<p>i know that there are various forms of engineering, but overall, or perhaps specific engineering majors, what do they do in their jobs, after they graduate?</p>
<p>Well, in a nutshell, here’s what I do as a structural engineer.</p>
<p>Architects hand me drawings of pretty buildings. I figure out where the beams and columns should go so as to minimally interfere with the prettiness of the buildings. I get information from them and the building owners as to what the different areas of the building are going to be used for, and from that, I try to conservatively guess what loads (including self-weights, weights of the stuff inside the building, wind loads, earthquake loads, loads from expansion/contraction of the building due to temperature changes, etc.) the building’s going to experience, and I select or design the beams and columns so that they’re strong enough to withstand the expected loadings. In addition, I try to make sure that none of the beams or columns deflect enough to cause cracking in any windows or building materials, to make sure that there aren’t any annoying vibrations in the floors that will affect people or machinery, and generally just try to make sure that the building’s not going to do anything to freak anyone or anything out. My calculations are done both by hand and by computer. I have to work quickly and accurately.</p>
<p>When the building’s being built, the steel fabricators or the concrete contractors will draw “shop drawings” of how they expect to put the pieces together of this building they’re about to actually construct, and they’ll send them to me to make sure that we’re both on the same page. If they can’t understand something, they’ll send me a “request for information,” or and RFI. Sometimes they’ll send me RFIs because they didn’t read the directions carefully enough, but sometimes they’ll send me RFIs because I didn’t explain something well enough, or I told them to do something that won’t work. One of my big goals is to not only design the thing correctly, but to make sure that my drawings and plans clearly convey that design.</p>
<p>Once the thing’s under construction, in certain cases, I’ll be asked by the client to come out and watch how the building’s being built, and to be a set of experienced eyes and ears. I’ll know exactly why I put in weird conditions, and if they’re being constructed incorrectly, I can say, “Hey! It’s supposed to go <em>this</em> way.” So, sometimes, I’ll spend some time doing that.</p>
<p>It can be a little irritating, but it’s typically pretty cool. I work with people from all walks of life… Very wealthy real estate people, engineering gurus and professors who have PhDs, construction foremen who’ve been in the business for forty years and think they know better than I do (sometimes they do, but not always!), architects who sometimes don’t get that I’m bound by the laws of physics and get mad at me when they ask me to put trees on the roof and to not put in any columns anywhere and I have to say “no”, right on down to the guy who ties the rebar.</p>
<p>I get to see the entire life cycle of some pretty cool buildings, which is really sweet. Sometimes it can get repetitive, if the building is large and has a lot of beams that are similar. Sometimes it can get frustrating, when they change things around at the last minute. But generally, taking a more global view, it’s pretty cool.</p>
<p>Wow. That’s a lot of work going into one project. Is that how all of your projects are done? Get drawings from architect, make your own designs/plans, deal with constructor, etc.?</p>
<p>If you’re doing that work (along with others I presume), then what does management do? Direct the whole lot of you on each of those steps?</p>
<p>While not really technically engineering, construction engineering & management is usually included in the civil engineering department, so I’ll include it here as well. Most of our staff were usually civil, mechanical, electrical, or architectural engineering majors in school, though we also have quite a few architects, and a random major here and there.</p>
<p>I work for a construction manager, which acts as an interface between the owner and the numerous contractors on the job. We “manage” the project. Depending on the owner, we may get brought in directly, or we may have to bid to get the job. In both cases, we have estimators who get the plans from the architect (which includes aibarr’s structural engineering drawings, and every other drawing necessary to understand what the owner wants) and they go through each sheet to estimate the total cost of the entire project. If we get this project directly from the owner, we’ll negotiate a contract based on our estimate. If we bid, then we’ll bid the project based on that dollar figure. I forget the statistic, but in our industry, the average contractor wins 10% of the projects they bid on.</p>
