Would one be able to get a good job with nothing more than a working knowledge of AutoCAD? I mean someone with a non-engineering degree.
My dad seems convinced that having strong AutoCAD skills can get one a job as a designer for machinists and fabricators, but that sounds iffy. I’d think they’d want an ME, or maybe a degree in graphic design. Anyone know if knowledge of just this one program can get one a decent job?
Being a machinist or engineer will help you with AutoCAD to some degree, but it’s not a requirement. Certainly the friend of mine who does AutoCAD work for a major PC company isn’t either of those (or even an architect, and he’s drawing up floor plans).
So, yes, you can make a career of it without being a machinist or engineer.
Tuckerfan, a machinist who can’t use AutoCAD.
Companies here are dying for good AutoCAD technicians. It’s a good skill to have, IMO, because no matter what you can get a good paying position with it and still pursue other career options.
OTOH I have many friends who make a good living as CAD draftsmen. It’s just as much skill as art, the further you get into it.
“Designers” often are techinically oriented folks who, one way or another, didn’t get their engineering degree. Again, these people are highly sought in my area. At many of the bigger engineering/architecture firms, these folks do a whole lot of the design, which the engineer/architect reviews and then passes on.
I dunno your age, dnooman, but my 20 yr old daughter is working as a CAD drafstman while she goes to college. It pays much better than waiting tables or selling clothes at the dress shop - probalby 3 times more. She can work part time and make more than she can 40 hrs in food service. In the mean time, she’s racking up valuable skills which she can always fall back on, should the case arise.
I say, go for it. 
Companies here are dying for good AutoCAD technicians. It’s a good skill to have, IMO, because no matter what you can get a good paying position with it and still pursue other career options.
OTOH I have many friends who make a good living as CAD draftsmen. It’s just as much skill as art, the further you get into it.
“Designers” often are techinically oriented folks who, one way or another, didn’t get their engineering degree. Again, these people are highly sought in my area. At many of the bigger engineering/architecture firms, these folks do a whole lot of the design, which the engineer/architect reviews and then passes on.
I dunno your age, dnooman, but my 20 yr old daughter is working as a CAD drafstman while she goes to college. It pays much better than waiting tables or selling clothes at the dress shop - probalby 3 times more. She can work part time and make more than she can 40 hrs in food service. In the mean time, she’s racking up valuable skills which she can always fall back on, should the case arise.
I say, go for it.
What sorts of things aggravate you on technical drawings? I saw many things that might make a machinist possibly upset, depending on their preference (i.e. dimensions listed vertically as well as horizontally, awkward positioning of instructions etc.).
What should a draftsman be wary of as far as keeping the machinist happy?
I’ll second the opinions above – most people that use AutoCAD to earn their living (i.e., it’s the bulk of their job) are not engineers. Working engineers have more varied, urgent things to do than play with AutoCAD all day long.
Yes, just knowing AutoCAD won’t make you a good draftsman. You should also take a course (if you can find one!) in manual drafting. If you are going to make machine drawings, you would do well to learn about the various manufacturing processes so that your dimensions and tolerances make sense. Some things you can only learn by having a machinist come an tell you “do it like this!”.
I’m a firefighter that uses AutoCad almost weekly - plan reviews are much easier (on the part of the drawer) when they aren’t printed out yet. Don’t get me wrong, I like scrolling through a set of paper plans, but before stuff is finalized, I’ll get the .dwg and go through it to offer “suggestions.”
So even if you’re not a draftsperson, engineer, or architect, AutoCad can be a useful skill.
The truth is it’s a jungle out there, and it’s getting worse. It’s survival of the fittest now more than ever, and the more tricks you have up your sleeves, the better. If you know CAD, that’s just ok. But, you could be readily replaced by a ME when the competitive marketplace forces your employer for a higher notch of quality or more precision designed parts, high-tech materials, etc.
Along with this, the MEs are under more and more pressure to get their FE (EIT) certification. And, after that, then there’s more pressure than ever to get your PE.
