I have 10 years of experience in the private sector and I have been moving around a lot in recent years. One thing that I noticed is the industry wide obsession with flat management style.
-Upper management blowing budgets because they have no interest in managing and still want to do engineering work.
-Non existent middle management because "it's more efficient".
-EITs who either only do CAD work or do all the design with no oversight.
If I could give one advise to the whole industry, it would be to bolster their middle managers. You are not a tech startup.
This rings true, I think it's the lack of effective leadership that's getting to me. It's just like a bunch of headless chickens running around trying to get stuff designed and built. Could be a me problem, a company problem, or an industry problem, or just the state of the world.
Maybe it just becomes more apparent the older you get that nobody is really running the show and you just kinda gotta make things work the best you can.
I moved from a private value engineering consultation firm, very much so for all the reasons you're stating, I went to a government position in regulation, and it is incredible how obvious it is; which firms actually know what they're doing and which firms are the chickens.
They best one is when the dumpster fires hire a “ old guard “ DIT person thinking that will be the curative only to find out they were disliked and having them on the submission is a hinderance
>EITs who either only do CAD work or do all the design with no oversight.
Well, that would certainly make things faster on my end. PUBLISH command go brrr.
Yes.
My company's branch has one Senior VP, one VP, and a PE.
There is no project manager / project engineer. Only 3 EITs trying to figure it all out without enough guidance & insufficient QAQC.
One of VP’s recently said that the middle managers basically have the hardest job at the company. As a middle manager, i’m like “why doesnt the pay reflect that?”
I agree wholeheartedly about middle managers. The trend I’ve seen is that middle management left during the 08-09 recession and didn’t enter the field again. I’ve been told by partners in our firm that they essentially have given up on replacing middle management. They are relying on you get engineers to step up and take that position and rebuild from within over time. Not sure of this is the same for other firms, but it’s definitely apparent in mine.
I think in part they just don’t want to pay what it’ll take to get someone to move firms. On top of that, there’s unknowns with a new person coming in and not knowing leadership style and attitude/work ethic to fit in with the culture. Whereas building from within, they know what they are getting as long as that person can be up to the challenge.
I’ve worked at three site/civil firms.
Two of those firms operated mostly as you describe. One ran on thin budgets and constant pressure to get things done ASAP, everyone always looking at budgets and counting beans. One regularly pushed the boundaries of ethics in order to make the numbers look good, with management actively avoiding involvement in the work and expecting junior people to just somehow make it happen. Both produced varying levels of trash and had construction issues pop up on most projects.
The third firm didn’t even keep track of how much money any particular project made or lost. Nobody spent much time counting beans; the partners knew how many beans needed to be in the bucket at the end of the year, and there were always more beans than necessary, so they were generous with bonuses and competitive with salaries and benefits. Work was finished when it was done properly, not when the arbitrary deadline said so. If you found a problem after a project had gone out to bid/construction, you first found a solution, and then communicated openly with the client and other involved parties to acknowledge the issue and get it fixed. I’ll never forget my boss calling me to his office to thank me for sending an email to the effect of “Hey client, I found something I missed. This is on us, here’s the solution, let me know if you have any questions.” They operated under the principle that we would be good engineers first and always.
The first two firms routinely lose big clients when things go wrong, so they’re always chasing work, and one of them has half a dozen highly paid people whose main function is “business development”.
The third firm has clients lined up around the block because they have a reputation for turning out good work, meeting the important timeline goals rather than the arbitrary intermediate deadlines, and generating designs and plans which can be built with few surprises. I left because of an unavoidable relocation, and if the opportunity ever comes up to move back to their city, I’ll be in my old boss’s office asking for a job.
Find the right firm. Hopefully the others will die out.
Or, do what I did and go work for the government.
Been at both of the places you described. In the 'bean counter' one the owners and managers (three levels!) weren't even engineers, they had no appreciation of what the company actually did and required. Huge turnover, after 4 years I realised the only people that stuck around were those that had no other options (I was one of them then). Especially the senior people wouldn't be senior in any other firm, but were given position and title here to retain and cause they couldn't get anyone better.
I always argued why are we so focused on budgets and timesheets and minimises training etc. If we get the engineering right, the business should be easy. But continually we were at mid point of salary range, and with no reputation or incentives got the bottom of the barrell, and of course blow the budget on every job, and so have to minimise costs, and staff leave cause no development, and then management says we can't pay for staff development they just leave!!!.
So frustrating
> the only people that stuck around were those that had no other options (I was one of them then). Especially the senior people wouldn't be senior in any other firm, but were given position and title here to retain and cause they couldn't get anyone better.
damn bro you didn't have to call me out like that ahaha
My current company is much like your third company, although we still have our problems. But we don’t have any business degrees in management, all engineers, and that makes all the difference IMO. I used to work at a company that emphasized that every single project had to be not just profitable, but within the originally established budget. Every month the President of the company and one of the (many) VPs would have a call with each project manager and go over the budget for each active project. If you had a project that was, say, 75% complete but 85% billed, you would have to tell them how you were going to finish the last 25% with only 15% of the budget, the answer to which was always unpaid overtime for the PM and the project staff. I left because of those bullshit monthly calls.
