Reason #37: The Vendor Writes Your Design

Your “new product” kickoff starts with a parts list you didn’t write. The motor comes as a package with the gearbox, the controller, and the exact bolt pattern the vendor’s catalog has had for twenty years. Your CAD opens on their STEP, not yours. The meeting ends with assignments to confirm hole clearances and draw a bracket for someone else’s box, see Reason #33. 

This is how mechanical work narrows. Procurement wants NEMA or IEC frames because the shop stocks them. Compliance wants UL-listed assemblies because the test plan is shorter. Quality wants suppliers with PPAP history. All of that is sensible, and all of it moves the lever arm away from you, see Reason #26. The compressor is a vendor skid. The battery is a module with a sealed BMS and a CAN spec you cannot see. The hydraulic power unit is a catalog manifold with port patterns you will not change. You integrate, you shim, you reroute hoses, and you call the outline “architecture.”

Even the analysis comes pre-baked. The vendor FEA drives the wall thickness. Their performance map decides your operating points. Their harness length sets your enclosure and your thermal path. Your drawing says “per supplier print” in more places than it says anything else. When a tolerance stack fails, you revise your plate, not their casting, because their tooling is amortized and your plate is cheap, see Reason #21.

Academia sells first-principles freedom. Industry sells parts that already exist. In the gap (see Reason #32), your creativity turns into constraint management: REACH certificates in the portal, CE clauses on the nameplate, ERP/BOM numbers that make the ECO route clean. You can call this “systems thinking.” It often feels like shopping with paperwork. See Reason #2 if you want to remember how many semesters you paid to be here: 

Glut writes the spec. When ten COTS products queue for one project, managers pick what they can defend: catalog modules with warranties and part numbers already living in ERP. Risk shifts to the vendor, and most choices go with it. You weren’t out-engineered. You were out-supplied by lead times and a price list, see Reason #23.

You will learn a lot about vendor portals. You will learn less about making something from zero, see Reason #14.

Reason #24: Your Applicant Pool Is Global

The hiring funnel for mechanical engineers in the United States is structurally crowded, see Reason #1. Labor-market totals show fewer projected openings than new graduates, and that baseline oversupply is further amplified by a steady inflow of H-1B workers in mechanical engineering occupations. Together, these streams create a persistently deep applicant pool for entry-level and early-career ME roles (Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], 2025; National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2022; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS], 2025). 

Quantitatively, the BLS projects about 18,100 mechanical-engineer openings per year on average over 2024–2034 (BLS, 2025). In the latest fully consolidated NCES year, U.S. institutions awarded 36,224 bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering (AY 2020–2021), roughly two graduates for every projected opening (NCES, 2022). This two-to-one ratio exists before adding experienced candidates, internal transfers, or those re-entering from graduate programs: factors that further intensify competition (BLS, 2025; NCES, 2022). 

Global labor supply compounds the squeeze. In FY 2024, USCIS approved 8,010 H-1B petitions in Mechanical Engineering Occupations alone (2,714 initial and 5,296 continuing. The practical result is that the same requisitions attract domestic new grads, experienced MEs, and returning H-1B candidates who already know the employer’s systems, fixtures, routings, and paperwork. 

These conditions are visible on the shop-floor side of ME work. Day to day, junior engineers are evaluated on risk reduction rather than invention, moving holes and thread callouts to match supplier revisions, rewriting DFMEAs when a casting tolerance shifts, shimming test fixtures to preserve repeatability, and pushing ECOs through signatures. In an oversupplied market, managers can wait for applicants who already did these tasks in the same plant. As if not bad enough, internally, the pressure is reinforced by peer competition and by the lack of a protective professional guild, see Reason #6 and Reason #13.

You were never outmatched, only outnumbered.

References

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. (2025). Mechanical engineers (Occupational Outlook Handbook). https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mechanical-engineers.htm 

National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Table 325.47: Degrees in chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering conferred by postsecondary institutions, by level of degree: Academic years 1959–60 through 2020–21. In Digest of Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_325.47.asp 

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (2025, April 29). Characteristics of H-1B specialty occupation workers: Fiscal year 2024 (Annual report to Congress). https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/ola_signed_h1b_characteristics_congressional_report_FY24.pdf 

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (2025, July 18). H-1B specialty occupations. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-specialty-occupations

Reason #21: Cost Down Is the Job

Your first performance goal is not invent something, it is remove dollars. You get a number that looks small on paper and huge in tooling, a cost-down target to hit before year end. You change a fastener to a cheaper grade, you shave thickness and promise the test will still pass, you swap a supplier the buyers can process in two hours. The part survives, the margin smiles, the word innovation stays in the slide template.

Most mechanical work is value engineering in plain clothes. You trade stainless for zinc-plated steel and attach a salt-spray chart. You drop an ABEC rating and accept a bushing where a bearing lived. You consolidate fastener lengths so the kit has one size instead of five, then switch to flange bolts to kill the washers. You relax a flatness from 0.05 to 0.10 so grinding disappears, you bump a surface finish from Ra 0.8 to 1.6 so a polishing step goes away, you trim weld lengths and thin a gusset because FEA says it still clears fatigue. You replace a machined spacer with a laser-cut shim stack, you change FKM to NBR and add a line in the temperature table. None of this is glamorous, all of it moves the costed BOM.

What counts as innovation when the goal is pennies? You write the ECO, update the control plan, and paste the before-after rollup so Finance can see the delta. The architecture does not change, the interfaces get cheaper. You want invention, but instead you will find yourself packaging other people’s breakthroughs see Reason #7 and Reason #14

You hit the target, then you get a new target, and that is the plan.