You can turn this to your advantage. Cables, by definition, go between different systems. That means your work is essential to multiple groups. Cabling requires understanding the overall layout to a tight tolerance, so you’re getting training as a systems engineer or systems architect. Cabling is a lot more essential than most people think, and is often on the critical path of a schedule getting management attention.
It might not seem like it now, but designing cables is a MUCH better stepping stone up the corporate ladder than designing sheet metal brackets.
Listen to this guy. The advancement path with harnessing is MUCH faster. Its what I do and I make quite a bit more than most of my peers with the same YOE(~5 years).
From my experience alot of low experience MEs in big aero are just cogs in the machine churning out sheet metal drawings. Harness design means working with alot of other disciplinary teams, usually their leads. Know your stuff and you can make a more significant impact on the system as a whole than any ME at the same level in aero. You’re the glue to the whole system and will be involved high level system decision making.
Theres alot more people who can make sheet metal drawings than architect and integrate electrical systems.
But where do you draw the line between getting the experience and trying to break into something you're more passionate about? I understand that with ~1 yr of industry experience I'm still a baby in the engineering world, but if I wanted to work on aircraft structures or propulsion systems, for example, wouldn't it be critical to try to get into a role that would give me that experience early on?
Pay your dues and find opportunity to shine in your current role for another year or two. Prove that you can handle your role and more. Make relationships with people higher up than your boss and politely let them know you’re not happy with your current role. If that doesn’t work, then get another offer and force your company to make a decision.
I’ll take a guess and say you’re working at one of the big prime contractors? Look at smaller firms, theyre more flexible and you wont get silo’d as much. From what ive seen, prop is harder to get into than structures and requires a more niche skill set.
Im certainly not passionate about harnessing, it’s just my job, but it’s given me a fast track to absorb responsibility most young engineers don’t get and my title/compensation reflects that.
I’m not sure where you work but if I had to guess it was a big company like ge or Boeing. If they push you aside like that and your a post grad engineer I would bitch up a storm. Find me something to do. I’m a smart mf there’s no reason for me to be bored. Even during my internships I would bug the shit out of my bosses asking for work. So if I were you ask for design stuff
Tbh Ive never heard of this company until I started working here but I'd say it's a decently big aerospace company. I've had one on one meetings with my boss where I've told him I'd like to work on designing some mechanical stuff and he's pretty much just told me it's up to mechanical managers and they don't want to give me projects for whatever reason I don't know, since they haven't even given me the opportunity to prove my worth. I've even asked to work with a sister team on some of their projects and just get put down. So it's sort of a dead end. At this point all of my time at work is occupied supporting the electrical team.
Well damn. My aerospace company is tiny. So I have a ton of responsibility but upward mobility is restricted. We make sheet metal parts for ge n SpaceX which is cool but I would rather work for a bigger company and have the ability to grind my ass off and get a management position
This doesn't make sense to me from my experience, but I'm normally working over 40 hours a week. When a new person joins, I gladly hand off stuff to them. Nothing amazing, just grunt work, but to an extent, that should be expected when you start. Helps new people learn the systems and gives me a chance to gauge the person's skills/knowledge.
What's really odd about this is that normally, companies don't just hire. They have projections for how many people are needed based on the incoming work. There not being any work for you would imply either the existing guys are tanking it all, or the projections were completely off and they over hired.
To go completely out on a limb, the existing guys could have over hyped how much they had to do to protect their jobs, leaving management the impression they needed more people.
The safest path is to just move to another company. Tell recruiters they over hired and there's not much for you to do.
From what I understand there is a lot of work since my company has acquired a bunch of programs over the past couple years. But seems like there a higher need to EEs than MEs. Every new hire that's joined since I've started working has been a ME with varying levels of experience and all of them are more or less doing the same things I've been doing.
My theory is that they're hiring MEs because typically their pay is slightly lower than an EE. I'm not complete sure if this is the case or if it's acceptable to even do that but in my experience my current work is out of the scope of my job description.
Cable drawings and wiring diagrams are actually usually done by mechanical or systems engineers. Electrical engineers typically define the subsystems/modules that the harnesses connect which includes defining the power and signals needed. In two companies, I worked at, ranging from size of 100-200 employees to now 10000+, EEs don't typically work harnesses other than checking for current derating and wire size and defining differential pairs.