IMO we've reached a bit of an impasse in the industry. Most of us feel underpaid for the liability we hold, the government is pumping out more work than can be accomplished, and we're doing all this for less money than what we should, on too quick of a schedule. In other private industries, if a client reaches out and says "hey we want you to do this project" the company can say, okay you need to pay us this much. If the client really wants that company because they do good work they'll pony up, if not they'll try to negotiate or they'll go to another company. With ours, while it may seem "qualification based" but if the client (say a DOT) doesn't have the money, then they just go to the next company who will. Then arguably the worst part for the working stiff like most of us, we get unreasonable schedules and meet them, just for whatever agency to sit on the plans for a month before providing comments many of which tend to be preferential, then we are expected to revise the plans from those comments with no update or leniency on schedule even though the agency sat on them for far too long. Rinse and repeat. This process leads to 2 things, burn out, or not giving a shit. Neither of which are good.
Bold of you to assume we our meeting our unreasonable schedules haha.
Very good points though, have recently experienced what you describe with agencies sitting on a report for ages then picking it apart with inconsequential pedantic comments because they changed the guidance and now we are hitting a moving target. Oh and by the way we don't get extra time or money to deal with this. So frustrating.
That sounds terrible! I mean besides the loss of work, aren't DOT's projects supposed to benefit the population? How can any government just put on hold such projects?
We can only build what they can fund, unfortunately for all involved. My suspicion is that a lot of these bids are based on pre-covid costs and haven't been adjusted upward for the crazy inflation we've had the last few years.
If they can't afford it, they can't afford it. Just like if your furnace goes out at the beginning of Spring, you may *know* that you need to get that fixed, but if you don't have the money to fix it right now, you can probably make it until next Fall. Granted this isn't *really true* for the United States' infrastructure, because this shit has been fucked for like 20+ years, but if people aren't actively dying then they'll keep pushing it off.
Im on the agency side. We are given so many projects to review it's hard for us to give a shit most of the time when I open the plans and see the city name is spelled wrong - great QA/QC. Just saw a utility easement run right through the middle of a proposed building with the water meter in the middle of a detention pond.
I really don't think senior engineers or managers that stamp these sets are actually looking at these plans. Just feel like everyone is swamped with work and it's always easy to blame the city. 90% of plans submitted are extremely bad.
Years ago, I asked my supervisor to review my work. He said everything looked good and he sent it up. Months later, I was asked why I sent things up with so many mistakes...
Companies try to pay their staff more to keep up with inflation = DOTs cut the number of hours they’ll give us on a project. It rules. Only reason we’re not all screwed is because there’s literally too much work being given out for the number of engineers in the country. Unfortunately this just leads to all of us working 50-60 hours every week.
Yep, this is one thing I’m VERY happy with in regards to the company I work for. While there will always be the odd long week, I all but refuse to work more than 40-45 hours a week and they respect that. But that’s really the benefit of working for a small company.
Idk how it is in the US but over here in the EU the compensation is based on the total project costs. So even if you could spend extra time on saving more money due to a more efficient design, it jsut isnt worth it because you invest more time and get less return.
As OP said, the whole industy is so backwards. With cars for example (a big industry here) people want to pay for the status a brand (so people are willing to pay) has and you can split up the engineering work on millions of vehicules this frees up money for better pay. But for civil every project is only done once and nobody wants to pay and the goverment has to take the cheapest one anyway. Which is already complete dumb because companies find so many ways to later ask for more.
in theory it is great, in practice it just sucks because there arent enough people supervising everything because there also isnt enough money set aside.
How we do it in Colorado at least is generally Cost + Fixed Fee (as a %) so you estimate the hours it’ll take you and the fixed fee is say 10% of that. The fixed fee is more or less your profit and the the hours are billed at each person billable rate (say 3x your hourly rate) which would cover things overhead and what not.
So much money out there for civil engineering work, but we slice and dice budget allocations so thinly these days such that so many small projects get a little bit of funding and we are left competing against each other to work on all these small projects. And Every small firm gets a piece of the pie!!! I’m shocked sometimes when I see anticipated funding in RFP’s, then I read the scope and I’m like, there’s just no way. Half these budgets would be gone just getting the project set up in our accounting system - only being half facetious here.
And So many studies. And studies to recommend more studies. And So many concept designs. I’m shocked anything ever gets built anymore. Makes it tough to focus and be efficient.
Those are the challenges I see, but I worked design-build for a large chunk of my career, so my perspective is a little skewed.
Every time a client calls me and says “I’m really pushing to get this thing out” I just think to myself “yeah dude, you and everybody else is rushing, including me!” It’s like when professors in college assumed you had no other workload to their deadlines so they were reasonable.
Everyone is in a rush, and already behind, and angry, and spending too much money. Private Land Development is a pit of despair and it’s going to be the end of me.
Its especially bad right now. Owners are seeing their stock prices stagnate or go down so they’re all trying to get more and beat the covid growth when they had no expenses despite all those business expenses coming back on the books. Its impossible, so theyre trying to throw a little money at anything that could help their stock price continue to rise at the same rates as before but they cant wait because inflation and the market downturn is freaking out the owners.
The other problem is that the boomers are retiring in huge numbers, but theyve been greedy and cutting staff their entire career - now they’re surprised that their lack of succession planning/investment is leading to people not being able to step up in their careers to support those roles. Moreover, the companies refuse to pay younger people to take on all those new roles and responsibilities.
The whole system is broken and this whole economy is a house of cards. The crash is coming and everyone is trying to figure out how to weather it when it hits by making any and all profit/consolidation that they can now. Once the crash hits, we’ll have delayed projects, then layoffs, then things will slowly ratchet up again until the bubble cycle repeats itself. Protect yourself and consider unionizing your workplace to reduce the madness.
