Reason #61: It's Business Administration, With Consequences

You remember how engineering students talk about business majors. The jokes are a team sport. “Group projects.” “PowerPoints.” “Networking.” You say it with the smug relief of someone who survived thermo and earned the right to look down.

Then you graduate and your week becomes their week. See Reason #9. You are not designing a machine. You are herding a schedule. You are aligning stakeholders, routing approvals, updating trackers, and polishing a deck that exists to make yesterday’s decision look inevitable. The work that moves is the paperwork, and the paperwork is what you ship. See Reason #33

Mechanical just adds a special penalty: the moment something gets real, you inherit the mess. A test pops. A fitting weeps. A bracket sings at one speed only. The install “doesn’t match the drawing” because the drawing never met the install. Purchasing picked the vendor. Sales picked the date. Manufacturing picked the shortcut. Management picked the headcount. But when the hardware fails, it becomes “an engineering problem,” which means it becomes your problem. You spend the morning writing the story and the afternoon cleaning up the consequences, with your fingernails paying rent either way.

This is what a mature field does to you. The exciting choices are upstream and already locked. You inherit integration, tolerance, compliance, cost, and risk, repeated on platforms that are “proven” right up until they are not. You become a custodian of other people’s decisions. See Reason #14 The day-to-day is mind-numbing because it is designed to be auditable, not satisfying. See Reason #26 The center of the discipline barely moves, but the bureaucracy around it grows like mold. See Reason #35

And if you actually wanted to be close to the hardware, hands on, solving the real problems, you probably should have gone MET. In most plants, that is where the practical troubleshooting lives, where you get credit for the fix, and where your skill set compounds into the kind of competence that travels well to other sites and becomes very hard to replace at your own. Meanwhile the ME title often buys you the privilege of being the paperwork wrapper around the people doing the physical work. See Reason #16. You can call that “engineering leadership” if you need to sleep.

The final insult is that once your job becomes packets, portals, checklists, and closeouts, it becomes portable. Then it becomes outsourced or it becomes scripted. See Reason #40. You mocked business majors, then you did their job, and you still ended up in the corner of the plant wiping somebody else’s decision off a failing assembly.

Reason #60: No Matter What They Tell You, There Are Winners, and You Aren’t One

Economist Steven E. Landsburg once put it bluntly: “in the economy, there is no such thing as a zero-sum game.”, you always end up with winners and losers. Mechanical engineering just teaches you what it feels like to be the loser while the profession insists the pipeline is healthy. See Reason #39. When the establishment starts publishing “debunking” pages, see Reason #59, it is not because everything is fine. It is because it needs you to keep walking forward anyway.

So who wins? The buyer wins. See Reason #23 and Reason #45. The people who get cheap, disposable educated labor and call it “opportunity.” In a crowded market, wages do not rise to meet difficulty. They sink to meet desperation, see Reason #18, and the pipeline keeps refilling. See Reason #1. The taxpayer pays for the pipeline through public universities, loan systems, tax policy, and contracts, and the buyer gets to shop the output at a discount.

That is why the biggest ME employers look the way they do. Engineering services firms sell your hours to someone else’s program. Manufacturers keep you around to absorb the physical remainder that software cannot wave away. Government and primes turn appropriations into schedules, and you turn schedules into signoffs. The iron triangle gets fed, and you get told to be grateful for “stability.”

The day-to-day mechanics make the arrangement obvious. You do the integration pain. You chase a supplier cert, discover the RoHS paperwork lapsed, wait for the vibration rig, renegotiate a casting tolerance shift that just broke your stackup, and rebook the thermal soak because the chamber is full. Then you compress that mess into a slide that reads “risk mitigated.” See Reason #26 and Reason #9. Your real training is pressure and slide decks, not instruction. See Reason #54. In ME, the report becomes the product because the report is what survives the institution. See Reason #33.