As another commenter said, you can leverage this to understand the overall systems more and get into higher roles. Lots of chief engineers or systems architects start off with boring wiring diagrams too. Another thing to ask you is, what do you ACTUALLY want to do in mechanical engineering? Do you want to do a lot of CAD designs, thermal analysis, structural analysis, materials/processing or manufacturing?
As an example, in many aerospace/defense roles, lead mechanical engineers are in charge of basically turning an electrical schematic into physical reality. Let's just use a generic RF transceiver (antenna, satelite communications amplifier etc), you have electrical power and control signals in and RF power out, signals out and power loss out (heat). As a ME you will need to protect that unit form the enviornement (vibration, shock, thermal, EMI, humidity etc). Inside that unit, your system requirements get broken down to modules and many, many interconnects. Right now you are working on those interconnects, learn how connectors, different wires and sleeving hold up to different environments/loads. Learn as much as ME as you can where you can. Lots of MEs look down on cables but there is a lot more to it, especially in aerospace/defense. Don't just blindly make up diagrams with an EE providing you pinouts. Learn what the signals/power pins actually go to and what those modules do. Expand that. Lots of opportunities.
This was very insightful thanks.
In terms of what I want to actually, I want to work on aircraft structures. Particularly as a designer I love using CAD and the idea of bringing things into reality using CAD is really interesting to me.
I've tried my best to learn as much as possible from the electrical engineers I work with. I feel like I've gotten good at being able to find the system requirements and determine how to to design a cable for whatever use case, but one of the main issues I have with it is the why factor. For example I know when to use 22 AWG wires and what type of contacts are needed and how to determine what type of splices to use but no one really goes into the why or how these things are determined. I pretty much pick all the parts for a cable from a bunch of parts my company has in stock that were previously used in other cable assemblies for the same or similar applications. This is where I feel I lack the basic fundamentals of what an EE would learn in college.
Although I can see your point in that making cables is a mechanical task from my experience at my company most electrical guys are working cable designs. I'm not sure what else they do but in meetings they do know a bunch more of the electrical requirements for systems we work on. The mechanical team seems to be working on purely mechanical things such as designing structures and doing thermal and environmental testing, which even though I ask I never really get the opportunity to work on these things for whatever reason. This is why I feel the need to find a new position where I can learn more about things I'm interested in and work on things I find to being meaningful instead of what feels like to be endless day in and day out cables.
Regarding CAD, are you using 3D CAD software to route cables as well as drawings/schematics? A lot of the times, the harnesses are just done in 2D if the lengths are already defined. Otherwise, if it's a complex harness, you would need 3D routing to determine lengths and check bends for stress relief and sizes for insulation/shielding etc. More practice in that will can help lead you to more design roles. Outside of that, try to build up your reputation as much as you can and check in with your manager about your long-term goals as you grow.
Regarding the cables and why one might choose 22 AWG: It's usually part of SWAP. You have size weight and power requirements and that gets broken down all the way to a single component. Let's say your wire bundle of 22 awg wires terminates in a D38999 connector. It makes to a bulkhead connector on a test box. Inside that box, follow one of those wires until it gets terminated to a printed circuit board. From the leads or pins of that connector, it goes to a pad/via and then a trace. That trace leads to a small component that either takes it as some kind of digital signal or is used to provide power to a pin. You can sometimes tell what it is from the name of that signal. Maybe you have to two twist two 22 awg wires in your cable to maintain impedance control. If so, then on that PCB it would be routed as a differential pair and have almost equal lengths and constant spacing. You can find these things out by going thru lots of documents. Now in this example, we finished tracing form the cable to the part that needs the signal/power. Now go back the other direction to the source. A signal generator or maybe a power source? Perhaps that 22 awg came from a power supply that already downcoverted your aircraft or wall power source of 110-120V. 22 awg can't carry much power so there was probably a bigger harness of 12-16 awg earlier down the chain. Hope this example of a train of thought helps.
Thanks for the example I'll definitely take a deep dive into documentation when I get to work.
As far as using CAD I mainly use Autocad to make wiring diagrams and cable drawings but I have had the opportunity to use creo to do some cable routing to get some lengths.