<p>Once we win a project, we in turn put out various parts of the project to bid by subcontractors. We have to hire specialists to do the work because no one company out there has the knowledge or personnel to do everything from start to finish. If there was one, then I’d be out of a job, lol. On my last project, I counted and there were a total of about 50 subcontractors and subconsultants. So we break up the entire project into smaller manageable pieces and send them out to bid by subs. When we get the bids back, I sit down and take a look at each of them and compare them with our own estimate. I check to make sure they have all the work that they’re supposed to do listed in their estimate. If not, I have to call them up and get new prices. They almost never have everything, so this part is critical. This process gets repeated dozens of times, though one person doesn’t do all of it. People tend to specialize; we have civil people, MEP (mechanical/electrical/plumbing) people, and finishes (sheetrock, paint, framing, etc) people, though some get involved with all of it. </p>
<p>aibarr pretty much explained RFI’s and shop drawings. Sometimes the questions originate with us (the construction manager) and sometimes they come from the sub. For shop drawings, we do a preliminary review before sending it off to the architect/engineer, though this is unofficial, and not every company does this.</p>
<p>We manage the schedule of the project. We make sure the subcontractors are doing their work at such a pace that the deadline will be met. If we fall behind schedule significantly, we have to revise it. It gets pretty complicated because every activity depends on the completion of a different activity, and logisitcs between contractors have to be worked out. We have someone who <em>only</em> works on schedules. We also monitor the finances. We review invoices and pay our vendors and subcontractors, after verifying the work was actually performed. </p>
<p>Safety is a big thing. We make sure all of our subcontractors are performing the work in a safe manner. This may involve us coming up with ideas on how to protect their workers or how to build the project, especially for unique parts of the project.</p>
<p>Coordination is <em>huge</em>. With so many players involved, everybody looks to us to make sure everything runs smoothly and that the logistics allow each party to do their jobs with minimal disturbance. </p>
<p>aibarr’s last two paragraphs also apply to me. I might be talking to the president of a company at 8am, and to a laborer at 8:30. I’ve met some of the most interesting people in construction; everyone’s a character. Everyone has a “war story” to share. Sometimes things do get repetitive, especially if I’m working on architectural finishes in a 40-story condominium, but overall it’s well worth it.</p>
<p>There’s so many more day-to-day, as well as random unexpected things, involved in what I do, but those are the big items. Everyday is a new adventure, which is what I love about working in this field. You never really know what to expect…If I have to summarize what we do in one sentence… We manage a project to make sure it gets built correctly, on schedule and under budget.</p>
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<p>Yup, that’s how it’s done. With large projects (large stadiums or very complex-geometry hospitals), I might be working on the same project for a year and a half.</p>
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<p>There are about four or five actual engineers working on the design team for the project I’m on now. University of Phoenix Stadium, where the Cardinals play and where the last Superbowl was held, had a design team with about three or four engineers. So, there aren’t that many engineers. My superiors are one design manager, who helps us out on logistical questions and directs the flow of engineering (and teaches the younger engineers how to actually engineer things), one assistant project manager, who coordinates issues with the other subcontractors and gets information we need and helps pitch in on the design work when needed, and one senior project manager, who directs the <em>whole</em> thing and explains how he wants the building to be designed. So, that’s how our design team works, in terms of its internal management. The management of our group is done by our business unit director, who is also an engineer. He handles a lot of the business development (convincing people that we’re the best group for the job, shaking projects out of the Project Tree) but also acts as senior project manager on some projects, and offers a lot of engineering guidance, so it’s not like our managers suddenly stop being engineers.</p>