Engineering management wins in a smaller, uglier way. The VP wants dates. The director wants a clean narrative. The department head wants someone to “own” the action items. They are the interface, the capos that translate power into tasks. If you absorb the chaos quietly, they look effective. If you refuse to promise miracles, you look like the blocker. Being needed turns into being used, right up until you are used as the explanation. See Reason #55.

You could tell yourself the escape hatch is independence, but ME keeps that door narrow. Your credibility is rented from the institution, along with its tools, accounts, test evidence, and liability shield. See Reason #56. Even the “hang your own shingle” fantasy usually collapses into more gates, more permission, more dependence. See Reason #58.

There are winners, yes. They are just not the ones still up at night rewriting the DV plan.

Reason #59: If Everything Was Fine, They Would Not Need to Debunk It

You click a page titled “Debunking Myths: Why Mechanical Engineering Is Not Bad” and it reads like a defense brief wearing a guidance counselor’s smile. The point is not the optimism. The point is that someone felt compelled to publish optimism in the first place. Nobody writes “it’s not bad” unless they are hearing “it’s getting bad” often enough to worry about the pipeline. See Reason #1.

But this page matters because that someone matters. DiscoverE is not a random commenter with a grudge. It is the outreach infrastructure of the profession. It sits inside the engineering establishment as the backbone behind Engineers Week, pushing out the annual theme, toolkits, classroom activities, and event “kits” that companies, universities, museums, and societies reuse to sell engineering as upbeat, necessary, and attainable. It runs pipeline programs like Future City and Girl Day that turn engineering into a branded, repeatable experience for K–12 students, and it keeps the whole thing funded and amplified through corporate partners and coalition relationships. And they just happen to be the creators of DiscoveringEngineering.org That is the machinery. Its job is to keep engineering legible, desirable, and socially approved, especially to people who are about to choose a major and lock themselves into a track they do not understand yet. See Reason #25.

The branding fog does the rest. The article lives on DiscoverEngineering.org, "your gateway to the wonders of engineering", a name and slogan that function as an official front door, the kind of site you trust because it came from the people who print the brochures. It functions like the party line because it is written in the party line voice, and the whole point of that voice is to steady you when you hesitate. See Reason #39.

Look at the “myths” they choose to fight. Limited job options. Boring work. The response is the highlight reel: renewables, robotics, space, medical devices, “more in demand than ever.” That is not a rebuttal, it is a sales pitch aimed at the exact moment you start noticing the daily reality is coordination, validation, and release. See Reason #23. You are not hired as a prophet of innovation, see Reason #14. You are hired as overhead who makes someone else’s product survive procurement, testing, and warranty.

And when they point to the “new” industries, notice where mechanical engineering is positioned inside them. The strategic money and the career leverage live in chips, software, and chemistry, and you end up packaging the novelty and eating the integration pain. See Reason #7. In a crowded market, the institution still needs bodies to do that work, so it has to keep selling the identity even when the work itself has thinned out and the applicant math stays ugly. See Reason #34. Later, when you try to “go independent,” you learn how much of your credibility was rented from the institution the entire time. See Reason #56.

So yes, treat this as the party line. Not because it admits anything outright, but because it shows you where the pressure is. The institution does not publish reassurance when everything is fine. It publishes reassurance when it needs you to keep walking forward anyway.

References:

DiscoverE. (n.d.). About DiscoverE. https://discovere.org/about/

DiscoverEngineering. (n.d.). Debunking myths: Why mechanical engineering is not bad. https://www.discoverengineering.org/debunking-myths-why-mechanical-engineering-is-not-bad/

Fluor Corporation. (2006, November 3). For 2004, National Engineers Week takes on the world. https://newsroom.fluor.com/news-releases/news-details/2006/For-2004-National-Engineers-Week-Takes-on-the-World/default.aspx

DiscoverEngineering. (n.d.). Discover Engineering: Your gateway to the wonders of engineering. https://www.discoverengineering.org/

Reason #58: You Can't Hang Your Own Shingle

Reason #56 already told you the quiet part: your “skills” live inside other people’s systems. Your week becomes revision control, DV and PV queue fights, supplier cert chasing, and ERP and BOM cleanup, and the tools that make you employable are not yours. That is why the fantasy of “I’ll just go independent” falls apart on contact.

