<p>One of the engineers I met at aecom water said that he does roughly half of his work on a computer. </p>
<p>It’s widely variant, even within a “discipline.” I can’t speak for mech, but for civil:</p>
<p>geotechs spend most of their time outside
structurals spend most of their time on the computer
civil/enviro is somewhere in between</p>
<p>and of course those are generalizations</p>
<p>“Mechanical engineers” is an even more nebulous term than “civil engineering.”</p>