuring the present and filing it.