You want the American Dream version of engineering. The version where you “own something.” Not just a house, but your time, your output, your client list, your upside. You graduate, do your time, and then you hang your own shingle and stop begging a plant manager for headcount. In mechanical engineering, that dream is usually deferred, and then quietly forgotten.

If you mean independent mechanical engineering the way most people mean it, paid advice that someone relies on, you run into the stamp problem. Real clients do not want to be your liability experiment. They want a name, a license, a traceable chain of responsibility, and insurance that does not flinch when the hardware meets the world. The standard path to that legitimacy is years of progressive experience and licensure. Four years is the minimum story people tell themselves, and it is still four years spent deep inside an institution, learning the same internal gates you were trying to escape. You do not “go solo.” You apprentice in public, under someone else’s umbrella, until a board agrees you are allowed to be blamed. See Reason #13 and Reason #17.

So you pivot to the other path people whisper about. You become so good in a niche that companies pay you anyway. But look at what the modern “niches” actually are. The leverage is in code, controls, electronics, and the parts of products that can be shipped as files, not fixtures, see Reason #7 and Reason #35. Mechanical work is the physical remainder. It is slower, heavier, compliance-soaked, and harder to sell in small chunks. Even when you are excellent, the deal still needs test rigs, supplier accounts, calibration records, certifications, and someone willing to sign off. You cannot Stripe your way out of that.

Other engineering paths can cheat this a little. Software can start as a laptop and a weekend. Embedded and EE can start as a dev board and a bench supply. You can sell a prototype, a module, a consulting hour, and iterate fast without asking a factory for permission. Mechanical can start a company too, but it tends to start as a capital plan and a liability plan. It starts as “who is paying for the prototype run, the drop tests, the returns, and the lawyer.” That is why the happier cluster exists, see Reason #38.

And it is why the inheritance breaks. People who know ME best do not see “go independent” as a realistic prize at the end of the pipeline. They see more gates. More risk. More dependence on institutions. In that house, their kids notice too, see Reason #53.

You will still hear success stories. A guy who does machine design for a niche industry. A woman who consults on HVAC. A former plant engineer who now “runs a firm.” They exist. They are just rarer than the brochures imply, and they usually arrive after a long sentence served inside other people’s walls.

Reason #57: The Entry Ramp Is Built for People With No Life

You think the hard part is the coursework. It’s not. The hard part is fitting the shape the hiring pipeline was built around. Of course Mechanical engineering doesn't “discriminate by age” so much as it selects for the conditions that usually come with being young: unencumbered, available, and cheap. The moment you show up with a mortgage, a spouse, a kid or two, a second job, or even just a spine, the path narrows to a slit. The field is already crowded, and the one bridge into the first real role is the internship bottleneck. See how that’s going in Reason #5.

And the internships that do exist are rarely where your life is. They are in plant towns, two time zones away, on schedules that start before sunrise, doing sustaining work no one wants to staff year-round. “Relocation friendly” sounds like a perk until you realize it means you are expected to uproot yourself for three months to earn the right to apply for a job that still calls itself entry-level. If you cannot pick up and vanish for a summer, your résumé is treated as a character flaw. Your course projects do not count as experience, and the postings quietly confirm that. See Reason #12.

The geography is not incidental either. ME ties you to factories, and factories do not move to accommodate your daycare pickup. See Reason #20

This is why “going back for a BSME” can feel like a trap for non-traditional students. School is the only socially acceptable reset, but mechanical engineering does not reset cleanly. The gatekeepers still want the same stamps: recent grad status, internship logos, and a story that sounds like you had nothing better to do than chase a rotating series of plant badges. If you are older, you get squeezed from both sides. You can be “overqualified” for internships and still “underqualified” for engineer roles, and you get told to be patient while you bleed time. That patience is competing against an oversupplied pipeline and a hiring stack that never stops refilling, see Reason #1 and Reason #24. And if you lose a year just getting to the starting line, the clock does not stop for you, see Reason #29.

