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<p>Yeah. Even in, for example, structures, where there’s a lot of repetitive work, yes, the younger engineers do most of that repetitive work. It doesn’t mean that it’s at all mindless. A monkey could not do it. Someone without a high school diploma couldn’t even do it. Only with significant practice could an intern do it. There’s repetition involved, but there’s enough variance that this just means that eventually, you’ll be able to design the more repetitive things cold, without even thinking about it.</p>
<p>As you move up the food chain in my field, you start getting the more complicated tasks… going from simple gravity beams and mastering those, to designing the girders that those gravity beams feed into, to designing the columns and beams that resist all the wind and seismic lateral loads, to designing the lateral load plan itself. </p>
<p>There are unique projects that you work on, too, in and around the more repetitive things, where you’ll have to solve problems and figure out principles that nobody else in the company has worked on, and then people will come to you the next time there’s a question on doing whatever it is you have more experience doing. I’m already the office expert on pedestrian walkway time-history vibration analyses. I’ve been here four and a half months.</p>
<p>Eventually, at my company, you become a design manager, and you work on many different projects at once, helping younger engineers solve the trickier problems that are anything but repetitive. It’s more like being a professor with perpetual office hours than anything else. It’s pretty cool. Completely technical, no management stuff to deal with (unless you want to).</p>
<p>Yes, I work at a desk. I’m sitting at my desk right now; it’s a very nice desk. We’ve got an open floor plan (no cubicles, just half-walls… actually really spacious) and I’ve got a view out the window. Working inside gets a little tiring sometimes, and there’s more sitting-in-one-place than there was when I was in college, but that’s kind of the nature of doing what I want to do.</p>
<p>It’s not mindless, though. I’m mentally whupped when I head out for the evening. I do a lot of keeping track of many, many details in my head, and I use a lot of sticky notes to remind me to check things I think of that might end up controlling the design.</p>