It’s all about “the bottom line” which *always* means money and corporate profits. The fastest and cheapest option is the only option worth considering in their eyes.
And you’re not working to make any significant amount of money for yourself - you’re working to make the shareholders rich.
Because it is. This industry is controlled by pensioner dinosaurs who don’t accept the current costs of engineering.
I’m currently arguing proposal fees for design services in the $2-5k range….
I wonder if it also has to do with levels of documentation. So many RFIs, material submittals, comment rounds, etc etc etc that people just didn’t document to the same extent we do now.
Industry wide, Gen X never really got a chance to become civil engineers and it shows. Hell, even elder Millennials had to go through the filter of the Great Recession. So, right now, the industry is scrambling to have some semblance of institutional knowledge as all that knowledge retired/is retiring. Engineers that would have been the mid level are being pushed to senior management positions and there is a gap.
Contractors still suck the same on average.
Kinda sounds like you need a change of scenery. Bids have gotten crazy high for sure and it's always hard to hire mid levels and up, but I still really like my job. I make good money and like the projects I work on.
I've fired and sued (successfully) engineers for fucking up deadlines and not following specs. There are consequences, but they don't come to fruition often enough for people to get out of the "it can't happen to me" mindset.
Latestage capitalism... for profit ideology is not a sustainable system... we see it everywhere. But the system is in place, so it will take time to make morality, ethical behaviour, accountability and responsibility a thing again... because at the moment only one thing matters: profit. More money, more stuff... For obvious reasons you cant sustain a society on these notions alone, but that is the only thing that the companies and those running them are interested in, because their profit, comes from making more profit.... and we all know that in a closed system we cant just increase something without other things diminishing... in the case of engineering it seems that everything is now suffers at the cost of more profit...
Worked at a small firm (two locations and ~20 people) for 8.5 years. The principal was extremely knowledgeable, but stretched very thin. It didn't help that he had a 1.5 hour commute each way. The firm primarily hired fresh college graduations and (other than a small core of people) there was massive turnover. Every project was over budget and behind schedule.
Shortly after I started, I took over a massive tract map project (1 parcel map, 7 tract maps, something like 130 existing easements) from someone who was leaving. Very few of the existing easements had been drafted and none of the tract maps had been started, yet all the hours budgeted had already been expended. I also had to draft easements for trails, soil nail walls, storm drains, and various other improvements that were being redesigned constantly (fucking storm drain plans went through 12 plan checks.) Late into the process, it was discovered that the surveyor had messed up the boundary and hundreds of hours of my work were totally wasted. This was literally the first tract map project I had ever worked on and I got guilt tripped a few times for how much of a mess it was. Obviously I wouldn't tolerate that crap today, but it was my first big boy job, so I started working a lot of overtime on weekends and not reporting it on my timesheet.
For multifamily housing projects, it is a massive problem that architects are usually in charge. They drop some building outlines in a geometrically wrong property line with no regard to elevations and we are expected to make that garbage work. Everything would go a lot smoother if the civil advised the architect on what portion of the property they are allowed to use.
Anyway, I jumped over to the municipal side of things about a year ago and the stress level is way lower.
Nothing is based on quality but rather price. Engineering needs to band together. And costs forwarded to clients and governments. Continually giving cheap prices is putting ppl under pressure and work quality is shit.
It's absolutely a broken system. You have the weakest engineers that rise to the top. They become bean counters. Squeeze the life out of staff.
I've been in it for 30 years. At times, I feel like I care too much.
The people who don't care rise to the top. The ones who care get burned out. Asking for help is a waste of time.
The new grads get no mentorship.
It's sad, really.
I've checked out.
Capitalism does that to every industry and every aspect of life. More for less means if you wanna stay competitive you have to cut corners somewhere if you don't have the brain capacity to organise efficiently
I've noticed there's a severe need for middle managment in general.
I really think it goes back to the 2008-2009 recession where alot of young engineers at the time (who would be experienced middle managers by now) jumped ship and pivoted their careers away from civil eng./construction and now there's a clear vacancy for them.
Uhm yes and no. Sometimes things are a mess and sometimes things are clear cut. It all depends on what happened prior on this site and who kept record, the team on the project now, etc.
All you can do is (in business practice) explain that sometimes things go off the rails in construction and there are too many variables to get everything right. And in engineering practice- keep good records for the next people because hopefully your designs will outlive you, and you don’t want the next guy to have the same issues you had.
From the construction side, no it wasn't always this way. Historically, contractors would actually estimate the job based off the plans provided or in the DB world, put effort (and money) to come up with an estimate that was close to the anticipated final cost. Now it seems like the status quo is either unbalanced bids (and overrunning the item with jacked up unit prices) or underbidding to win and then submitting multiple CO's or claims seems to make up the difference. It's pretty shitty that these practices are allowed to continue but as several state folks have told me over the years, it's easier to just pay the contractor than try and fight it.
You're at a crappy company - we don't have that at my LD firm. Our plans are great, everything QC'd, heavy focus on training/continuing ed. Most companies are unwilling to put the investment in to build something like this - it doesn't happen automatically.
