The raise that actually changes your life comes with a new badge. It moves you away from mechanical engineering. By year seven you are smoothing supplier drama, shepherding ECO gates, and babysitting packaging drop tests so a DV/PV pack can crawl through approval. You spend more time in status decks than in design, see Reason #9.
The organization pays for what protects revenue and schedule, not for the quiet correctness of a tolerance stack. So the ladder tilts toward roles that own customers, calendars, and headcount. Program management finds you because you already run the shaker queue and the UL retest calendar. Product management is the same move with a market attached: requirements, tradeoffs, launch dates. Operations pulls you because you live on the floor and can translate a polymer creep hiccup into throughput. Technical marketing hires you to turn specs into positioning and to make a demo survive a sales call. Business development likes that you can read a drawing, price a BOM, and still carry a room. Consulting wants the same skills with a savings guarantee on a slide. None of that is mechanical engineering, see Reason #14 and Reason #16.
Geography helps the drift. Plants pick zip codes; customers pick the map. Operations, product, and program roles can sit nearer headquarters or the market and farther from the cell that needs your badge to clear an ECN. If you want a different city or a ceiling that finally moves, you follow the jobs that live off the floor. See Reason #20.
You will tell yourself you still “use your engineering every day.” In truth you move numbers, not metal. You negotiate lab time you no longer need, promise dates you do not control, and translate testing noise for people who will never see the rig. Is that flexibility or an exit?
You rise, the metal recedes, and the title that made you an engineer becomes a line in your bio, see Reason #15.
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