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"I'm a mechanical engineer." Well there's your problem.
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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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See, I was a structural/mechanical designer up until not that many years ago, and the overwhelming majority of mech engineers I worked with were very competent. Also are you suggesting that a mech. Eng wouldn't specify a bracket off the shelf, it would go to a Chem eng for material selection? Because that's buck wild.
I'm just glad the office I worked for never handed drafting work over to engineers, we had one young guy who came in boasting that he could do the engineering AND the drafting and he didn't last long. Why would the business want to pay him an engineer's salary when I'm in the next chair, being paid half as much and able to do he job faster and better because it's What I Do?! And the crazy thing is I DO think engineers should be better paid than designers/drafters all else being equal. They carry a lot more responsibility and need a lot more education and that should be rewarded! But I still don't want to have to fix up some engineer's gross drawing to look like a professional drew it:p
They usually don't make the same mistake twice, I will give them that, but I have seen younger mechanical engineers do some pretty silly shit.
I was specifically talking about tanks and stuff like that, not like a standard bracket material selection. Most piping and tanks and stuff is either a team of mechanical and chemical or purely chemical, sometimes with a process or controls engineer thrown in depending on how much money is floating around.
That said, my father tells me all of that stuff used to fall within mechanical engineering, with chemical engineering really being limited to Petro, pharma and agriculture.
Still seems weird to have just chemical engineers involved in tank design. I wouldn't expect them to get any real education relevant to tank design, although I never worked with chemical engineers so I could just be unclear on what they do! Guess how much it matters also depends on the tank and application, the tanks I worked on were, for example, multiple gigalitre recycled oil tanks at a port, built on reclaimed swamp (:/) so chemical engineers weren't really relevant at all, but mechanical and structural engineers were vital.