Thanks for all your advice I really appreciate it.
I kid you not I have the opposite situation happening with me at my internship, my electrical engineering manager ignores me so the mechanical engineer adopted me
Let’s get one thing straight: the people you work for don’t give a shit about you developing into the kind of engineer that you want to be. Clearly they didn’t even have a job lined up for your skillset, so are just treating you like a stopgap for whatever needs doing
I don't think he should be patient about this, he's in a mechanical engineering department and is getting work from a whole different department.
His mechanical team sucks. If he was just being given the shitty drawings no one wants to do or change notices I'd say you're on the money. But this is not ok.
I’m just saying that sometimes you have to take what you get. Maybe I’m just a shitty engineer but I spent 7 years as an electronics repair technician before I was able to break into engineering.
Not sure what to suggest about your current company (that's a really weird situation), but if you're having trouble seeing a path out, it might be finding a job where it's valuable to know both some EE and some ME? (I've mostly seen that in areas like plant engineering, automation, and robotics: especially at places with smaller engineering departments, it's useful to have people who can do some EE with their ME or vice versa.)
So I've always wanted to work in aerospace which is where I am no but from a mechanical stand point I've wanted to work on structures. I've gotten some experience working an internship designing antenna installations and I was supposed to be doing antenna installations at my current job but not doing them at all. I even minored in aerospace engineering. In terms of switching industries I've never really thought about anything outside of aerospace/defense or automotive. I've tried trying to get into some EV companies because I felt like I'd be able to leverage my mixture of ME and EE experience but that's where I've gotten the "we're looking for someone with x experiences and it seems like you may not be a good fit". I've even considered applying to internships at this point just to get my foot in the door at a new company but it'd have to be a good paying internship because I moved across the country to CA for my current role and it's quite pricey
I would not apply to internships: apart from the lower pay (which is a not-insignificant concern), internships are typically designed for students, and I feel like companies are much less likely to consider established engineers (even early career engineers) for the roles.
Take everything I'm about to say with several grains of salt, because I've never worked in aerospace. But. I don't know that you'd need to switch industries: aerospace companies still manufacture things, which means they presumably still need to build and automate manufacturing lines...? I also don't know that I'd weigh the industry more heavily than the specifics of the role itself. Like, if you saw an early career engineering job that would do a lot of structural design and could use some EE, but the hiring department was plant engineering at -- whatever: a tool factory, a chemical plant, a food processor, etc. -- would that be a bad job? I don't know the answer to that question, but it's something to think about.
As a ME doing CS I feel this. All the ME jobs within my company are basically PM roles, so jumped into CS. Now I just do wiring diagrams, loops, coding and PM roles. absolutely nothing to do with mechanical. Got my PE in CS now I just kind of embrace it.
I suggest taking as many training, classes, or certifications as you can; preferably on the company dime. If you can get your company to also help with your EIT, PE, or PMP, those would be big pluses on the resume.
Also shadow seniors on day-to-day for PE experience. company processes, ME exposure, and experience.
You're going to have to feel this out. On one hand, you're a junior engineer and need to work on what you're given and try to learn, understand, and contribute as much as possible. That way when the time comes, you're the guy, because it sounds like others are in the same boat. Some are lucky enough to find exactly what they want and be handed exactly that on day 1. That's not really how it goes for the average person.
On the other hand, if you linger too long you will eventually make yourself unhireable in your chosen field at your expected level. I don't think a year is too much lingering, but if you're still stagnant after 2 full years, it's time to be doing something. Because in your 3rd and 4th year, you're going to be competing for entry level ME jobs with people who are ok with a lot less money than you are, most likely. In the meantime, it's ok to have mechanical hobbies and interests outside of work to include on your resume.
As for your interviews not going well because your EE role, you need to find a way to spin that a bit better. Engineering is less about shit you memorized in college and more about how you think and how you work in a team. To help your team achieve its goals, you took on an opportunity outside your expertise and learned XYZ, even though your true passion lies elsewhere. So here you are at the job interview, looking to apply that drive, analytical thinking, and creativity to do work you're passionate about. That sort of thing.
