Claude! said:

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What's so civil about engineers anyway?

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When they are CADDY, they are uncivil.

Licensed Civil here, but no longer practicing in the field. My response to this… or should I say "excuse", is that 90% of civil engineering is trying to get through the permitting process. We have engineers submitting crap, because it's going to be rejected by the city regardless. Then they just slap the comments from the city on the original crap set of plans, and boom, your thru the permitting process in a year flat.

I do a lot of civil plan reviews in my work. Some are pretty good, others are not. I have even sent a few back to them after only redlining a few pages telling them to start over and that I am not their QA/QC department. Often times, you can tell right away if a PE actually reviewed them before they left the office. Some firms seem to have little or no QA/QC.

It is my opinion that every potential PE should have to spend their first year or two out of school actually working in the construction business and learn how things are built before they start designing them. It would improve the quality of the plans they design in the future.

I'd like more details on the 'closet homo'. Asking for a friend.

Pretty sure he died of AIDS.

Mechanical engineers design weapons systems. Civil engineers design targets. HTH

I tell the young civils doing residential subdivision plans. Your designs should meet the code design requirements with the least amount of construction cost. They don't know WTF I'm talking about. A lot of mid to upper engineers don't either.

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LOL...those guys retired over a decade ago. Nothing has been hand drawn since about 1985. The guys that 'learned the trade before most of it was done on a computer" learned it in the 70's, which means they are in their 70's now.

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I learned to draft by hand at A&M in the early/mid 90's. We didn't get the Autocad lab in Langford until '96 I think. Just my experience, not an engineer.

THE_CHOSEN_ONE said:

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I supply construction materials, so unfortunately I don't get to pick engineers. We get sent a set of plans and have to figure out how much material is needed based on the plans we get, which are often terrible.

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what kind of engineering drawings do not come with a bill of materials? That is kind of the point of engineering.

Apache said:

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LOL...those guys retired over a decade ago. Nothing has been hand drawn since about 1985. The guys that 'learned the trade before most of it was done on a computer" learned it in the 70's, which means they are in their 70's now.

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I learned to draft by hand at A&M in the early/mid 90's. We didn't get the Autocad lab in Langford until '96 I think. Just my experience, not an engineer.

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Engineers when I was there had to pay their dues as a freshman dork carrying around the blue box EDG drafting kit. Not only were you screaming engineer major to the world but you were also announcing freshman, freshman, ….

Amazing after all these years, I feel that was the best class to teach you how to visualize a real 3D object in your head.

I've been in practice for nearly 18 years now and worked at 3 of the ENR top 20 firms. All 3 firms I've worked at have all had significant engineering presence in India that collaborate on American projects at lower billing rates, even if they're not overtly marketed as an international engineering company. The work quality is going as you'd expect.

My current firm just had a big rah-rah regional meeting, where one of the passing comments was a quiet reveal that EVERY project from 2026 on was going to have a quota of a given % of engineering effort that must get routed through our India production office rather than being done by the local team. My engineering discipline is uniquely insulated from that edict, but this issue is going to get worse everywhere else. Project Managers' performance scores/raises/bonuses here now depend on it.

We've cherry-picked engineers from our India offices that generally do a really good job, and we lock them down as selfishly as we can on our projects. There are tons of others that don't do good work.

Between this, H1B culture, and very few American studies advancing past BS degrees in non-CS engineering disciplines, it's bleak. And I don't really blame American students for not going for graduate degrees... considering the overall landscape, compensation, and stress/nonstop OT expectations it's not worth it at all to do this.

Bleak.