Reason #14: You're a Custodian, Not an Innovator

Mechanical engineering sells a picture of sketchbooks, prototypes, and breakthroughs. What it delivers is quieter. The core decisions are made somewhere else, then you are invited in to make them fit. By the time you show up, the motor frame is fixed, the impeller diameter is set, the heat exchanger vendor is chosen, and the pipe schedule is locked. You inherit an assembly that needs bolt patterns shifted, thread callouts corrected, clearance cuts added, and a torque table that nobody agrees on. You will spend a week arguing about a gasket while the thing you are gasketing was designed without you.

Even when the company’s business is the product, the interesting work sits upstream with a small group you rarely see. Everyone else tends the margins. You will size fittings on the heat exchanger rather than design the heat exchanger. You will route a cable bundle around a bracket that arrived from a meeting you did not attend. You will write the change order that fixes the label that failed a compliance rule you learned about yesterday.

Packaging becomes the job. You will pick fasteners, juggle IP ratings and cost targets, and make sure the box survives vibration, water, heat, and legal. When a test fails, you will own the calendar and the paperwork, not the authority to fix the part that failed. When production calls, you will redesign for assembly until it feels like the original concept was approved by rumor.

The innovations that used to be mechanical moved elsewhere. Climate work tilts to chemical and civil. The energy transition celebrates electrical. Aerospace headlines belong to guidance and software. Robotics and AI reward code and compute. Mechanical shows up afterward to fasten the battery, quiet the plastic, and keep the fan from wobbling, see Reason 7. The work matters, yes, but it is not where the credit or the prestige lives.

The pipeline stays swollen, so roles get thin. Employers learn they do not need a theorist to move a hole pattern or clean up GD&T. They need someone who will keep the drawings current and the fixtures passable. That is why technician titles expand while engineer sounds more like permission to update the model, see Reason 1 and Reason 10.

If you pictured yourself shaping new machines, prepare to live in the margins of other people’s machines. You will make it fit, you will make it pass, and you will hand it off. Someone else will make the announcement. You will make the slide.