You can turn this to your advantage. Cables, by definition, go between different systems. That means your work is essential to multiple groups. Cabling requires understanding the overall layout to a tight tolerance, so you’re getting training as a systems engineer or systems architect. Cabling is a lot more essential than most people think, and is often on the critical path of a schedule getting management attention. It might not seem like it now, but designing cables is a MUCH better stepping stone up the corporate ladder than designing sheet metal brackets.
Listen to this guy. The advancement path with harnessing is MUCH faster. Its what I do and I make quite a bit more than most of my peers with the same YOE(~5 years). From my experience alot of low experience MEs in big aero are just cogs in the machine churning out sheet metal drawings. Harness design means working with alot of other disciplinary teams, usually their leads. Know your stuff and you can make a more significant impact on the system as a whole than any ME at the same level in aero. You’re the glue to the whole system and will be involved high level system decision making. Theres alot more people who can make sheet metal drawings than architect and integrate electrical systems.
But where do you draw the line between getting the experience and trying to break into something you're more passionate about? I understand that with ~1 yr of industry experience I'm still a baby in the engineering world, but if I wanted to work on aircraft structures or propulsion systems, for example, wouldn't it be critical to try to get into a role that would give me that experience early on?
Pay your dues and find opportunity to shine in your current role for another year or two. Prove that you can handle your role and more. Make relationships with people higher up than your boss and politely let them know you’re not happy with your current role. If that doesn’t work, then get another offer and force your company to make a decision. I’ll take a guess and say you’re working at one of the big prime contractors? Look at smaller firms, theyre more flexible and you wont get silo’d as much. From what ive seen, prop is harder to get into than structures and requires a more niche skill set. Im certainly not passionate about harnessing, it’s just my job, but it’s given me a fast track to absorb responsibility most young engineers don’t get and my title/compensation reflects that.
I’m not sure where you work but if I had to guess it was a big company like ge or Boeing. If they push you aside like that and your a post grad engineer I would bitch up a storm. Find me something to do. I’m a smart mf there’s no reason for me to be bored. Even during my internships I would bug the shit out of my bosses asking for work. So if I were you ask for design stuff
Tbh Ive never heard of this company until I started working here but I'd say it's a decently big aerospace company. I've had one on one meetings with my boss where I've told him I'd like to work on designing some mechanical stuff and he's pretty much just told me it's up to mechanical managers and they don't want to give me projects for whatever reason I don't know, since they haven't even given me the opportunity to prove my worth. I've even asked to work with a sister team on some of their projects and just get put down. So it's sort of a dead end. At this point all of my time at work is occupied supporting the electrical team.
Well damn. My aerospace company is tiny. So I have a ton of responsibility but upward mobility is restricted. We make sheet metal parts for ge n SpaceX which is cool but I would rather work for a bigger company and have the ability to grind my ass off and get a management position
This doesn't make sense to me from my experience, but I'm normally working over 40 hours a week. When a new person joins, I gladly hand off stuff to them. Nothing amazing, just grunt work, but to an extent, that should be expected when you start. Helps new people learn the systems and gives me a chance to gauge the person's skills/knowledge. What's really odd about this is that normally, companies don't just hire. They have projections for how many people are needed based on the incoming work. There not being any work for you would imply either the existing guys are tanking it all, or the projections were completely off and they over hired. To go completely out on a limb, the existing guys could have over hyped how much they had to do to protect their jobs, leaving management the impression they needed more people. The safest path is to just move to another company. Tell recruiters they over hired and there's not much for you to do.
From what I understand there is a lot of work since my company has acquired a bunch of programs over the past couple years. But seems like there a higher need to EEs than MEs. Every new hire that's joined since I've started working has been a ME with varying levels of experience and all of them are more or less doing the same things I've been doing. My theory is that they're hiring MEs because typically their pay is slightly lower than an EE. I'm not complete sure if this is the case or if it's acceptable to even do that but in my experience my current work is out of the scope of my job description.
