Your offer letter came with a map, not a skyline. You drove past cornfields, smokestacks, and a rail spur, then parked beside a building that smells like coolant and cardboard. Before lunch, a supervisor asks if you can swing by bay three. This is mechanical engineering. You are hired to be near the thing as it becomes the product.
Other disciplines can float above the factory. An electrical or software team can design, develop, and ship from an air-conditioned office park two time zones away, surrounded by white-collar peers who speak in tickets and sprints. You live closer to the point of delivery. When a test fixture drifts out of tolerance, you tweak it so the data survives review. When the vendor’s motor shows up with a new flange, you adapt the mounting, update the keyway, move holes on drawings, call out threads, and rewrite the torque table so the build keeps moving. If a line stops, your phone rings at 2 a.m. The shop does the hands-on work while you route ECOs and CAPA rationales, which is exactly why you must be present, see Reason #16.
Oversupply makes the geography harsher. There are more mechanical engineers than attractive roles, so openings are where the plant is, not where you want to be. You take the job in a town chosen by rail, utilities, and tax abatements because you cannot negotiate for remote when ten qualified applicants will move tomorrow, see Reason #1.
Managers will say we are flexible, then schedule standups around the production shift. Proximity buys you credibility with technicians, which you need, but it also traps you in calendars and zip codes you never would have picked. Why would leadership pay for you to live wherever you want when the bottleneck is ten steps from your desk?
The irony is that the closer you are to shipping, the further you are from freedom. Your impact is real, very, very real, but the badge opens doors to the plant, not to a coastal remote policy. You can pick the job or the place. In ME, the place usually picks you.
No comments:
Post a Comment