Parsifal1 said:
After searching about I've found numerous accounts of Engineers hating being stuck on CAD, and wanting something more involved. Personally, CAD has been my least favourite aspect of Engineering, so I wonder if this is the same for many others. I wouldn't fear the prospect of being say a design engineer, if CAD didn't exist and it was all paper, but being on CAD is just like you're a zombie clicking away and burning out your retinas. Lol.
Yeah, people don't like X, until they have to go back and learn how you did X before computers came along.
I started out learning drafting before there were cheap computers capable of running CAD, heck before there were cheap computers capable of running anything.
After spending the time to learn CAD and pick up some useful skills along the way, I use CAD for much more than making a stupid drawing. It can be incredibly helpful in planning and checking certain engineering calculations, for example.
Working on a drafting board was often physically quite tiring, standing up for long periods and bending over is not good for your lower back. Fiddling with pencil lead and keeping it sharp all the time so your line widths wouldn't vary too much. Getting eraser dust all over you, your clothes, etc. Cramping in your hands from holding a pencil for extended periods. And, you still got retina burn from staring at a (mostly) white sheet of drafting paper!
If you wanted to take a break and play a quick game of solitaire, it meant breaking out an actual deck of cards.
Most of my engineering undergraduate study was spent learning how to use pre-computer calculation tools to design boats. Lots of tabular form calculations calculating areas, volumes, moments, etc.; using analog tools like planimeters and integrators, heck, even cutting out cardboard models and pasting them together to check the location of a centroid. Of course, with so much time being required to do calculations, this left little time to actually design anything and get comfortable doing that. As soon as you make a change, then there's that mound of paperwork waiting, so that you can revise your calculations.
With CAD and computers doing most of the heavy lifting, you can design something in a few hours which previously took many weeks, if not months. You can check and revise your calculations in a fraction of the time, and actually spend a little time trying to optimize a design.