Reason #44: Worse Than the Job Is No Job

You think it cannot get more demoralizing than being a mechanical engineer in today’s market. It can. Being a mechanical engineer without a mechanical engineering job is worse. The degree isn’t just a line on your résumé after six stretched years; it becomes your name tag. Then one day you are “unemployed engineer,” which reads like a punchline even to you. Oversupply did not just bruise your offers (see Reason #34). It erased your introduction.

The identity problem arrives first (see Reason #15). You trained to be the person who knows how things are made, and now you’re the person explaining a gap. Hiring managers do not hear “market correction.” They hear “why couldn’t you stick.” ME is supposed to be the broad degree that goes anywhere, except most elsewhere wants direct experience doing that elsewhere. Your portfolio is locked behind NDAs and disabled logins, so you can’t show the one fixture you nailed or the one system you debugged at 2 a.m. Software applicants ship demos; you redact filenames.

Then come the filters. HR sorts by last-title match and present-tense employment. Recruiters “circle back” when your last drawing release is older than their requisition. Meanwhile you are told to “keep skills sharp,” as if FEA seats grow on trees and chamber time is free. You chase contract gigs that only count if you already have them. Your old team forwards your “open to work” post with a sad emoji. The inbox fills with technician roles at your old pay minus benefits (see Reason #10).

The pivot stories sound inspirational until you live the part where you are junior again. Product manager interviews want customer wins you were never allowed to own. Manufacturing wants TPS playbooks that died when your plant moved. Sales wants accounts. Even the “adjacent” jobs quietly prize people who never were you. You will work harder to explain what an ME can do in their world than you ever worked to pass fluids (see Reason #8).

This is the quiet truth: the market can reduce a broad, proud credential to an awkward sentence you rehearse before every call. The work was invisible when you had it. And, it is invisible now that you don’t.