Economist Steven E. Landsburg once put it bluntly: “in the economy, there is no such thing as a zero-sum game.”, you always end up with winners and losers. Mechanical engineering just teaches you what it feels like to be the loser while the profession insists the pipeline is healthy. See Reason #39. When the establishment starts publishing “debunking” pages, see Reason #59, it is not because everything is fine. It is because it needs you to keep walking forward anyway.
So who wins? The buyer wins. See Reason #23 and Reason #45. The people who get cheap, disposable educated labor and call it “opportunity.” In a crowded market, wages do not rise to meet difficulty. They sink to meet desperation, see Reason #18, and the pipeline keeps refilling. See Reason #1. The taxpayer pays for the pipeline through public universities, loan systems, tax policy, and contracts, and the buyer gets to shop the output at a discount.
That is why the biggest ME employers look the way they do. Engineering services firms sell your hours to someone else’s program. Manufacturers keep you around to absorb the physical remainder that software cannot wave away. Government and primes turn appropriations into schedules, and you turn schedules into signoffs. The iron triangle gets fed, and you get told to be grateful for “stability.”
The day-to-day mechanics make the arrangement obvious. You do the integration pain. You chase a supplier cert, discover the RoHS paperwork lapsed, wait for the vibration rig, renegotiate a casting tolerance shift that just broke your stackup, and rebook the thermal soak because the chamber is full. Then you compress that mess into a slide that reads “risk mitigated.” See Reason #26 and Reason #9. Your real training is pressure and slide decks, not instruction. See Reason #54. In ME, the report becomes the product because the report is what survives the institution. See Reason #33.
Engineering management wins in a smaller, uglier way. The VP wants dates. The director wants a clean narrative. The department head wants someone to “own” the action items. They are the interface, the capos that translate power into tasks. If you absorb the chaos quietly, they look effective. If you refuse to promise miracles, you look like the blocker. Being needed turns into being used, right up until you are used as the explanation. See Reason #55.
You could tell yourself the escape hatch is independence, but ME keeps that door narrow. Your credibility is rented from the institution, along with its tools, accounts, test evidence, and liability shield. See Reason #56. Even the “hang your own shingle” fantasy usually collapses into more gates, more permission, more dependence. See Reason #58.
There are winners, yes. They are just not the ones still up at night rewriting the DV plan.
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