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Comment by syntaxing | Hacker News Reader

I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.

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I think it's partly the economic conditions. You have some great innovation in AI and it's worth billions. You have some in cars and it just holds off the decline a bit while manufacturing moves to Asia.

I know several mechanical engineers who ended up in semiconductor processing and they make bank. Maybe not senior google coder/engineer money but probably in top 10% of senior engineers easily

Culturally, America wants manufacturing back in order to increase the prestige of non-college men. Some amount of spillover to engineers might be tolerated, but if the pay, benefits, and authority are seen to mostly accrue to high-SAT-scoring engineers (just like in Silicon Valley) then a manufacturing renaissance will be considered an abject failure.

It’s a rent extraction economy not an industrial one.

Respect comes with money, money come with demand. No demand - no respect.

do you still create stuff for fun?

As for mechanical engineer many things that are puzzling to average engineer are easy to understand / recreate by mechanical engineer, especially in 3d printing era

I do a lot of small mechanical projects for fun. But designing something for one or two pieces is very different from designing something that is made in the hundreds or even thousands.

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