Then comes the real punchline. Mechanical engineering loves to advertise itself as practical and grounded, but its hiring funnel is built for people with the least grounding. The profession that claims to reward responsibility quietly selects for people who can postpone responsibility a little longer. You will call it a career move. The system will call it an internship, and invoice you accordingly.

Reason #56: Institutionalized by Design

A shop guy calls mechanical engineering “mostly theory,” and you feel the urge to correct him. You learned the math. You sat through fluids and heat transfer and machine design. You can speak in units and assumptions like it is a second language. Then you get your first job and notice what actually makes you useful, and the shop guy’s comment stops sounding like an insult. It starts sounding like a syllabus, see Reason #10. And the part nobody tells you is how much of your “training” is informal, rushed, and social, delivered via slide decks and pressure instead of instruction, see Reason #54.

In school, you are trained to turn reality into something solvable. Loads are known. Materials behave. Boundary conditions sit still. The answer fits on a page, and the reward is that it is clean. Even “design” is usually a contained exercise where nothing ships, nothing gets purchased, nothing gets serviced, and nothing comes back six months later with a crack and an invoice.

Outside school, mechanical engineering is not a set of problems. It is a system. Your analysis is not the deliverable. Your deliverable is whatever survives the institution: revision control, release rules, signoffs, procurement constraints, supplier capability, test evidence, quality dispositions, and the quiet politics of who is allowed to approve risk. Your week becomes revision control, DV/PV queue fights, supplier cert chasing, and ERP/BOM cleanup, see Reason #26. This is why so much ME work collapses into documentation and justification, because the report becomes the thing you actually “ship” while the real product responsibility diffuses upward, see Reason #33.

That institutional framing also explains why you leave school with so little that is cleanly sellable on your own. You are not entering a profession with a simple retail boundary. You are entering a field where legitimacy is guarded by process, reputation, and protection you do not have as an individual. ABET audits courses, not markets, and nobody is standing behind you when you try to practice alone, see Reason #13.

This is why other degrees translate into something you can sell immediately. A graphic designer can sell a brand kit to strangers next week. An accountant can sell bookkeeping and tax prep as a normal service. A software developer can ship features and get paid for a module. A marketing grad can sell strategy plus execution with a laptop and a portfolio. What do you sell as a fresh mechanical engineer, exactly?

If your ME education were a standalone skill set, “consulting” would be a default option right after graduation. It is not. You either spend years inside institutions until your judgment is trusted, or you chase licensure that rarely changes the day-to-day for most MEs, or you become unusually good in a niche that no syllabus really teaches, see Reason #17. You graduate with a head full of elegant methods and no obvious way to invoice them.

Reason #55: Being Needed Means Being Used (Until You’re Fired)

For a while, you will believe the place cannot run without you. You are the one who “makes it happen.” You translate vague leadership wishes into hardware that ships, you unstick the build when the pilot line stalls, you answer the questions nobody else can even parse. Then you remember the part they never say out loud. You are still replaceable. The market is still crowded. Your indispensableness does not make you unfirable. See Reason #34

Mechanical engineering is unusually good at turning you into a catch basin. Broadness gets sold as freedom, but in practice it makes you the default owner of anything that touches atoms. Demand modeling, supplier chasing, fixture triage, packaging drop test drama, “just run the numbers,” “just update the model,” “just make a quick drawing,” “just lead the meeting.” That is not leadership noticing your talent. That is the organization exploiting a job description with soft edges. See Reason #8

And because you are a cost code, not a revenue line, the gratitude is always temporary. Every new productivity hack comes with a new dashboard, a new cadence, and a new expectation that you can do two roles with one headcount. When the quarter tightens, your “range” is not rewarded. It is treated as proof you can absorb more. See Reason #23

