Your badge says engineer, your cost code says overhead. The first-time finance walks the floor you learn the hierarchy that matters. Sales is revenue, operations is throughput, you are an expense to be managed. You propose a better bracket; they ask about unit cost and cycle time. You save a line from slipping schedule, the thank you is a reminder to hold the tooling budget flat next quarter.
This is not personal; it is how mechanical engineering is positioned. You live in validation, fixtures, packaging, and release, work that companies file under cost containment rather than value creation. The board is picked, the software is chosen, the suppliers are locked, and you inherit a pile of drawings that need holes moved, threads called out, and a torque table that nobody agrees on. The more disciplined you are, the more invisible you feel, because a perfect day has nothing to show but a green dashboard and a smaller variance. What does that do to your raise conversation.
Being labeled a cost center shapes everything downstream. Your projects are approved when they reduce scrap, shorten test time, or make the same thing cheaper, not when they make a new thing possible. When a fixture slips out of tolerance, a technician shims it and keeps the cell alive, you route the ECO and update the model later, see Reason #16.
When the plant calls at 5 a.m., you drive in because the product exists where you live, not in a slide deck, see Reason #20.
Cost center status also drags your calendar toward coordination. You sit in three standups to defend capacity and two reviews to defend tolerances. You ship more slides than designs, see Reason #9.
Meanwhile, the programs that earn strategic credit live elsewhere. Budgets and headlines migrate to batteries, chips, and code, see in Reason #7.
You will work hard, reduce risk, and keep the operation steady. The spreadsheet will still call you a cost to be minimized.
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