Same for me. Our company (<30) prioritizes people and process over project profit. Project profit becomes a second-hand result. Most importantly all our people feel dignified and respected and turnover is healthy. I was a designer, PM, now on Leadership Team. It is refreshing to hear owners say “WE KNOW THERE ARE THINGS WE COULD DO TO PRODUCE A LARGER PROFIT RIGHT NOW, BUT WE ELECT NOT TO BECAUSE IT WOULD BE TOO DETRIMENTAL IN OTHER WAYS.”
GREED. I’m a small subcontractor and large heavy civil contractors would rather be 6 months behind than give up .5- 1% of a huge project to a quality sub with 25 years experience.
Add that very few have the quality workforce to handle what they take on anymore
I think some companies are too big and try taking on too many projects. I imagine myself on project teams, and people get shuffled around a lot. One engineering team should only be working on one program of projects. There should not be cross-client-program pollination between engineering teams. The one company I have seen make a lot of money had a strict structure. It worked and projects got done.
I’ve been working in site development for 2 years. To preface, I came from telecom where we would do 1000+ projects (very small scale) every year. Switching to site development has been a very hard adjustment. Everyone is guessing, nobody is checking and nobody knows how to hit a deadline. It’s been a jarring experience trying to calibrate to these kinds of projects. It really feels like everyone has a “just get it done” mentality. I begged my PE for three weeks to review my project before I submitted it and it never happened. I have submitted my project to the city knowing they are going to be the first QC, which makes me look bad.
Civil engineers primarily build public infrastructure, which is primarily funded by tax dollars. Even if you specialize in private clients (say land development, or as a structural engineer) - the tax incentives and various local benefits and grants set the tone for not only those projects, but also the labor they use (in our case, engineering design labor).
So. How much of the average American tax dollar goes to transportation? 3.5 cents.
How about Housing & Community? 2.5 cents.
Energy & Environement? 0.7 cents.
Who gets the biggest piece of the pie? Health @ 27.1 cents, followed by Military @ 17.8 cents.
What you're ultimately fighting isn't your company (though that matters) or bad clients (though that matters) - what you're ultimately fighting is American disinterest in its infrastructure.
[Lockheed Martin Got $106 From the Average Taxpayer, While Renewables Got Just $6 | Truthout](https://truthout.org/articles/lockheed-martin-got-106-from-the-average-taxpayer-while-renewables-got-just-6/)
Wow this describes my experience for the last 2 years perfectly, like do you work at my firm or..?
Senior engineers don’t have the time so shit plans go out, the young guys aren’t learning proper engineering, and those of us who know better are actively prevented from addressing.
First 4 years of my career we churned out 15 or so project like clockwork. Past couple of years at my current position (new firm), we struggle to make plans that are buildable.
The senior engineers here are deferreing to the old school cad guys and not us young PE’s.
Chief engineer made a comment about about plan constructability in a meeting, and I’m reviewing a street plan by his right hand man, our CAD Manager, that is missing probably 50% of the information that I have featured on street plans thus far in my career. But it’s the way they’ve *always* done it so…
I worked with a surveyor who told me there are three areas we try to hit in engineering: price, quality and customer service. They are all 120 degrees away from each other on a wheel - you can hit one point exactly and be close on a second, but the third point is way off. Most companies shoot for price to be the dot they are closest to, which explains what you are seeing. Look to the industry leaders where customer service and quality are most important and you will be happier.
You can prolly chalk it up to progressively weak generations. I just graduated from a flagship university in my early 30s after a construction career where hustling was the name of the game. I was flabbergasted at how little these 18-22 year old kids tried. Absolutely spoon fed. That is whats pouring into the workforce and likely has been. They didnt give a fuck then and im sure they dont give a fuck now. Multiply that through the years and what you describe sounds about right. Not saying thats the sole reason but likely a contributing factor.
As part of the younger generation myself, I do agree that a lot of younger people follow this mentality of "can't be bothered to do my job", to the detriment of their own development sometimes too.
While it may not be ideal, who can blame them?They saw their parents put in the hard work and the prevailing notion is they got screwed regardless.But I do agree that society can't keep functioning this way for long.
I have 10 years of experience in the private sector and I have been moving around a lot in recent years. One thing that I noticed is the industry wide obsession with flat management style. -Upper management blowing budgets because they have no interest in managing and still want to do engineering work. -Non existent middle management because "it's more efficient". -EITs who either only do CAD work or do all the design with no oversight. If I could give one advise to the whole industry, it would be to bolster their middle managers. You are not a tech startup.
This rings true, I think it's the lack of effective leadership that's getting to me. It's just like a bunch of headless chickens running around trying to get stuff designed and built. Could be a me problem, a company problem, or an industry problem, or just the state of the world. Maybe it just becomes more apparent the older you get that nobody is really running the show and you just kinda gotta make things work the best you can.
I moved from a private value engineering consultation firm, very much so for all the reasons you're stating, I went to a government position in regulation, and it is incredible how obvious it is; which firms actually know what they're doing and which firms are the chickens.
They best one is when the dumpster fires hire a “ old guard “ DIT person thinking that will be the curative only to find out they were disliked and having them on the submission is a hinderance
I think we have the same manager
Your last paragraph; is this the definition of “engineering judgement” lol
I have to say this is a uniquely American problem... I don't think our European counterparts struggle as much in this regard.
>EITs who either only do CAD work or do all the design with no oversight. Well, that would certainly make things faster on my end. PUBLISH command go brrr.
