There's a massive ongoing shakeout happening in lots of hardware industries. I won't name names but it's wild to have been operating for less than four years and watch companies that massively out-raised us rise and fall, and the funds that invested in them disappear completely, in just that space of time. Yes, generative destruction and all that. But the overall signal is that it's really hard to know what is legit.

The usual story is something like this. Raise $100m+. Hire hundreds of people far faster than any founding team could deeply screen for fit. Surface lots of technical problems. Attempt to solve them by throwing money at the problem (churn) rather than going back to requirements and deleting as much as possible. Usually spending on outside consultants and contractors, giving up control and moving the systems engineering layer into the legal department. Most people end up spending most of their time blocking or unblocking other people. I've interviewed people who worked within a fully staffed department (in a pre-revenue venture-funded startup) whose only job was to manually redraw CAD because their design contractor and manufacturing contractor (in a company that advertised itself as vertically integrated) used incompatible CAD tools. And their design contractor remained oblivious to DFM. Nice people, quite good at CAD, but no transferable experience to Terraform, because we don't have a department of fixing easily foreseeable problems that are incompatible with company success. Incidentally, "good at CAD" is an assumed level of competence for any interesting MechE job. Any basic tool like this cannot be a bottleneck to your performance in any situation, it is assumed knowledge, and listing it on your resume will pose more questions!