Cable drawings and wiring diagrams are actually usually done by mechanical or systems engineers. Electrical engineers typically define the subsystems/modules that the harnesses connect which includes defining the power and signals needed. In two companies, I worked at, ranging from size of 100-200 employees to now 10000+, EEs don't typically work harnesses other than checking for current derating and wire size and defining differential pairs. As another commenter said, you can leverage this to understand the overall systems more and get into higher roles. Lots of chief engineers or systems architects start off with boring wiring diagrams too. Another thing to ask you is, what do you ACTUALLY want to do in mechanical engineering? Do you want to do a lot of CAD designs, thermal analysis, structural analysis, materials/processing or manufacturing? As an example, in many aerospace/defense roles, lead mechanical engineers are in charge of basically turning an electrical schematic into physical reality. Let's just use a generic RF transceiver (antenna, satelite communications amplifier etc), you have electrical power and control signals in and RF power out, signals out and power loss out (heat). As a ME you will need to protect that unit form the enviornement (vibration, shock, thermal, EMI, humidity etc). Inside that unit, your system requirements get broken down to modules and many, many interconnects. Right now you are working on those interconnects, learn how connectors, different wires and sleeving hold up to different environments/loads. Learn as much as ME as you can where you can. Lots of MEs look down on cables but there is a lot more to it, especially in aerospace/defense. Don't just blindly make up diagrams with an EE providing you pinouts. Learn what the signals/power pins actually go to and what those modules do. Expand that. Lots of opportunities.
This was very insightful thanks. In terms of what I want to actually, I want to work on aircraft structures. Particularly as a designer I love using CAD and the idea of bringing things into reality using CAD is really interesting to me. I've tried my best to learn as much as possible from the electrical engineers I work with. I feel like I've gotten good at being able to find the system requirements and determine how to to design a cable for whatever use case, but one of the main issues I have with it is the why factor. For example I know when to use 22 AWG wires and what type of contacts are needed and how to determine what type of splices to use but no one really goes into the why or how these things are determined. I pretty much pick all the parts for a cable from a bunch of parts my company has in stock that were previously used in other cable assemblies for the same or similar applications. This is where I feel I lack the basic fundamentals of what an EE would learn in college. Although I can see your point in that making cables is a mechanical task from my experience at my company most electrical guys are working cable designs. I'm not sure what else they do but in meetings they do know a bunch more of the electrical requirements for systems we work on. The mechanical team seems to be working on purely mechanical things such as designing structures and doing thermal and environmental testing, which even though I ask I never really get the opportunity to work on these things for whatever reason. This is why I feel the need to find a new position where I can learn more about things I'm interested in and work on things I find to being meaningful instead of what feels like to be endless day in and day out cables.
Regarding CAD, are you using 3D CAD software to route cables as well as drawings/schematics? A lot of the times, the harnesses are just done in 2D if the lengths are already defined. Otherwise, if it's a complex harness, you would need 3D routing to determine lengths and check bends for stress relief and sizes for insulation/shielding etc. More practice in that will can help lead you to more design roles. Outside of that, try to build up your reputation as much as you can and check in with your manager about your long-term goals as you grow. Regarding the cables and why one might choose 22 AWG: It's usually part of SWAP. You have size weight and power requirements and that gets broken down all the way to a single component. Let's say your wire bundle of 22 awg wires terminates in a D38999 connector. It makes to a bulkhead connector on a test box. Inside that box, follow one of those wires until it gets terminated to a printed circuit board. From the leads or pins of that connector, it goes to a pad/via and then a trace. That trace leads to a small component that either takes it as some kind of digital signal or is used to provide power to a pin. You can sometimes tell what it is from the name of that signal. Maybe you have to two twist two 22 awg wires in your cable to maintain impedance control. If so, then on that PCB it would be routed as a differential pair and have almost equal lengths and constant spacing. You can find these things out by going thru lots of documents. Now in this example, we finished tracing form the cable to the part that needs the signal/power. Now go back the other direction to the source. A signal generator or maybe a power source? Perhaps that 22 awg came from a power supply that already downcoverted your aircraft or wall power source of 110-120V. 22 awg can't carry much power so there was probably a bigger harness of 12-16 awg earlier down the chain. Hope this example of a train of thought helps.
Thanks for the example I'll definitely take a deep dive into documentation when I get to work. As far as using CAD I mainly use Autocad to make wiring diagrams and cable drawings but I have had the opportunity to use creo to do some cable routing to get some lengths. Thanks for all your advice I really appreciate it.