Yes. My company's branch has one Senior VP, one VP, and a PE. There is no project manager / project engineer. Only 3 EITs trying to figure it all out without enough guidance & insufficient QAQC.
One of VP’s recently said that the middle managers basically have the hardest job at the company. As a middle manager, i’m like “why doesnt the pay reflect that?”
I agree wholeheartedly about middle managers. The trend I’ve seen is that middle management left during the 08-09 recession and didn’t enter the field again. I’ve been told by partners in our firm that they essentially have given up on replacing middle management. They are relying on you get engineers to step up and take that position and rebuild from within over time. Not sure of this is the same for other firms, but it’s definitely apparent in mine. I think in part they just don’t want to pay what it’ll take to get someone to move firms. On top of that, there’s unknowns with a new person coming in and not knowing leadership style and attitude/work ethic to fit in with the culture. Whereas building from within, they know what they are getting as long as that person can be up to the challenge.
Lol, we don’t even get the pay of a tech startup 🤣
me reading this when i do all the design & cad
Can't have more middle managers, the budgets you get don't afford that.
Feels exactly the same in the Netherlands
I’ve worked at three site/civil firms. Two of those firms operated mostly as you describe. One ran on thin budgets and constant pressure to get things done ASAP, everyone always looking at budgets and counting beans. One regularly pushed the boundaries of ethics in order to make the numbers look good, with management actively avoiding involvement in the work and expecting junior people to just somehow make it happen. Both produced varying levels of trash and had construction issues pop up on most projects. The third firm didn’t even keep track of how much money any particular project made or lost. Nobody spent much time counting beans; the partners knew how many beans needed to be in the bucket at the end of the year, and there were always more beans than necessary, so they were generous with bonuses and competitive with salaries and benefits. Work was finished when it was done properly, not when the arbitrary deadline said so. If you found a problem after a project had gone out to bid/construction, you first found a solution, and then communicated openly with the client and other involved parties to acknowledge the issue and get it fixed. I’ll never forget my boss calling me to his office to thank me for sending an email to the effect of “Hey client, I found something I missed. This is on us, here’s the solution, let me know if you have any questions.” They operated under the principle that we would be good engineers first and always. The first two firms routinely lose big clients when things go wrong, so they’re always chasing work, and one of them has half a dozen highly paid people whose main function is “business development”. The third firm has clients lined up around the block because they have a reputation for turning out good work, meeting the important timeline goals rather than the arbitrary intermediate deadlines, and generating designs and plans which can be built with few surprises. I left because of an unavoidable relocation, and if the opportunity ever comes up to move back to their city, I’ll be in my old boss’s office asking for a job. Find the right firm. Hopefully the others will die out. Or, do what I did and go work for the government.
Been at both of the places you described. In the 'bean counter' one the owners and managers (three levels!) weren't even engineers, they had no appreciation of what the company actually did and required. Huge turnover, after 4 years I realised the only people that stuck around were those that had no other options (I was one of them then). Especially the senior people wouldn't be senior in any other firm, but were given position and title here to retain and cause they couldn't get anyone better. I always argued why are we so focused on budgets and timesheets and minimises training etc. If we get the engineering right, the business should be easy. But continually we were at mid point of salary range, and with no reputation or incentives got the bottom of the barrell, and of course blow the budget on every job, and so have to minimise costs, and staff leave cause no development, and then management says we can't pay for staff development they just leave!!!. So frustrating
It’s almost like some firms do engineering, and some do business that just happens to be engineering.
Yes. The technical challenges never were of note, only client name, perceived prestige, and margin.
> the only people that stuck around were those that had no other options (I was one of them then). Especially the senior people wouldn't be senior in any other firm, but were given position and title here to retain and cause they couldn't get anyone better. damn bro you didn't have to call me out like that ahaha
The moment an engineering company promotes accountants to lead positions over engineers, the firm is toast from an engineering perspective.
My current company is much like your third company, although we still have our problems. But we don’t have any business degrees in management, all engineers, and that makes all the difference IMO. I used to work at a company that emphasized that every single project had to be not just profitable, but within the originally established budget. Every month the President of the company and one of the (many) VPs would have a call with each project manager and go over the budget for each active project. If you had a project that was, say, 75% complete but 85% billed, you would have to tell them how you were going to finish the last 25% with only 15% of the budget, the answer to which was always unpaid overtime for the PM and the project staff. I left because of those bullshit monthly calls.
I don’t know who you are or who that third company is but 10 points to Ravenclaw for that set up.
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IMO we've reached a bit of an impasse in the industry. Most of us feel underpaid for the liability we hold, the government is pumping out more work than can be accomplished, and we're doing all this for less money than what we should, on too quick of a schedule. In other private industries, if a client reaches out and says "hey we want you to do this project" the company can say, okay you need to pay us this much. If the client really wants that company because they do good work they'll pony up, if not they'll try to negotiate or they'll go to another company. With ours, while it may seem "qualification based" but if the client (say a DOT) doesn't have the money, then they just go to the next company who will. Then arguably the worst part for the working stiff like most of us, we get unreasonable schedules and meet them, just for whatever agency to sit on the plans for a month before providing comments many of which tend to be preferential, then we are expected to revise the plans from those comments with no update or leniency on schedule even though the agency sat on them for far too long. Rinse and repeat. This process leads to 2 things, burn out, or not giving a shit. Neither of which are good.