<p>But it seems like you do a majority of the engineering calculations and in-depth work. For example, if the senior project manager tells you he wants a column designed a certain way, it is on you to determine all the numbers necessary to make that design happen. He doesn’t actually crunch out those numbers, does he? Or does he check it after you are finished with it?</p>
<p>Your job seems a lot more challenging than the managers’ duties.</p>
<p>But you don’t always know how to do it, especially if you’re new to the field. That’s where the manager comes in. S/he doesn’t really work on the ordinary run-of-the-mill stuff, but when the engineer runs into trouble with something odd or unique, guess who’s going to come save the day?</p>
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<p>Bingo.</p>
<p>And actually, that takes up pretty much all of the upper-level managers’ time. What a lot of people don’t really realize is that engineering managers are much more like professors than anything else. I can handle all the nitty-gritty stuff, and I can generally just sort of hum along on my own pretty well. But if I run into something that’s different that I can’t sort out myself, I’ll consult my manager. Even if it’s something that I <em>can</em> sort out myself, if it involves assumptions on my part, I’ll run it by my engineering manager so that I know that I’m not leading the entire project off in an unintended direction.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that I’m going to go off and ask my project manager about every little thing that I get stuck on-- same thing as when I was an undergrad, I wouldn’t go to the professor and bug them about stuff every time I got stuck on a problem set. I research things first, bring them a valid question that’s fairly well-thought-out and not-obvious, and then I’ll ask them what’s going on.</p>
<p>Edit: There’s the added aspect of engineering liability, as well. I’m currently a graduate engineer. I’ve got another year before I can take the PE exam. I’m not actually licensed, so I’m off the hook, more or less, so far as liability goes. (I’m an EIT, so there’s some liability there). Even so, you may have two or three licensed engineers working on a project, but only one of them can be the EOR, or Engineer of Record, the one who stamps the drawings and says “These are valid, and I said so.” The EOR, who is typically the seniormost project manager on a project (though it depends upon the situation), is LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE INTEGRITY OF THE DESIGN. Which means they can be SUED if something goes wrong, and they can hypothetically be held responsible for manslaughter if people die in a collapse that results from a structural flaw. (Doesn’t happen often, but it CAN happen.) So, even though I do all the nitty-gritty, the EOR has a choice. They’re either placing a heck of a lot of trust in me, or they’re checking calcs along the way to make sure that everything makes sense. You can bet your pants that I know which one I’m going to choose when I’m eventually EOR for a project… The project managers do more than is immediately apparent.</p>
<p>So then a lot of people talk about working as an engineer for a couple years, then grab that MBA and move into management. But, you can’t really be a good manager, as you’ve stated, unless you can do the engineering and do it well. What if you went to your manager and asked him about a problem, and he couldn’t answer it? Where would he go?</p>
<p>It seems that you can’t just jump into management if you don’t know what you’re doing. I was under the assumption that once you became a manager, you’d never need to bother dealing with real engineering work anymore.</p>
<p>What do you guys think is an optimum level of experience for someone to move into management? Granted, this doesn’t take into account the types of projects one has done or how involved the person was, but try and use your judgment to offset those factors.</p>
<p>To me, it sounds like you need something like 5 years. I know I wouldn’t be comfortable with an engineer asking me why something isn’t working if I didn’t have a well rounded portfolio of projects I worked on.</p>
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<p>To be perfectly frank, a lot of people are high schoolers who are just saying what their uncle’s boss told them.</p>
<p>It’s not an MBA that makes you a manager in engineering; I don’t think any of my managers have MBAs. Experience is what makes you an engineering manager. </p>
<p>And you don’t decide when you move into management… Obviously, you can’t wake up one morning and say, “I think I’m going to tell my superiors to trust me with hundred-million dollar projects today!” 