Here is the darker part. Being the catch basin means you also become the blame basin. The more hats you wear, the more ways you can be “responsible” for something slipping. A supplier is late, a test slot is unavailable, a requirement changes, a VP wants it by Tuesday anyway. You write the memo, you own the action items, you stand in front of the slide with your name on it. In ME, visible impact is shared, but accountability sticks. See Reason #33

Those little dings add up. Missed dates you did not control. “Communication issues” when you refuse to promise miracles. “Not strategic” when you tell them physics has a schedule. Meanwhile your calendar is eaten alive by check-ins and “alignment,” which guarantees the work never gets a clean flow anyway. See Reason #42

Even your peers quietly benefit from it. If you are the fixer, everyone else gets to stay in their lane. Then review season comes and the lane-keepers look stable while you look messy. And in a field where everyone is competing for a small number of good seats, stability wins. See Reason #6

You will be proud to be depended on right up until the day they depend on you as the explanation.

Reason #54: Your Training Is a PowerPoint and Yelling

Your training will be a slide deck. If you’re lucky, it is recent. If you’re very lucky, someone actually walks through it with you. More often it is emailed, half out of date, and treated as proof that the company “did onboarding.”

After that, you’re live.

Mechanical engineering quietly assumes that competence appears through exposure. Not mentoring. Not instruction. Exposure. You inherit legacy drawings, old CAD habits, vendor quirks, undocumented PLC behavior, and a system that only works because the last person learned its moods the hard way. Then you are told to move quickly and not make mistakes.

When you do make mistakes, the response is rarely instructional. It is reactive. A raised voice. A “we already went over this.” A look that says you should have known. This is not really cruelty. It is the structure of the work. Senior engineers are rewarded for throughput and firefighting, not for building replacements. Teaching slows them down, so it does not happen. You are there to keep inherited systems running, not to understand them deeply or improve them thoughtfully. See Reason #14.

High turnover finishes what the incentives started. When people leave every two or three years, no one believes training will ever pay back. New hires are dropped into the deep end and told to swim. The pipeline quietly assumes apprenticeship, but the labor market is run on churn. That mismatch is not accidental. It is baked in. See Reason #25. Oversupply makes it tolerable for employers and brutal for individuals. See Reason #1 and Reason #34.

Temp-to-perm and extended “trial” employment lock it in place. Why invest in training someone who might not be converted, or who can be cut the moment demand softens? Long auditions reward quiet survival, not learning. Ask too many questions and you look risky. Make it through and the lesson is clear: you trained yourself. See Reason #45.

The breadth people praise only sharpens the edge. Mechanical roles rely on constant self-teaching across disciplines, but the job title pretends this is normal rather than extractive. You become productive by absorbing institutional debt no one bothered to document, and then you are congratulated for being “versatile.” See Reason #8.

There are exceptions. Regulated aerospace groups. Certain energy niches. A few long-tenure firms with cultural memory. Even there, training usually stops once you’re “useful.” It is front-loaded, not sustained. The moment you can carry load, the expectation shifts to silent competence.

For most of the field, the rule is simple: if you need training, you’re already behind.

The system survives because enough people accept this as normal.

Reason #53: Your Kids Don’t Want This Career—and Neither Should You

Hi Buddy!

Some careers run in families. Medicine does. Law does. Architecture does. These are licensed, gated professions with exams, boards, and formal choke points. Parents pass down not just expectations, but practical knowledge about how to get through the gate. Dynasties form because the structure rewards them.

Engineering does this too.

At a broad level, engineering starts from a baseline where about 3% of students choose it at all. Relative to that baseline, kids of engineers are roughly 100% more likely to also end up in engineering. That’s real intergenerational following. Weak compared to medicine or law, but real nonetheless (Altmejd, 2023).

Now look at the control group.