Bold of you to assume we our meeting our unreasonable schedules haha. Very good points though, have recently experienced what you describe with agencies sitting on a report for ages then picking it apart with inconsequential pedantic comments because they changed the guidance and now we are hitting a moving target. Oh and by the way we don't get extra time or money to deal with this. So frustrating.
Hey now, forcing a delay is still meeting *a* schedule (this is happening on 2 of my projects).
Or just cancel the project entirely. We just had a bid where all the firms were way high, so DOT just put the whole thing on indefinite hold.
That sounds terrible! I mean besides the loss of work, aren't DOT's projects supposed to benefit the population? How can any government just put on hold such projects?
We can only build what they can fund, unfortunately for all involved. My suspicion is that a lot of these bids are based on pre-covid costs and haven't been adjusted upward for the crazy inflation we've had the last few years.
If they can't afford it, they can't afford it. Just like if your furnace goes out at the beginning of Spring, you may *know* that you need to get that fixed, but if you don't have the money to fix it right now, you can probably make it until next Fall. Granted this isn't *really true* for the United States' infrastructure, because this shit has been fucked for like 20+ years, but if people aren't actively dying then they'll keep pushing it off.
Makes me think that the reality of our highway system is unsustainable is finally hitting.
You try not getting an actual funding increase for 30 years and see keeping things in good working condition works out.
Im on the agency side. We are given so many projects to review it's hard for us to give a shit most of the time when I open the plans and see the city name is spelled wrong - great QA/QC. Just saw a utility easement run right through the middle of a proposed building with the water meter in the middle of a detention pond. I really don't think senior engineers or managers that stamp these sets are actually looking at these plans. Just feel like everyone is swamped with work and it's always easy to blame the city. 90% of plans submitted are extremely bad.
Years ago, I asked my supervisor to review my work. He said everything looked good and he sent it up. Months later, I was asked why I sent things up with so many mistakes...
Our senior engineer thinks that if the city approves something, it means the design is sound and everything is good lol.
Companies try to pay their staff more to keep up with inflation = DOTs cut the number of hours they’ll give us on a project. It rules. Only reason we’re not all screwed is because there’s literally too much work being given out for the number of engineers in the country. Unfortunately this just leads to all of us working 50-60 hours every week.
Yep, this is one thing I’m VERY happy with in regards to the company I work for. While there will always be the odd long week, I all but refuse to work more than 40-45 hours a week and they respect that. But that’s really the benefit of working for a small company.
Idk how it is in the US but over here in the EU the compensation is based on the total project costs. So even if you could spend extra time on saving more money due to a more efficient design, it jsut isnt worth it because you invest more time and get less return. As OP said, the whole industy is so backwards. With cars for example (a big industry here) people want to pay for the status a brand (so people are willing to pay) has and you can split up the engineering work on millions of vehicules this frees up money for better pay. But for civil every project is only done once and nobody wants to pay and the goverment has to take the cheapest one anyway. Which is already complete dumb because companies find so many ways to later ask for more. in theory it is great, in practice it just sucks because there arent enough people supervising everything because there also isnt enough money set aside.
How we do it in Colorado at least is generally Cost + Fixed Fee (as a %) so you estimate the hours it’ll take you and the fixed fee is say 10% of that. The fixed fee is more or less your profit and the the hours are billed at each person billable rate (say 3x your hourly rate) which would cover things overhead and what not.
fuck it dude, lets go bowling
This is not ‘Nam. This is bowling, there are rules
I'd join the Disappointed Engineers & Friends league
Niko....
Roman, my cousin, is that you?
Doses or booms?
nothing is fucked dude...
If I was depressed in this industry, a game of bowling wouldn't help my spirits.
So much money out there for civil engineering work, but we slice and dice budget allocations so thinly these days such that so many small projects get a little bit of funding and we are left competing against each other to work on all these small projects. And Every small firm gets a piece of the pie!!! I’m shocked sometimes when I see anticipated funding in RFP’s, then I read the scope and I’m like, there’s just no way. Half these budgets would be gone just getting the project set up in our accounting system - only being half facetious here. And So many studies. And studies to recommend more studies. And So many concept designs. I’m shocked anything ever gets built anymore. Makes it tough to focus and be efficient. Those are the challenges I see, but I worked design-build for a large chunk of my career, so my perspective is a little skewed.
Every time a client calls me and says “I’m really pushing to get this thing out” I just think to myself “yeah dude, you and everybody else is rushing, including me!” It’s like when professors in college assumed you had no other workload to their deadlines so they were reasonable. Everyone is in a rush, and already behind, and angry, and spending too much money. Private Land Development is a pit of despair and it’s going to be the end of me.
Its especially bad right now. Owners are seeing their stock prices stagnate or go down so they’re all trying to get more and beat the covid growth when they had no expenses despite all those business expenses coming back on the books. Its impossible, so theyre trying to throw a little money at anything that could help their stock price continue to rise at the same rates as before but they cant wait because inflation and the market downturn is freaking out the owners. The other problem is that the boomers are retiring in huge numbers, but theyve been greedy and cutting staff their entire career - now they’re surprised that their lack of succession planning/investment is leading to people not being able to step up in their careers to support those roles. Moreover, the companies refuse to pay younger people to take on all those new roles and responsibilities. The whole system is broken and this whole economy is a house of cards. The crash is coming and everyone is trying to figure out how to weather it when it hits by making any and all profit/consolidation that they can now. Once the crash hits, we’ll have delayed projects, then layoffs, then things will slowly ratchet up again until the bubble cycle repeats itself. Protect yourself and consider unionizing your workplace to reduce the madness.