Your bosses, and your experience level, will dictate when you move into management. You can estimate that you’ll start to move into more managerial roles beginning two or three years after you get your PE license, but YMMV.</p>
<p>Also remember that once you’re a manager, it’s not like there aren’t other people around. Engineering is a very collaborative practice. Much like how doctors go around and ask opinions of other doctors on their tougher cases, engineers do the same thing. It doesn’t even really matter whether you’re a manager or not. It’s mostly just experience. Even though I’ve been out of school for only about two years, I’ll still get asked questions by people “above” me. Just today, my project manager came by and asked me if I knew how something in one of our proprietary software packages was calculated… I’ve been around here six months, but my manager has been with the company, using that software, for six YEARS. Today, I didn’t know the answer to his question, but I’ve known the answer to other questions he’s asked. Everyone’s an expert in different things. You develop a kind of humility and learn to ask questions of everyone, even the greenest interns. You never know who’ll have the answer.</p>
<p>What I don’t get is how you can be asked questions by people “above” you and they get paid more than you. If they’re getting the top dollar to be the top dog, shouldn’t they be answering questions instead of asking them?</p>
<p>It seems that in engineering, your pay scale or rank is determined not by your talents and abilities but by how much experience you have. Let me try to give you an example, and you let me know how far off I am. From my experience as a loan officer for a refinance company, you start out cold calling people to try and refinance their loan. Every 4 or 5 persons are assigned a team leader, who helps you out on calls and closing the deal. Should you do well with getting refi’s and produce consistent work, you could become a team leader. That chain continues upward all the way to a floor manager or even an executive. The point is, if you’re good at what you do, you can move up fast; I saw a guy move up to executive in 6 months.</p>
<p>In engineering, even if you’re the best at doing your work, am I right in saying you won’t move up the ladder that quickly? Granted, cold calling is not even close to the difficulty engineers face. But if you had a really special and talented engineer, would s/he be able to move up quickly to a project manager position, even with less experience than what is considered standard?</p>
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<p>Well, that would be the ideal, wouldn’t it be? Yet I myself can think of quite a few instances where engineering managers had quite limited experience as engineers, and in some cases, zero engineering experience. </p>
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<p>{As he reads the above, a knowing yet painful smile appears on sakky’s face; a smile that betrays the tragicomic chasm between the way things ought to be in corporate America, and the way they actually are.}</p>
<p>What I will say is that, to your statement that you can’t be a ‘good’ (engineering) manager if you can’t do engineering work well, my response is that many managers just aren’t very good. But it doesn’t matter; they get paid well anyway. </p>
<p>To your statement that you can’t just jump into management if you don’t know what you’re doing, all I can do is smile. </p>
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<p>Ha! Welcome to the world of Dilbert, a comic strip that, sadly, has a lot of truth in it. The sad truth is that there really are a lot of managers out there who know far less than their subordinates, yet get paid very well anyway. </p>
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<p>Well, sometimes I’m not even sure if even the experience matters all that much. </p>
<p>However, in the defense of engineering, none of the problems that you have identified are specific to engineering. The truth is, the vast majority of jobs have the problems that engineering does. You may have identified the one business function - sales - where the above does not hold, because it is the one function where individual performance can be easily separated and identified, and where individual performance really does matter greatly in terms of financial success to the company. In most other corporate jobs - including engineering - it’s not that easy to tease out exactly who are your best employees and who is incompetent, and furthermore, where top performance often times doesn’t really matter anyway. Business history is replete with high quality, well-engineering products that were nevertheless outsold by less-well-engineered competitive products that nevertheless enjoyed superior marketing or are accompanied by a superior business strategy. I.e. Microsoft products are rarely the best-engineered products in their class, but they usually win anyway. That is why you see so many people who are mediocre engineers, but who are very good at office politics get promoted.</p>
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<p>It would go up the chain, all the way to the president (if s/he had experience in your area, which is not always the case). Worst case scenario, you would hire a sub-consultant who has knowledge in your particular problem area. If you can get an approximate solution, however, you would go with that and just err on the conservative side. It’s rarely worth the money to hire a sub-consultant, but one of my companies did that once. One of our projects involved a traffic circle, and nobody had any previous experience with it, so we hired someone to do that particular part.</p>
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but based on your description of what you did as a loan officer, it seems repetitive, and you don’t learn as much with experience, so it’s not as valuable. </p>
