You spend four years, maybe five or six (See Reason #2), sitting next to the same people in lecture halls, solving the same problem sets, cramming for the same dynamics final. You share notes. You split lab reports. You tell yourself you are building a network. Then you graduate into a market with two and a half candidates for every opening (See Reason #34), and every one of those people is applying to the same handful of requisitions you are. So is every graduate from the last several years who never landed a real engineering job in the first place. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York puts early-career ME underemployment at 20.1 percent, one in five working jobs that do not require a degree (See Reason #63). They are still in the queue. The network you built is the competition you trained.
That arithmetic does not soften once you get through the door. It hardens. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that architecture and engineering occupations carry a median tenure of 4.9 years, the highest of any professional occupation group in the country (BLS, 2024). Computer and mathematical occupations sit at 4.3 years. Your group stays longer because going means re-entering a market that has not improved since the last time you searched. See Reason #1. And in the manufacturing markets where most MEs work, employer concentration is among the highest in the economy (Handwerker & Dey, 2022). Everyone in your network already works for the same three employers. The hidden job market thesis depends on many competing employers. You have a plant town.
Other engineering branches have structural relief valves. In EE, one person does power systems, another does embedded, another does RF. Their specializations create lanes. They are not interchangeable in their manager's eyes. In civil, the PE stamp creates a legal tier that separates licensed practitioners from everyone else, and thousands of civil engineers sit for the PE every year because their work requires it. In ME, the PE is available but the industrial exemption means it is not required in most manufacturing roles, the very setting where most MEs work (See Reason #17). In CS, geographic mobility and high turnover mean the colleague you compete with today is gone tomorrow. ME has none of these. Your broadness means everyone in the department can theoretically do everyone else's job (See Reason #8). You have no guild creating protected scope (See Reason #13). Your geographic options are a short list of plant towns where the same handful of employers cycle the same handful of MEs (See Reason #74).
Now put that inside a typical ME department. Roughly three quarters of U.S. manufacturing establishments employ fewer than fifty people total (BLS, 2025). In ME-dense industries like engine and turbine manufacturing, ASME finds about one mechanical engineer for every twenty-one workers (ASME, 2016). That is two to five MEs at a typical plant, sharing one test lab queue, one ECO routing chain, and one manager who decides who gets the next project lead. You know who owns the DFMEA. You know who got the last DV priority. You know whose name showed up on the corrective action that impressed the plant manager. In a department of four where everyone can theoretically do everyone else's job, nothing is anonymous. When one person gets the revision to the org chart, the other three feel it in their next review cycle.
The friction stays quiet because the exits are bad. Manufacturing accounts for the single largest share of long-tenured displaced workers in the United States, seventeen percent of the total, and displaced manufacturing workers have a reemployment rate of just 57.4 percent, the second lowest of any major industry group (BLS, 2024). The ones who do find work earn roughly thirteen percent less per week on average, and about a quarter of them take pay cuts exceeding thirty percent (Kletzer, 2001). Long-run studies put the earnings loss at fifteen to thirty percent, persisting for a decade or more, with each year of prior tenure adding another one percent to the scar (Jacobson et al., 1993; Farber, 1997). You know this even if you have never read the papers. You know it because the last person who left your department took a contract role at lower pay in a different city, doing sustaining work on someone else's drawings.
So you stay. Your colleague stays. The contractor sitting between you stays as long as the purchase order holds. In automotive and heavy equipment manufacturing, contract staffing agencies have formalized this arrangement for decades: add ME headcount on project peaks, cut contractors first when demand falls. The temps make your replaceability visible. Management does not need to say anything. The structure says it for them. The queue behind the door is always full. The department is always small. And the person you studied with, crammed with, split the lab report with, is now the other name on the same shortlist for the one senior ME requisition your site will post this year.
You did not choose to compete with them. The market chose it for both of you.
References:
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024, September). Employee tenure in 2024 (Table 6). U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.t06.htm
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024, August). Worker displacement: 2021-2023 (News release). U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/disp.pdf
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). County employment and wages: Establishments by size. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/charts/county-employment-and-wages/establishments-by-size.htm
ASME. (2016). From professional services to manufacturing, ME compensation is looking up. https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/from-professional-services-to-manufacturing,-me-compensation-is-looking-up
Farber, H. S. (1997). The changing face of job loss in the United States, 1981-1995. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Microeconomics, 55-128.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (2026). The labor market for recent college graduates. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
Handwerker, E. W., & Dey, M. S. (2022). Some facts about concentrated labor markets in the United States (BLS Working Paper 550). https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2022/pdf/ec220050.pdf
Jacobson, L. S., LaLonde, R. J., & Sullivan, D. G. (1993). Earnings losses of displaced workers. American Economic Review, 83(4), 685-709.
Kletzer, L. G. (2001). Job loss from imports: Measuring the costs. Peterson Institute for International Economics. https://www.piie.com/publications/chapters_preview/110/5iie2962.pdf
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