Engineers, All Other

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. An 11 reflects the split where tolerance stacks, FEA/optical model setup, requirements traceability matrices, and test-report drafting are already being handed to AI-assisted tooling, while aligning a laser bench, instrumenting a prototype, and working out why a robot cell drifts after 400 cycles still demand someone in the lab — if the work were purely simulation and documentation it would sit near 5, and if it were mostly field commissioning it would clear 15.

Some physical or field component. A 9 puts most of these engineers in a lab, test cell, or plant floor rather than an uncontrolled site: you do handle hardware, fixtures, oscilloscopes, and environmental chambers, but the conditions are engineered ones you control, unlike a wind-turbine or pipeline engineer climbing structures in weather, who would score in the mid-teens.

Certification preferred, not legally required. A 7 is the industrial exemption in practice — an EIT or a degree plus an internal design-review sign-off is what gates your work, and the PE stamp that would push this past 12 is only needed by the minority of you touching public works or offering services to the public.

Some relationship component. An 8 recognises that program managers and customer engineering teams come back to you by name because you know the failure history of the platform, but your deliverable is a validated design, a test report, or a working subsystem that another competent engineer could take over — the relationship shortens the ramp-up, it is not the product.

Meaningful discretion. A 13 sits at the top of real discretion: you decide whether a marginal qualification result is a real failure or a fixture artifact, whether to accept a supplier deviation, and when a design is ready for release — calls that get scrutinised in review boards and root-cause investigations, but that a chief engineer or safety authority formally owns rather than you.