Places like this still exist to some extent. I’m employed at one. I work as an engineer at a factory that makes engineers and constructs large pre-fab steel structures. It’s the first engineering job I’ve had that is a part of an actual manufacturing facility. I’ve always done work at engineering consulting firms or been teaching. The culture is very different than my previous positions. It’s definitely a more blue collar environment. On the engineering, drafting, estimation, and HR side (the office work), it’s pretty much exclusively through online applications. However we do get walk-ins for positions in the shop. People do sometimes walk in the office door and ask cold to apply for a welder or other fabricator position.
As for why the difference? I suppose in theory someone could do a walk-in for an office position, but that’s not something I’ve ever seen. Those are fewer, less frequently available, and far more specialized. If you’re a good welder? If you really know what you’re doing, you could get a job with us, regardless of what industry you worked in prior. If you can read a set of drawings and move your body in the subtle ways necessary to make that drawing real, then you can do at least some of the work in the fab. And the rest you can learn as you go. But the engineering side is fairly specialized. Even among engineers, even among just the engineering discipline most relative to our work, only one in a hundred engineers selected at random would be familiar with the codes we design to. And I suppose there’s also a cultural factor. Maybe when you work behind a screen all day, applying to jobs through a screen is most natural. If your work is all physical and in-person, applying for jobs that way is natural. Oh, and for the welders at least, it’s very difficult to bullshit your way through the interview process. We can ask prospective engineers technical questions in an interview. We can give them model projects to test their skills, but there’s no real way to prevent cheating. If someone really wanted to, they probably could hire someone to complete a test project we might ask them to do. But the welders? There’s no bullshitting the process. Part of the hiring process is direct skills demonstration. You create a test weld while being directly observed. That weld specimen is then immediately tested to failure, on-site, there and then. You can either do the work or you can’t. Maybe this kind of “prove your skills” character of the work makes walk-in applications more possible. Also, I do not get me wrong. I think the walk-ins are the exception, not the rule, even for our shop guys. We do get walk-ins, but I believe most do come in through references or online resume submissions. Oh, and I suppose one other factor may just be the ownership structure. The company is still majority owned and run by the original founder. So it’s pretty much what he says goes, for good or for ill. Even if this isn’t the norm in most corporate cultures, it is here simply because he likes it that way.
But yeah, I literally work at a place where now, in the Year of Our Lord 2026, you can still show up completely unannounced, walk in the front door, fill out a paper application, and potentially get a pretty solid job without ever touching an online application. It’s not easy work. Half the people who start in the fab quit after the first week. It’s hot, cold, hard, dirty work shaping steel into large structures using enormous heavy equipment. And I’m not talking some minimum wage gig either. This is skilled welding work, and the pay is commensurate with that. I’m also not in some backwards place time forgot. IDK. For example, I’m not working in some crazy post-Soviet factory in a Central Asian nation that should have been shut down 20 years ago. I live in the US.
But indeed, it does still exist. I literally work at a place you can still do this today.
Places like this still exist to some extent. I’m employed at one. I work as an engineer at a factory that makes engineers and constructs large pre-fab steel structures. It’s the first engineering job I’ve had that is a part of an actual manufacturing facility. I’ve always done work at engineering consulting firms or been teaching. The culture is very different than my previous positions. It’s definitely a more blue collar environment. On the engineering, drafting, estimation, and HR side (the office work), it’s pretty much exclusively through online applications. However we do get walk-ins for positions in the shop. People do sometimes walk in the office door and ask cold to apply for a welder or other fabricator position.
As for why the difference? I suppose in theory someone could do a walk-in for an office position, but that’s not something I’ve ever seen. Those are fewer, less frequently available, and far more specialized. If you’re a good welder? If you really know what you’re doing, you could get a job with us, regardless of what industry you worked in prior. If you can read a set of drawings and move your body in the subtle ways necessary to make that drawing real, then you can do at least some of the work in the fab. And the rest you can learn as you go. But the engineering side is fairly specialized. Even among engineers, even among just the engineering discipline most relative to our work, only one in a hundred engineers selected at random would be familiar with the codes we design to. And I suppose there’s also a cultural factor. Maybe when you work behind a screen all day, applying to jobs through a screen is most natural. If your work is all physical and in-person, applying for jobs that way is natural. Oh, and for the welders at least, it’s very difficult to bullshit your way through the interview process. We can ask prospective engineers technical questions in an interview. We can give them model projects to test their skills, but there’s no real way to prevent cheating. If someone really wanted to, they probably could hire someone to complete a test project we might ask them to do. But the welders? There’s no bullshitting the process. Part of the hiring process is direct skills demonstration. You create a test weld while being directly observed. That weld specimen is then immediately tested to failure, on-site, there and then. You can either do the work or you can’t. Maybe this kind of “prove your skills” character of the work makes walk-in applications more possible. Also, I do not get me wrong. I think the walk-ins are the exception, not the rule, even for our shop guys. We do get walk-ins, but I believe most do come in through references or online resume submissions. Oh, and I suppose one other factor may just be the ownership structure. The company is still majority owned and run by the original founder. So it’s pretty much what he says goes, for good or for ill. Even if this isn’t the norm in most corporate cultures, it is here simply because he likes it that way.
But yeah, I literally work at a place where now, in the Year of Our Lord 2026, you can still show up completely unannounced, walk in the front door, fill out a paper application, and potentially get a pretty solid job without ever touching an online application. It’s not easy work. Half the people who start in the fab quit after the first week. It’s hot, cold, hard, dirty work shaping steel into large structures using enormous heavy equipment. And I’m not talking some minimum wage gig either. This is skilled welding work, and the pay is commensurate with that. I’m also not in some backwards place time forgot. IDK. For example, I’m not working in some crazy post-Soviet factory in a Central Asian nation that should have been shut down 20 years ago. I live in the US.
But indeed, it does still exist. I literally work at a place you can still do this today.
Engines?