I can confirm that. While it's true that the MechE's at my workplace all have CAD seats, we also have a number of floating seats that get used by a variety of p

I can confirm that. While it's true that the MechE's at my workplace all have CAD seats, we also have a number of floating seats that get used by a variety of people. There are things you can do in the CAD tool, but not in the free "viewer" tool, so we provide CAD seats to our manufacturing engineers, who also use CAD to design things like jigs and fixtures. I believe it actually takes a bigger and more hierarchical engineering organization to have MechE's who are not busy at the CAD terminal a lot of the time. In addition, our machinist has a CAD seat, the machine shops that we use all have CAD seats. And while optical engineering is a small field, most OE's have CAD skills.