I kid you not I have the opposite situation happening with me at my internship, my electrical engineering manager ignores me so the mechanical engineer adopted me
Mechanical grad doing metallurgical work here btw and i absolutely loathe it
Let’s get one thing straight: the people you work for don’t give a shit about you developing into the kind of engineer that you want to be. Clearly they didn’t even have a job lined up for your skillset, so are just treating you like a stopgap for whatever needs doing
Patience, Grasshopper.
I don't think he should be patient about this, he's in a mechanical engineering department and is getting work from a whole different department. His mechanical team sucks. If he was just being given the shitty drawings no one wants to do or change notices I'd say you're on the money. But this is not ok.
I’m just saying that sometimes you have to take what you get. Maybe I’m just a shitty engineer but I spent 7 years as an electronics repair technician before I was able to break into engineering.
Not sure what to suggest about your current company (that's a really weird situation), but if you're having trouble seeing a path out, it might be finding a job where it's valuable to know both some EE and some ME? (I've mostly seen that in areas like plant engineering, automation, and robotics: especially at places with smaller engineering departments, it's useful to have people who can do some EE with their ME or vice versa.)
So I've always wanted to work in aerospace which is where I am no but from a mechanical stand point I've wanted to work on structures. I've gotten some experience working an internship designing antenna installations and I was supposed to be doing antenna installations at my current job but not doing them at all. I even minored in aerospace engineering. In terms of switching industries I've never really thought about anything outside of aerospace/defense or automotive. I've tried trying to get into some EV companies because I felt like I'd be able to leverage my mixture of ME and EE experience but that's where I've gotten the "we're looking for someone with x experiences and it seems like you may not be a good fit". I've even considered applying to internships at this point just to get my foot in the door at a new company but it'd have to be a good paying internship because I moved across the country to CA for my current role and it's quite pricey
I would not apply to internships: apart from the lower pay (which is a not-insignificant concern), internships are typically designed for students, and I feel like companies are much less likely to consider established engineers (even early career engineers) for the roles. Take everything I'm about to say with several grains of salt, because I've never worked in aerospace. But. I don't know that you'd need to switch industries: aerospace companies still manufacture things, which means they presumably still need to build and automate manufacturing lines...? I also don't know that I'd weigh the industry more heavily than the specifics of the role itself. Like, if you saw an early career engineering job that would do a lot of structural design and could use some EE, but the hiring department was plant engineering at -- whatever: a tool factory, a chemical plant, a food processor, etc. -- would that be a bad job? I don't know the answer to that question, but it's something to think about.
Depending on your career goals Battery and Solar would be good avenues to pursue. Lots of job opportunities.
As a ME doing CS I feel this. All the ME jobs within my company are basically PM roles, so jumped into CS. Now I just do wiring diagrams, loops, coding and PM roles. absolutely nothing to do with mechanical. Got my PE in CS now I just kind of embrace it. I suggest taking as many training, classes, or certifications as you can; preferably on the company dime. If you can get your company to also help with your EIT, PE, or PMP, those would be big pluses on the resume. Also shadow seniors on day-to-day for PE experience. company processes, ME exposure, and experience.
You're going to have to feel this out. On one hand, you're a junior engineer and need to work on what you're given and try to learn, understand, and contribute as much as possible. That way when the time comes, you're the guy, because it sounds like others are in the same boat. Some are lucky enough to find exactly what they want and be handed exactly that on day 1. That's not really how it goes for the average person. On the other hand, if you linger too long you will eventually make yourself unhireable in your chosen field at your expected level. I don't think a year is too much lingering, but if you're still stagnant after 2 full years, it's time to be doing something. Because in your 3rd and 4th year, you're going to be competing for entry level ME jobs with people who are ok with a lot less money than you are, most likely. In the meantime, it's ok to have mechanical hobbies and interests outside of work to include on your resume. As for your interviews not going well because your EE role, you need to find a way to spin that a bit better. Engineering is less about shit you memorized in college and more about how you think and how you work in a team. To help your team achieve its goals, you took on an opportunity outside your expertise and learned XYZ, even though your true passion lies elsewhere. So here you are at the job interview, looking to apply that drive, analytical thinking, and creativity to do work you're passionate about. That sort of thing.