Architecture starts from a tiny baseline of about 0.55%, yet shows a +250% parent–child effect. Teaching starts from a much larger baseline, around 6%, and still shows a +30% family-following effect. Law starts from roughly 1% and shows +100%. Medicine starts near 4–5% and also shows close to +100%. These are professions that clearly carry themselves forward. The study detects dynasties exactly where you’d expect them.

Engineering in general, clears the bar as well.

But then there’s Mechanical Engineering.

ME starts from a baseline where fewer than half a percent of students chooses it at all. Relative to that already-small baseline, kids of Mechanical Engineers are nearly 300% LESS likely to follow the same path. Civil engineering is closer to 40% less likely. Electrical engineering is about 10% less likely. Architecture goes the opposite direction entirely, showing strong positive inheritance (Altmejd, 2023, Appendix Table C.2).

That puts mechanical engineering in a position you’ve already seen before. Mechanical engineers are tied to physical plants and specific facilities, which quietly dictates where they can live and work (see Reason #20 and Reason #11). When companies restructure, merge, or offshore, mechanical roles are often the first to be “rationalized,” turning years of experience into dead weight overnight (see Reason #44 and Reason #45).

And even when the job survives, the work itself becomes increasingly invisible. The product isn’t the mechanism. It’s the documentation, the reports, the reviews, the approvals, and the meetings that exist so someone else can say “we’re on track” (see Reason #33 and Reason #9).

Children of mechanical engineers don’t need career fairs or glossy brochures to understand this. They grow up watching it. They see the relocations that weren’t optional. The late nights that weren’t heroic. The layoffs that weren’t personal, just “business.” They notice how much of the work disappears into paperwork and how little of it turns into autonomy, flexibility, or durable upside.

That’s why the inheritance breaks.

While Engineering overall shows inheritance, Mechanical Engineering shows rejection.
Mechanical engineering has no shortage of outsiders lining up (see Reason #1 and Reason #34). What it lacks is succession. Here, the people who know it best don’t pass it on. If you’re unsure about mechanical engineering, that doubt isn’t a personal failing. It’s pattern recognition. You’re reacting to the same realities that make insiders quietly steer their own kids (or themselves) elsewhere.

Reference:

Altmejd, A. (2023). Inheritance of fields of study (Working Paper). Stockholm School of Economics. https://adamaltmejd.se/assets/papers/Altmejd_Inheritance.pdf

Reason #52: The Plant Teaches You What the Degree Didn’t

Your first week in a real plant is an apology tour for everything you were so confident about in school. You walk in thinking “design” means clean geometry and correct equations. Then the floor hands you reality in steel-toe boots. The fastest way to learn this is to watch a technician solve your problem in five minutes, then keep solving it for the next five years. See Reason #16 

And when you try to explain what you “meant,” you discover your meaning doesn’t ship. See Reason #10

In class, constraints are tidy and announced. In a plant, constraints arrive as a forklift turning radius, a fixture that already exists, a vendor that can only hold that tolerance on Tuesdays, and a lead time that makes your “better” material irrelevant. Your elegant part fails because it can’t be deburred without cutting gloves, because the operator can’t reach that fastener without removing two guards, because the paint line racks it by the one surface you made critical, because the packaging drop test turns your crisp edge into a warranty claim. You start noticing that the important dimensions are the ones you never thought to dimension.

The plant also rewrites your sense of what “engineering” is. You spend less time proving the mechanism and more time proving it can be built, inspected, shipped, serviced, and repeated. You learn to fear ERP substitutions, revision locks, and the quiet power of a nonconformance tag. You learn that the drawing is not the truth, the process is. A perfect CAD model is just a suggestion until the gage says no and the line stops. Somewhere around then, your coursework becomes trivia you’re embarrassed you believed mattered.

And the irony is you still have to act like the degree taught you this. You will talk about analysis and “design intent” while you are really negotiating with reality: cycle time, scrap rate, torque access, training burden, rework risk, and whatever the shop can actually do this week. The plant doesn’t care what you know. It cares what you can get to ship.

You were trained to solve problems. You were hired to learn which problems you are allowed to solve.