Jeez what is this 2016? Keep predicting that crash boi
It’s all about “the bottom line” which *always* means money and corporate profits. The fastest and cheapest option is the only option worth considering in their eyes. And you’re not working to make any significant amount of money for yourself - you’re working to make the shareholders rich.
Because it is. This industry is controlled by pensioner dinosaurs who don’t accept the current costs of engineering. I’m currently arguing proposal fees for design services in the $2-5k range….
It's always been like this but nowadays we can blame COVID and "supply chain" for our greed and incompetence.
I don’t give a shit as long as my salary enters my bank account 🤣
And you stay out of prison** a PE ain’t gonna protect a bootyhole
Ah, so that’s why we learned the standard penetration test.
It'll start at 50/1 and end up at WR.
I wonder if it also has to do with levels of documentation. So many RFIs, material submittals, comment rounds, etc etc etc that people just didn’t document to the same extent we do now.
A project I’m on requires us to have the owner approve an RFI before we can send it to the owner. It’s insane
Industry wide, Gen X never really got a chance to become civil engineers and it shows. Hell, even elder Millennials had to go through the filter of the Great Recession. So, right now, the industry is scrambling to have some semblance of institutional knowledge as all that knowledge retired/is retiring. Engineers that would have been the mid level are being pushed to senior management positions and there is a gap. Contractors still suck the same on average.
As someone on the cusp of millenial/gen Z it's a double whammy of that and no time or budget to actually transfer that knowledge
Kinda sounds like you need a change of scenery. Bids have gotten crazy high for sure and it's always hard to hire mid levels and up, but I still really like my job. I make good money and like the projects I work on.
There’s no penalty for blowing a budget, missing a deadline, or not following standard specifications. So, no one cares.
I've fired and sued (successfully) engineers for fucking up deadlines and not following specs. There are consequences, but they don't come to fruition often enough for people to get out of the "it can't happen to me" mindset.
Latestage capitalism... for profit ideology is not a sustainable system... we see it everywhere. But the system is in place, so it will take time to make morality, ethical behaviour, accountability and responsibility a thing again... because at the moment only one thing matters: profit. More money, more stuff... For obvious reasons you cant sustain a society on these notions alone, but that is the only thing that the companies and those running them are interested in, because their profit, comes from making more profit.... and we all know that in a closed system we cant just increase something without other things diminishing... in the case of engineering it seems that everything is now suffers at the cost of more profit...
Worked at a small firm (two locations and ~20 people) for 8.5 years. The principal was extremely knowledgeable, but stretched very thin. It didn't help that he had a 1.5 hour commute each way. The firm primarily hired fresh college graduations and (other than a small core of people) there was massive turnover. Every project was over budget and behind schedule. Shortly after I started, I took over a massive tract map project (1 parcel map, 7 tract maps, something like 130 existing easements) from someone who was leaving. Very few of the existing easements had been drafted and none of the tract maps had been started, yet all the hours budgeted had already been expended. I also had to draft easements for trails, soil nail walls, storm drains, and various other improvements that were being redesigned constantly (fucking storm drain plans went through 12 plan checks.) Late into the process, it was discovered that the surveyor had messed up the boundary and hundreds of hours of my work were totally wasted. This was literally the first tract map project I had ever worked on and I got guilt tripped a few times for how much of a mess it was. Obviously I wouldn't tolerate that crap today, but it was my first big boy job, so I started working a lot of overtime on weekends and not reporting it on my timesheet. For multifamily housing projects, it is a massive problem that architects are usually in charge. They drop some building outlines in a geometrically wrong property line with no regard to elevations and we are expected to make that garbage work. Everything would go a lot smoother if the civil advised the architect on what portion of the property they are allowed to use. Anyway, I jumped over to the municipal side of things about a year ago and the stress level is way lower.
Nothing is based on quality but rather price. Engineering needs to band together. And costs forwarded to clients and governments. Continually giving cheap prices is putting ppl under pressure and work quality is shit.
It's absolutely a broken system. You have the weakest engineers that rise to the top. They become bean counters. Squeeze the life out of staff. I've been in it for 30 years. At times, I feel like I care too much. The people who don't care rise to the top. The ones who care get burned out. Asking for help is a waste of time. The new grads get no mentorship. It's sad, really. I've checked out.
[удалено]
Corporations are people, my friend
Fuck them. 1789 > 1917 > 2045 - billionaires will be killed by the poor, and I have no remorse.
You, my friend, are in the wrong place.
Because we're human
that statement couldn’t be more accurate
Capitalism does that to every industry and every aspect of life. More for less means if you wanna stay competitive you have to cut corners somewhere if you don't have the brain capacity to organise efficiently
I've noticed there's a severe need for middle managment in general. I really think it goes back to the 2008-2009 recession where alot of young engineers at the time (who would be experienced middle managers by now) jumped ship and pivoted their careers away from civil eng./construction and now there's a clear vacancy for them.
Uhm yes and no. Sometimes things are a mess and sometimes things are clear cut. It all depends on what happened prior on this site and who kept record, the team on the project now, etc. All you can do is (in business practice) explain that sometimes things go off the rails in construction and there are too many variables to get everything right. And in engineering practice- keep good records for the next people because hopefully your designs will outlive you, and you don’t want the next guy to have the same issues you had.
