Mechanical engineering is not hard because the physics is hard.
The complex CAD was not the hard part. Neither was correlating simulation data against real injection-molded parts. That is the job. What took the time was admin, and it came from three places.
Version control. We were locked into CATIA V5 because the previous generation of the product lived there and our vendors only had V5. When a design was ready for production we exported it into 3DEXPERIENCE by hand, then fought the entire PDM process. To check a part in you exported it, opened it in the new environment, dug deep into the product tree, created new parts on the master product, and waited days for approval. Change Actions took a week-long seminar to learn. I dreaded doing them. They made me anxious.
Once a month, fifty mechanical engineers sat in a room for two hours and spun the CAD by hand looking for interferences. There was no clash detection. Just notes.
Visual collaboration. Design reviews every three or four days, one to two hours each. You built a PowerPoint of screenshots and markups, an Excel for the tolerance stacks, then spun the live CAD while people called out changes. You opened a screenshot tool on top of the CAD software, marked it up, and hoped you remembered to save it. Most of the annotations went nowhere. The context lived in a personal OneNote, or in somebody’s head.
Four hours a week, and then a follow-up meeting because the first one did not stick.
Engineering decisions. I was dropped onto a subsystem after the previous team had left or been laid off. Two weeks chasing the people who ran validation and testing. Three weeks in Confluence, Jira, and hundreds of Excel files, working out what had already been decided and what the open risks were. Then I repeated tests and CAD investigations somebody had already run, because nothing connected them to anything.
Five weeks of an engineer’s time before I could start the work I was hired to do.
The most useful thing I produced in those five weeks was a OneNote document that lived on my laptop.
Software had its moment. GitHub, Linear, Jira. Version control, visualization, and a place for the why behind a change. Hardware is still sewing together screenshots, PowerPoints, and institutional memory that walks out the door. Most mechanical engineers do not love their tools. They use them because we have always used them.
Hardware is moving fast. The workflow tools are not.
The workflow is broken.