19 years experience. Static refinery equipment.  
CAD, Excel, Word and ASME Section VIII design programs are what I use most.
Most of it is analysis of designs or drawings in my case.
There is a lot of problem solving.
I am actually working on some light autocad coding but that is all of the programming that I have done since college.

This is not the case in the petrochemical industry. Most engineering for the refineries is done by the contractors and they typically get paid more than the engineers int he refineries. The refinery guys work lots of hours but are salary where as the contractors all get paid for every hour you work.



BSME - 20 years in petrochemical - all this years I always did calculations but never with the higher math like DifE and extremely rarely anything that looked like calculus. Lots of problem solving and trouble shooting and interfacing with the client to solve their problems. I enjoyed it because I would often get the hardest issues to work on since I solved them. ASME vessel and piping work required the most calculations with some hydraulics.



Last 16 year I have been working mainly firearms industry. Some calculations but most of it is fairly straight forward. Otherwise its design work with Solidworks which has a nice FEA package with it.



 

We have borderline retarded engineers I think it's just the GP way but usually it's the machine tenders and millwrights that catch hell for incompetent engineers.

Mechanical Engineer here

First place was surveying instruments product development.  Learned a lot.  Interesting products.  Focus on product design and testing with rigorous design analysis.  CAD heavy.

Second place was aerospace manufacturing.  Learned a lot.  Interesting products.  Focus on manufacturing ancient designs cheaply, save a buck anywhere possible, mostly through assembly process changes.  Lots of troubleshooting.  Microsoft Word heavy.

Third place is focused on maintenance and repair in a large old facility.  Still learning.  Interesting old machinery.  Far more independent project management than anywhere else.  Take a problem and point mechanics and electricians in the right direction to solve it.  Mix of CAD, planning, process creation, lots of field inspection and oversight.

Usually in the paper industry, engineering is a background role. Not much effort is given in mentoring or developing good engineers. Many companies have dropped their in house engineering and construction groups and rely on consultants that have no ownership in what they are designing or building. The result is many projects completed poorly and passed to operations and maintenance to fix.

I'm a thermal engineer (mechanical engineering degree) who designs, assembles, and operates custom test hardware for electronics thermal testing.  

The homework and exam problems you have in an undergrad degree are meant to teach you problem solving skills and the fundamental concepts of engineering.  They are not meant to be representative of what you'll actually do in industry.  I haven't had to solve ODEs or code a point jacobi solver, but it was still valuable to learn them at one point.  Programming, algebra, basic statistics, basic thermal analysis, and basic circuit analysis are the main engineering skills that I use frequently.  

I do have a bit of a "problem" (I guess if you want to call it that) with the engineers who brag about how they use 0% of what they learned in school at their engineering job.  I'm not sure why you're bragging about that.  You're either doing trivial work which you're overqualified for, or your employer hasn't yet caught on that they could get the same quality work from a non-engineer with a non-engineer salary.  The ability to apply the principles of physics in the form of mathematical equations to solve real world technical problems is what differentiates an engineer from a technician or a machinist.  And no, that doesn't mean that engineers are "better" than technicians or machinists, so let's not start that...

How do you get truck deliveries?

Loading docks or unloaded in the yard.