(Even MEs under pressure to know CAD, so a ME can do the job of two people.)
Yup, it’s a jungle out there. Just knowing CAD can send you hopping from job to job never developing a stable work environment, always sending out resumes, potential loss of retirement fringe benefits, etc. Or, leave you stagnant in a dead-end job which is equally frustrating.
Think big…it’s the only way to stay one step ahead of the kid coming up fast and furious behind you. Also, pick an undergrad, accredited ME program that’s as cheap as possible. Save your money for grad school. Yes, it never ends…
That said, it’s still no gravy train once you’ve reached the top of your game. My advice? For all that hard work, you’re better off going to med school. At least doctors are respected whereas MEs are shit upon…and medicine is an open-ended career. The ME life is that of a hired-hand, on an as-needed basis. Take the auto industry, for one. Besides, how many times does someone in the general public (i.e. the people you’ll date, etc.) say to a doctor “What does a doctor do, anyhow?” :mad:
Sounds grim, but you better get used to it,
The auto industry’s actually pretty stable, unless you’re a contractor. But then that’s the whole point of contracted services. Of course here “ME” is manufacturing – not mechanical – engineering. There’s also not a whole lot of pressure for PE’s at the middle-of-the-road level and you can live a super life without one (me, for example). And non-contractors typically use CAD for product or facilities reference; contracted designers (or design houses) do all the “real” work.
Form follows function. Never add anything to a part or drawing that doesn’t have to be there. It takes longer to make and time = money. Do make it any harder to make than necessary.
I once made a prototype of a little fixture to hold a part so it could be polished. A young man was given the fixture and he measured each and every bit of it and made a drawing on autocad. The drawing came to my shop with a request to make 10 pieces.
There problems with it. All the dimensions were set to the fourth decimal. +/-.0000 Also it had extra features that had nothing to do with the function of the part. Every single nook, cranny, hole, side and feature had lines and arrows and notes all over it. (I expected to find a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was.) I pretended not to know what it was and quizzed the lad why there were a couple of grooves and a second hole in the other end from where it would hold the part. He said he didn’t know. Also why were such tight tolerances asked for on a simple throw away tool? That he had no excuse for. The default tab was set at four and he left it that way.
I poured him a coffee and took him to my shop and explained why it would take three times as long to make with the silly tight tolerances and that the extra grooves and hole were on the non working end because they were on the left over piece of material I made the prototype on. They had nothing to do with the part.
Next few drawings from him were much simpler and cleaner. No extra clutter and the critical features stood out from all the background.
Hell with autocad, become a machinist it’s more fun. You get to play with sharp tools and make fun of engineers all the time.
Check out the field of cartography.
Usually,Autocad is used for designing–i.e. making pictures of things that will later be built according to the details you draw. And in most cases, you can’t draw something without first knowing how it works. Most companies dont need a “draftsman”–they need a technician. Someone who is trained in architecture, or electronics, or mechanical engineering, and can use his knowledge to draw precise details of what the engineer designs.
But there is one major exception: maps. A mapmaker doesn’t design something new which doesnt exist yet–he’s doing the opposite: taking what exists out there on the ground, and making a precise copy of it. It’s a wide and diverse profession–involving land surveying, aerial photography, data base management. (collectively known as GIS–geographical information systems.) You can get a Phd in it— or you can start out on the ground floor as a draftsman.
