Your first week on the line, a technician teaches you the machine by sound. He hears the bad bearing before you can find the panel latch. You are in clean PPE with a notebook. He is three steps ahead with a nut driver. Everyone looks at you for the decision anyway, because you are the mechanical engineer. In practice, you are one of the few white-collar people embedded in production, surrounded by folks who run the critical equipment every day. They see you as the fancylad from a hoitytoity engineering college, you see a shop that can fix problems faster than you can define them.
This is the social arrangement the job gives you. Technicians do diagnosis and real hands-on work, you route ECOs, write CAPA rationales, and get signatures. A fixture slips tolerance, a tech shims it and keeps the cell alive. You rewrite the test plan so the unit survives vibration. A vendor swaps a motor, a tech adapts the mounting in an hour, then you chase shaft fits, update the keyway, move holes on drawings, and argue over a torque table in a release meeting. When a build goes sideways, you are asked to sign off on a quick deviation, then you own the paper trail when the field return arrives.
The contempt is quiet but it is there. You are expected to tell people what to do, while they know the machine better than you do. They know it because they were trained and you were not. Sales drags you into calls as the egghead who will save the account, then forgets to give you the parts list or the histograms. Management praises your problem solving in public, then forwards every unsorted issue to you in private because the ME is the safest place to park risk. Companies hire you as a compliance wrapper around work that other people already did.
So who is the engineer here, the person who fixes the problem or the person who documents the fix after the fact?
You wear the title, they do the work, you sign the blame.
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