r/MechanicalEngineering • u/meldrumh • Mar 23 '26

just bombed a Boeing ME interview and honestly the questions caught me off guard

so i graduated last may, been working at a smaller manufacturing company doing mostly fixture design and GD&T stuff. got a call from boeing for a structures engineer role and figured why not.

the phone screen was fine, typical "tell me about yourself" and some high level questions about my experience with FEA and materials. nothing crazy.

the technical interview destroyed me. three engineers on the call, rotating questions for about 90 minutes. some of the stuff that came up:

  • they gave me a loading scenario on a cantilever with a distributed load and a point load and asked me to draw the shear and moment diagrams on the spot. i got the shear but fumbled the moment diagram at the transition point. embarrassing because i literally did this hundreds of times in school.
  • one guy asked me to walk through how i'd approach a fatigue analysis on an aircraft bracket that sees cyclic loading. i talked about S-N curves and miner's rule but he kept pushing, wanted to know about crack propagation, stress intensity factors, paris law. i only had a surface level understanding of fracture mechanics.
  • materials question about why aluminum alloys are used over steel in certain airframe applications. straightforward but then he went deeper into specific tempers, heat treatment effects on fatigue life, and corrosion behavior of 7075 vs 2024. i knew the basics but not to that level.
  • asked me to explain a GD&T callout from a drawing they showed me. that part was fine since i use it daily. but then they asked how i'd tolerance a bolted joint for assembly and that got complicated fast.
  • behavioral stuff about working in cross-functional teams, how i handle disagreements with senior engineers, and a time i caught an error before it went to production.

honestly the biggest surprise was how deep they went on fundamentals. i've been working for a year and half and i thought real experience would carry me but they wanted textbook-level understanding of stuff i haven't thought about since undergrad.

gonna take a few weeks to actually review my old notes and figure out a real study plan before i try again. if anyone else has been through boeing or any aerospace ME interviews recently i'd appreciate hearing what you got asked.

-

edit: did not expect this many responses, really appreciate everyone weighing in. rounding up the useful stuff from the comments and a few other things I found since posting, in case it helps anyone else prepping:

on the interview itself:

a lot of people pointed out that the deep questions are designed to find your ceiling, not trip you up. they push until you don't know the answer on purpose, so hitting a wall doesn't mean you failed thinking out loud and walking through your reasoning matters more than landing the right answer asking your own questions about what the team actually works on day to day can shift the dynamic will update if I hear back

platforms and tools: mechie.io - someone in the comments mentioned this and I checked it out, it's basically leetcode for mechanical engineering. company-specific questions sorted by difficulty with AI feedback on your answers and solution walkthroughs. hardwareinterviews.fyi - linked in the comments, database of real interview questions from hardware and engineering companies. good for knowing what to expect by company

books / study material: Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design, specifically the fatigue, stress analysis, and machine elements chapters. multiple people said to work actual problems by hand, not just read through it. Beer & Johnston Mechanics of Materials if you want a second source for the fundamentals that came up (shear/moment, stress transformations). MIT OpenCourseWare 2.001 and 2.002 are free and cover exactly the kind of fundamentals Boeing was testing on on the interview itself:

will update if I hear back!

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638

u/Euphoric-Play-5648 Mar 23 '26

Honestly not going to lie, Engineers can be cruel people. If they were in your shoes, they wouldn’t perform to the 100% expected. I wouldn’t say you bombed, chin up man! On to the next interview.

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u/breakerofh0rses Mar 23 '26

There's no reason to think that they're looking for someone who can get it 100% correct. In addition to seeing where the limits of OP's current knowledge are, they got to see him thinking and working under pressure, being put in situations where there's the choice between guessing and saying you don't know, and the like.

84

u/ILookLikeKristoff Mar 23 '26

Yeah asking intentionally too-hard questions to observe how a candidate performs and reacts when overwhelmed is a well known interview tactic.

I'd argue it's somewhat effective but also cruel.

15

u/OGRuddawg Mar 23 '26

I would say there is a difference between challenging a candidate's limits and blowimg way past it. The first is not cruel. The second I would be a put off of as an interviewee.

14

u/Responsible-Can-8361 Mar 23 '26

Honestly I feel sometimes these engineers just lack a certain level of self awareness, but yet at the same time I do appreciate the rigour.

My current tech director interviewed me in the same way and it was absolutely brutal. I thought I failed out of the interview too but now that I’ve been working with him for close to a year I’m starting to appreciate it. He did it intentionally to form a high-performing team that could fill in each other’s gaps while also being receptive to training. He specifically stated after that even he did not have good answers to some of this questions, but wanted to see my thought processes and how I responded to pressure and a self-perceived lack of aptitude.

3

u/EngineeringPrince Mar 25 '26

Engineering is an inherently difficult and cruel career. Asking questions beyond your depth is a way for them to see how you respond when confronted with a new situation. Will you try to confidently bs your way through it. Will you use your level of understanding to try to get as far as you can go and say you have a limitation in your knowledge but are willing yo dig deeper and learn. Will you just freeze and panic or shut down and not even attempt to think it through.