AutoCAD is a very useful program, and it is used in many different fields. That’s good news for someone who enjoys using AutoCAD. Me? I could sit around all day working in ACAD. (And my brother-in-law just plays Everquest all day…)
My advice? Try using AutoCAD. If it’s something you think you like, then try using it some more. The point is, you need to find out if you REALLY enjoy using it. If you do enjoy the program, and you enjoy the process of creating with it, then you can concentrate on getting really good at it…
When you’re a skilled and efficient programmer/designer/problem solver in AutoCAD, you can apply those skills to getting a job in whatever field interests you the most. As you can see from the earlier posts, there are lots of industries that use AutoCAD. So you can take your skill in AutoCAD and combine it with your interst in - well, whatever you’re intersted in. Even as I type this, I am on a break from preparing installation sheets for equipment that I designed in 3D using AutoCAD 2006. The job I shipped out last week went to the Pentagon, and this job is headed for a courthouse in upstate NY. For me, 10 years of AutoCAD proficiency is a perfect compliment to my other skills and interests, and I’ve turned it into a great career. I still can’t believe they pay me to play with this stuff…
I’m an engineer for a telecommunications consulting firm; we deal almost entirely with outside plant - the conductors and related equipment that gets hung on poles and buried in the ground - CATV, telephone and FTTx. We use both AutoCAD and Microstation extensively - for construction type drawings, for permit drawings, for plant schematics, for planning future services (although we’re using GIS more and more for that kinda stuff), for equipment locating and inventories when a client doesn’t know what they’ve actually got in the field, and lotsa other smaller things.
We did a Fiber To The Home engineering/design/permitting job in 2003; the final sheet count for the network layout and permit applications ran to over 2500 d-size pages - lotsa drafting. Part of my role here is management of the CAD/GIS department. That kinda fell to me because I’ve got the most CAD experience; I’ve been using AutoCAD for over 15 years for all kinds of stuff - steel work, sheet metal fabrications, electronics packaging, plant layout, machine design, land use, circuit board layout, the aforementioned flavors of communications networks, etc.
All the engineers/designers here have some experience with either (or both) AutoCAD and Microstation and are expected to be able to use it efficiently. We don’t hire anyone to fill an engineer or designer role who doesn’t have CAD experience. Entry level guys we’ll train if need be. CAD, while it used to be a pretty specialized skill, is rapidly becoming just another tool, much like a spreadsheet or word processor. In fact, we have several third party applications used for engineering and design work that sit on top of a CAD package using them as a graphics engine with some kinda of RDBMS behind it; we simply could not efficiently design or engineer a communications network without a reasonable set of CAD skills.
We’re a pretty small company, about 20 total employees and we have 8 AutoCAD installations and an equal number of Microstation seats. Then there’s the third party stuff - three application that sit on top of AutoCAD and three that emply Microstation. My point of all that rambling is that CAD and CAD skills are extremely important to us.
What I recommend to you is obtaining a solid background in CAD, and then using that to leverage your way up the ladder. That is, get yourself in the door someplace by taking a drafting type position where you can get a broad range of types of drafting. From there, you’ll be able to find what kind of work you like and push your way into a more design-oriented role. We use contracted CAD guys and temp agencies to fill in when we get a large project which requires a lot of drafting work and that may be a good place to start. You can get a wide range of experience thru something like that. But I do not recommend staying at a place like that for more than a year or two. You’ll find some aspect you enjoy more than others, and you can go after a more permanent type position in that area.
I worked as a machinist (or really machinist lackey) for a summer, which, though I do not have the skills to work as one professionally, taught me a lot about how to be a better engineer. Here are some of the problems we regularly encountered:
The biggest problem we had were engineers drawing 2D plans and forgetting what had to be done to make them 3D. When you bend metal you have to compensate for the thickness of the metal to get the final dimension you want. The way you do this changes depending on whether the final dimension you want is an interior or exterior dimension.
Accuraccy. As Mr. Goob mentioned, there is a world of difference between 0.2 and 0.200. Knowing what does and does not need to be exactingly accurate is critical.
What gets dimensioned. If you have three points on a line: A, B, and C, you can only define two lengths. For example, if you give the length of AB and BC you cannot define AC. That will just be the sum of the other two plus the sum of their errors. The one you don’t define will be the least accurate, so make sure you define the correct ones. If you stupidly give all three, the machinist has no idea which are critical.
Desgin for manufacture. Mr. Goob said it best, so I will leave this one alone.