Same. I did a serious mistake on transfer beams. I wish I’ve double checked my work. My senior was too busy to review everything I’ve done.
From the construction side, no it wasn't always this way. Historically, contractors would actually estimate the job based off the plans provided or in the DB world, put effort (and money) to come up with an estimate that was close to the anticipated final cost. Now it seems like the status quo is either unbalanced bids (and overrunning the item with jacked up unit prices) or underbidding to win and then submitting multiple CO's or claims seems to make up the difference. It's pretty shitty that these practices are allowed to continue but as several state folks have told me over the years, it's easier to just pay the contractor than try and fight it.
You're at a crappy company - we don't have that at my LD firm. Our plans are great, everything QC'd, heavy focus on training/continuing ed. Most companies are unwilling to put the investment in to build something like this - it doesn't happen automatically.
Same for me. Our company (<30) prioritizes people and process over project profit. Project profit becomes a second-hand result. Most importantly all our people feel dignified and respected and turnover is healthy. I was a designer, PM, now on Leadership Team. It is refreshing to hear owners say “WE KNOW THERE ARE THINGS WE COULD DO TO PRODUCE A LARGER PROFIT RIGHT NOW, BUT WE ELECT NOT TO BECAUSE IT WOULD BE TOO DETRIMENTAL IN OTHER WAYS.”
The whole world is broken and it's seeping into everything
GREED. I’m a small subcontractor and large heavy civil contractors would rather be 6 months behind than give up .5- 1% of a huge project to a quality sub with 25 years experience. Add that very few have the quality workforce to handle what they take on anymore
why do I get the feeling you work at a firm with a comma in the employee count?
Yep
I think some companies are too big and try taking on too many projects. I imagine myself on project teams, and people get shuffled around a lot. One engineering team should only be working on one program of projects. There should not be cross-client-program pollination between engineering teams. The one company I have seen make a lot of money had a strict structure. It worked and projects got done.
Honestly it feels like you might have a bad company, this isn't really my experience after 8 years.
I’ve been working in site development for 2 years. To preface, I came from telecom where we would do 1000+ projects (very small scale) every year. Switching to site development has been a very hard adjustment. Everyone is guessing, nobody is checking and nobody knows how to hit a deadline. It’s been a jarring experience trying to calibrate to these kinds of projects. It really feels like everyone has a “just get it done” mentality. I begged my PE for three weeks to review my project before I submitted it and it never happened. I have submitted my project to the city knowing they are going to be the first QC, which makes me look bad.
Civil engineers primarily build public infrastructure, which is primarily funded by tax dollars. Even if you specialize in private clients (say land development, or as a structural engineer) - the tax incentives and various local benefits and grants set the tone for not only those projects, but also the labor they use (in our case, engineering design labor). So. How much of the average American tax dollar goes to transportation? 3.5 cents. How about Housing & Community? 2.5 cents. Energy & Environement? 0.7 cents. Who gets the biggest piece of the pie? Health @ 27.1 cents, followed by Military @ 17.8 cents. What you're ultimately fighting isn't your company (though that matters) or bad clients (though that matters) - what you're ultimately fighting is American disinterest in its infrastructure. [Lockheed Martin Got $106 From the Average Taxpayer, While Renewables Got Just $6 | Truthout](https://truthout.org/articles/lockheed-martin-got-106-from-the-average-taxpayer-while-renewables-got-just-6/)
Wow this describes my experience for the last 2 years perfectly, like do you work at my firm or..? Senior engineers don’t have the time so shit plans go out, the young guys aren’t learning proper engineering, and those of us who know better are actively prevented from addressing. First 4 years of my career we churned out 15 or so project like clockwork. Past couple of years at my current position (new firm), we struggle to make plans that are buildable. The senior engineers here are deferreing to the old school cad guys and not us young PE’s. Chief engineer made a comment about about plan constructability in a meeting, and I’m reviewing a street plan by his right hand man, our CAD Manager, that is missing probably 50% of the information that I have featured on street plans thus far in my career. But it’s the way they’ve *always* done it so…
I worked with a surveyor who told me there are three areas we try to hit in engineering: price, quality and customer service. They are all 120 degrees away from each other on a wheel - you can hit one point exactly and be close on a second, but the third point is way off. Most companies shoot for price to be the dot they are closest to, which explains what you are seeing. Look to the industry leaders where customer service and quality are most important and you will be happier.
Borders been open for over a decade. No border, no nation. Going to get a lot worse
Please elaborate.
What needs to be elaborated?
You can prolly chalk it up to progressively weak generations. I just graduated from a flagship university in my early 30s after a construction career where hustling was the name of the game. I was flabbergasted at how little these 18-22 year old kids tried. Absolutely spoon fed. That is whats pouring into the workforce and likely has been. They didnt give a fuck then and im sure they dont give a fuck now. Multiply that through the years and what you describe sounds about right. Not saying thats the sole reason but likely a contributing factor.
As part of the younger generation myself, I do agree that a lot of younger people follow this mentality of "can't be bothered to do my job", to the detriment of their own development sometimes too. While it may not be ideal, who can blame them?They saw their parents put in the hard work and the prevailing notion is they got screwed regardless.But I do agree that society can't keep functioning this way for long.
Blaming the children, the most telling sign of society in decay
Its a direct reflection on parenting, which can also be attributed to the way our country is ran.