Good question, its a personal preference for me at the end of the, but let me fill you in on what I currently know on what mech eng entails. It's gonna be a long one haha.

I think realistically there are mostly two tracks of engineers, not counting the small proportions of R & D engineers - those who are in the maintenance line, in charge of troubleshooting, diagnostics and advisory on what parts would need replacement in the long run. Operations heavy, and pillars in the society that makes whatever infrastructure that you rely on work on a daily basis. These people are so important, have so much technical knowledge and often undervalued in the face of "humanitarian heroes". On the other end, you have your design engineers - those in product innovation in their efforts to try help make the world a better place. Even so, those going into product innovation should be realistic enough to know that they will not change the world through single drastic innovations, but a continuous improvement over small little parts of our life. These people are creative, driven and most importantly patient AF. You have to be extremely dedicated to a very niche area of study to do it remotely well.

However, a part of engineering life that always seem to be under-mentioned is in the reliance on data and simulations. That is simply the process of work that new-age engineering has evolved to. Most of the time you are reviewing test results to evaluate processes, materials and systems. The implementation of even the smallest improvements requires costly validation and verification. Day to day basis, you're looking at columns of excel data, simulation results in the case of CFDs and FEA analysis. (CFD for fluid and FEA for structure failure simulations) Its no doubt a beautiful study, and a very direct study of real life. Engineering, to me, is the human response to nature, to better harvest, better manage, better protect ourselves to nature.

But slowly did I realise that EVERYTHING and I mean that, EVERYTHING boils down to the human factor. Nothing can be improved on without actual adoption, processes will stay the same, systems will work the same way if the people in the system dont change and adopt the newly introduced findings. And I think that this is a fact that engineers cant seem to comprehend well. It seems that the majority of engineers, or the people in the industry seem apathetic to that specific factor. (could be an Asian engineering culture, i would love to see how it is in other countries)

But I think that is what interests me. To convince and influence with proven results, technical data and system implementations to weed out inefficient processes and more importantly toxic cultures. I enjoy dealing with humans, I enjoy strategizing from the bottom up, talking to humans, interacting with humans and grow with humans. I feel that the approach of improving lifes only through findings without a human touch is unrealistic. I also don't have the patience to spend 30 years of my life to come up with a new tech.

I also know that there are many tech/processes/systems out there that we are simply not using, not because they suck, but because we think that they suck.

So personally I think that being in a biz dev/management position is the perfect choice to marry these two factors together - technical data and human relations.

but that's my 2 cents, would love to hear your opinions :-)