I’m an engineer working at a civil/environmental engineering consulting firm. I’m in a branch office with about 12 employees. We are actively looking for a couple of AutoCAD drafters right now. Proficiency with AutoCAD is required, but prior experience in civil drafting is not, nor is an engineering degree (or any degree) a requirement.
Our main drafter (who has a math degree, BTW) is completely overwhelmed right now. We’ve been keeping things afloat by making the engineers take up some of the drafting slack, and using interns. However, this can be problematic as well, as our most junior engineer just quit after doing nothing but CAD work for a year.
So anyway, I would say that AutoCAD proficiency is a fairly marketable skill, and an engineering degree is not required. Starting pay for a drafter is about $20-22/hour here.
I should that “mastery” adds a level to this that’s been ignored so far. If you’re looking to - eventually - work your way into an engineering/design type role, “mastery” is most definitely not the route you wanna go. All you need is a decent working knowledge. To my way of thinking, “mastery” would entail having the ability to write applications to run on the CAD platform; if you wanna be a third-party software/application developer for CAD, then yeah, “mastery” is the route to go. But if you want a job where CAD is just another in your set of software tools, “mastery” is excessive. Having the ability to write simple macros and customizing the interface would be desireable, though. These are relatively simple things to do.
At my workplace, we don’t use AutoCAD at all. Wait, I’ll take that back–some engineers have personal copies they use for simple drawings or to check fits–but all of our official work is done in Pro-Engineer, a 3D CAD package.
I forgot to add that as a company becomes larger, the need for engineers to be CAD masters decreases. Although I have Pro-E and use it to bang out quick drawings, for anything remotely complicated, I hand my sketches to someone on our drafting staff, because that’s what they’re for.
disclaimer: I’m not trying to insult our drafting staff. They get paid to work on CAD files all day long, whereas I have other tasks I need to accomplish.
You sad, sorry bastard. “Sketch will not regenerate.” “Circular reference; cannot regenerate model.” “Mechanism joint poorly defined.” “External reference missing; delete or exit model retrevial?” And the classic: “Do you want to exit Resolve Feature Mode?”
I have it on good authority that the Granite kernel is some of the most convoluted, undocumented spaghetti code ever written, and their attempts to make the datafiles encrypted and unusable by any other application have resulted in significant lags in interoperability with analysis codes. I curse Parametric Technologies and their bloody-minded lord-over marketing strategy; they’re almost as bad as McNeil Schwindler Corp for price gouging and bad-mouthing the competition.
But if you’re going to be a mechanical design engineer at a major corporation, you’d better be willing to learn this and/or Catia. I haven’t even seen, much less used AutoCAD in nearly a decade, and while SolidWorks and SolidEdge are fair dinkum packages for parametric solid modeling, they haven’t made much inroads with the major players.
As for the OP’s question, you may be able to get a job with just AutoCAD skills, but while it’ll be better than being fry guy at McDonalds, you’re going to be limited as to how far you can go. A 2 year technical degree will get you somewhat further, but my perception has been that companies seem to be looking for degrees over experience; the current employer (a major aerospace/defense contractor, no doubt soon to be gracing the front page of the Wall Street Journal as involved in some scandal or another) won’t even look at you for a technical position unless you have at least a BS in the relevant field; never mind that some of our best people are undegreed (or degreed in a nontechnical area) who either grandfathered in or obtained their positions by a little talent we call nepotism. Some of our most useless people, on the other hand, sport multiple PhDs but can’t seem to do a simple data sort in Excel without making a major production of it; go figure.
Several people have made good comments about what it takes to be a good mechanical designer (which is quite different from a mechanical engineer), but flight summed it up succintly, and I can’t think of anything else to offer other than to reinforce the notion that you should give weight to the opinions of your manufacturing people (process engineers, welders, machinists, even quality inspectors) in regard to not only how to design a piece, but to design it in a way that is cost-effective and practical to build. Knowing the software is a useful skill, but it does not in any way make a good designer.
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