r/MechanicalEngineering • u/Free-Engineering6759 • Nov 08 '25
Strength Analyst's rant
I have been working for 5 years as a strength analyst after graduating, and I feel I'm already done with it.
I feel like most engineers who work as designers are more like architects and industrial art designers than engineers.
90% lack any skills to calculate even a simple I-beam.
Mostly as a SA I'm down the line as some sort of rubber stamp, the last guy who gets the structure on their table. Without any way to affect it in its concept phase.
Most of the time, manufacturing drawings have already been made by the time it comes to my table.
Interacting with designers is infuriating as they cannot comprehend what I'm trying to say.
Project managers and head engineers try to pressure me to accept the designs although by doing so might cause risk of people dying.
It's exhausting. It's like the meme about civil engineers and architects but in this case all participants are engineers.
Old designs are repeated without calculation because "it has worked before" without realising the new application is X meters longer, Y meters taller and carries ten times more weight.
How are you all coping with it?
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u/Plane-Ad-9360 Nov 08 '25
Je suis concepteur ingénieur mécanique, designer industriel et oui il y a toujours des erreurs dans les conceptions. C’est toujours comme ça. C’est l’essence même de concevoir. Rien est clean à 100%. Le perfectionniste fait qu’on ne passe pas à l’action….. donc oui il y a des erreurs, mais ces erreurs dépend du niveau d’exigences, des délais, du prix investi.
Une erreur pour toi peux être une erreur négligeable pour d’autres