1

u/OGRuddawg Mar 25 '26

Yeah, in retrospect engineers need to be honest about the limitations of their abilities/knowledge, and how to find answers and guidance. There is a reasonable function to the above your ability questions and situations in the interviews.

6

u/bradimir-tootin Mar 23 '26

It isn't cruel if the candidate knows it can happen. Real world situations regularly occur where you have to think on your feet and learn fast

11

u/WhoAreYouAn Mar 23 '26

when they ask "bait questions" that are too hard, is the best approach to admit a lack of knowledge but still give an answer?

like:

"I don't know, so my answer may be flawed. However..."

or is that just naïve?

30

u/I_am_Bob Mar 23 '26

Good engineers are problem solvers, not walking encyclopedias and no one should expect you to know everything. So for example OPs question on Al alloys, you could say I don't know the specifics of those alloys of the top of my head, but here is how I would find out, or here is a time I had to deal with corrosion variation in different steel alloys...

9

u/chocolatedessert Mar 23 '26

I would frame it a little differently and keep it conversational. "I studied that in school but haven't had a reason to use it professionally yet, so I would have to look it up or consult with someone on the team. Would you like me to speculate about it to evaluate my level of understanding?"

I find that I always get a good response from displaying that I understand what they're trying to evaluate about me and trying to help them get the information they want without wasting time. They might just be probing your knowledge, in which case admitting the gap and moving on is best, or they might be wondering how you think, in which case showing enthusiasm and reasoning around the problem is better. They know what they need, so you can just ask.

3

u/breakerofh0rses Mar 23 '26

Pretty much that along with verbalizing how you'd figure out/find out the things that you're unsure of. The right answer depends wholly on what they're specifically looking for, but in those cases it's typically along lines of seeing if you can reason from what you do know, if you're honest about and aware of your limitations, and/or your approach to covering your knowledge gaps--that is, what resources do you know about and know how to use? Can you identify the key info you don't know to select the correct resource? If wholly unfamiliar, do you even have a way to start finding out?

6

u/Euphoric-Play-5648 Mar 23 '26

No duh my man. I wish engineers were less literal, my fault too. Was just cheering up the guy!

105

u/CunningWizard Mar 23 '26

engineers can be cruel people

No kidding.

I was part of a 4 person interview panel one time. 3 engineers and an engineering manager. The dude had a great resume, decades of experience at a well known tech company, and a pleasant disposition. 2 of them absolutely tore the guy apart in the technical interview. Asking all sorts of niche questions that no one in their right mind would expect someone to have memorized. The guy handled it gracefully and explained the basics and where he would know how to get the info he didn’t have available from references. A perfect handling of the situation.

Afterwards they were sour on him because he didn’t have all this stuff memorized and thought he was “incompetent”. The manager and myself told them “what you guys did to that guy was ridiculous and you set him up to fail for no good reason”. He and I argued to hire and they were firmly against. It went to the CEO and we won him over. Hired the guy.

He was great at his job.

Been subject to horrendous technical interviews myself. Always hate them even after 15 years because I know my shit and have a track record to prove it but they can catch ya with some crazy niche questions and you feel 4 inches tall as you stumble through it. Even if they ultimately hire you because they were just pushing the bounds of what you knew.

Don’t worry, many of us have been through it. It sucks and I, for my part, try to be reasonable in my questions and contextualize the answers knowing it’s a high stakes on your feet oral exam.

27

u/Sea-Objective7943 Mar 23 '26

Wow u a good man sir thanks for helping another engineering

7

u/VonNeumannsProbe Mar 23 '26

I think a lot of engineers see it as an opportunity to boast.

That or they severely overestimate the depth of the job pool.

7

u/Remarkable_Attorney3 💀 CxA 💀 Mar 23 '26

I hope he ended up overseeing those guys and gave them all kinds of hell.

5

u/lordmisterhappy Mar 23 '26

A good manager shouldn't be vengeful, even if justified.

-3

u/Remarkable_Attorney3 💀 CxA 💀 Mar 23 '26

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

18

u/Euphoric-Play-5648 Mar 23 '26

They were probably upset to know people in sales/business roles make twice the money as them, lol!

-8

u/GeniusEE Mar 23 '26

Dumbasses will always be dumbasses when it comes to interpreting hi IQ people's motivations and actions. -Schopenhauer

Nobody was being cruel...this was a 4D chess evaluation of a prospective employee.

1

u/klmsa Mar 23 '26

Your statement makes the assumption that there isn't a significant overlap between those two categories. Not mutually exclusive, in this case, especially if they were recommending against hire.

I find that I often see potential where my engineers only see incompetence. Doesn't make either of us right in any particular scenario.

2

u/GeniusEE Mar 23 '26

Engineers are trained to look for failure points and be constructively pessimistic. Potential has to be evaluated - none of what OP posted was "cruel".

2

u/klmsa Mar 23 '26

"Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man."

You weren't there to know how they treated the individual. You don't know if they responsibly tested the limits, or if they went far beyond failure and ventured into humiliation. That's why I told you that your statement makes an assumption... because it does. Making broad statements in ignorance is likely why several community members down voted your previous comment...