<p>Every civil engineering project is pretty different, so you always learn something knew on every project. You don’t become an expert once you graduate, even if you have a MS or PhD, so rookies are never “the best.” I imagine this is the reason why you need four years (in some states) of experience before you can even sit for the P.E. exam. You don’t learn everything in school; so much is gained through experience. </p>
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<p>Well, it wouldn’t be the case all the time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens every now and then. </p>
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No way any engineer moves up the ladder that quickly in 6 months. In addition to learning on the job (I assume there’s less of a learning curve with refinance loans), you get more contacts with experience. That’s something you need as a project manager, because you’re expected to help out in getting projects for the company. That’s especially true if your company is small, and needs all the help it can get with marketing. You can’t really cold call to sell your structural engineering services.</p>
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<p>I imagine the example that you cite is not in structural engineering, because “engineering managers” in this field without a P.E are pretty worthless since they can’t sign off on anything. And you can’t get a P.E. without engineering experience. You may be right in engineering fields that don’t require licensure though.</p>
<p>In response to the OP and for others new to the field: the Sloan Career Cornerstone website provides some good “overview” info on the field of engineering:</p>
<p>[The</a> Sloan Career Cornerstone Center](<a href=“http://www.careercornerstone.org/engineering/engineering.htm]The”>Career Cornerstone Center: Careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math and Medicine)</p>
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<p>Agreed in full.</p>
<p>I don’t see any of the Dilbertesque situations over here in structures. It actually confuses me a little bit when people talk disparagingly about managers, but I also have to acknowledge that management in structural engineering seems to be very different (and fairly utopian) in comparison with management in other engineering fields. I actually really like how it is over here.</p>
<p>There are just so many different building systems, and so many diverse problems faced in structural engineering, that the phrase “none of us is as smart as all of us” truly applies here. Collectively, the people above me know more than me. Specifically, I might have some knowledge that they don’t, because my experiences are unique (as is every structural engineer’s experience). The fact that my superiors recognize that is a true testament to their value as engineers. Still, they know more than I do, and I don’t begrudge them the higher paychecks at all. They deserve them. I don’t, yet. I’ve neither solidified my basic engineering understanding, nor have I gained enough experience on varied projects to proclaim myself a true expert in anything. That, however, will come with time, diligence, and experience.</p>
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<p>Well, this seems to be a quite ‘manageable’ problem: the manager can just get somebody else who is a PE to complete the actual sign-offs. For example, a (large) firm could have a centralized department whose entire job consists of just signing off projects. But the manager would still be doing everything else, including telling his subordinates what to do, having profit/loss responsibility, and (most importantly of all), having hiring/firing authority. The actual signing-off step is but a minor issue.</p>
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<p>When I was working in the R&D lab at a chemical company as an intern freshman year, I still knew random things that the people I was working for didn’t. Often it would be things more on the math/physics side of things, but occasionally a computer or mechanical problem would come up that I’d be able to figure out that they couldn’t get.</p>
<p>Even when I worked for a professor as an undergrad researcher they often asked me questions about things they didn’t know. One professor was reviewing a paper that required knowledge of stereology, and she hadn’t studied it in over 20 years. So, since I had been doing a side project on it, I was responsible for reading that section of the paper and figuring out if they’d made any sort of fundamental problems in their assumptions/calculations. Often I’d also get asked a lot of computer and programming questions, as well.</p>
<p>I am a mechanical engineer and I am a unit engineer for an electric utilities company. My primary job is providing technical support for all kinds of problems in the plant. However, I also manage projects. I just completed managing a full steam turbine overhaul. I coordinated all of the contractors, tracked all shipments of parts to vendors who were doing inspections and repairs, reviewed inspection reports and approved repairs, etc. I was also responsible for tracking the budget for all work orders for the job. I hired three turbine consultants who worked with the maintenace foremen and crews to run the day-to-day work as well as supervising all of the disassembly and reassembly activities, such as coupling alignments and bearing installations. Since I have only been out of college for two years I don’t have the experience to personally take care of certain technical things in regards to steam turbines. The consultants are hired used to work for companies like GE, MD&A, etc.</p>
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<p>Erm… Except for the whole engineering oversight and engineering liability aspects…</p>
<p>This doesn’t work in practice because you’d never find a structural engineer who would sign off on something that they weren’t integrally involved in designing. Aside from the fact that nobody wants to stick their neck out that much, it’s actually strictly against the ethical code of conduct, so even if you did find someone who was willing to do it, they’d probably be a pretty shady engineer.</p>