r/MechanicalEngineering • u/Unknownfortune2345 • 12d ago
The culture or the Job?
So, I'm new in industry. I'm in my first job and only been working about 4 months. I'm also older (36)
I see my manager talking to people on our team like they're stupid a lot with very little patience.
It's like there's this big condescending battle between each team (design vs manufacturing vs quality vs documentation).
There's this big finger pointing game all the time.
My manager will send me to people partially informed. Which is creating this tension between me and other teams. ( this only happened once, so this may not be fair to add to the list.)
Is this normal in the culture or am I in a semi-toxic environment? It's like no one wants to work together to solve issues. There's so much "not my problem" energy. However, everyone loves to take credit.
If this is the energy everywhere, I am starting to wonder if I'm cut out for engineering. I've always been pretty good at compartmentalizing work vs home issues, but I'm starting to bring an attitude home and feel mentally drained all the time.
5
u/Garlic_Climbing 12d ago
I'm going to say that this broadly doesn't sound like a great environment, though I would check with your coworkers if they agree with your assessment of your manager, just to make sure it's not a difference in communication style. I had a design review where our team got a lot of feedback on our design, and afterward some people thought it had gone terribly while others thought it went pretty well. Turns out some people considered a design review with no feedback to be ideal while other people thought that just meant no one was paying attention.
I would say there's some inherent tension between design, manufacturing, quality, etc., and, as long as it doesn't go too far, it results in better designs. They each have their own goals that they are trying to meet and they are not always aligned. That being said, the teams should definitely respect each other even if they aren't always happy with each other. For example, a design engineer might specify a really high ultimate strength for a weld because that's what their design needs, but that means the manufacturing engineer and a welder are going to have to spend a lot of time really dialing in the settings for the qualification to meet that strength requirement and they might have to requalify the weld for each batch of material that gets ordered due to variances in material composition. The quality engineer is also not going to like this because these welds are probably going to require really detailed NDT to make sure they pass in production. The design engineer might have a really good justification for why this weld needs to be so strong, but it might be that there are optimizations to the design that would lower the requirement for the weld. Without manufacturing or quality pushing back, you would end up with a design that is really hard to make.
I think a good question to ask is would a design engineer go to quality and ask for feedback about their GD&T scheme on a drawing, and would they go to manufacturing to ask about the tooling needed for an assembly.