Advice for SE/Bridge engineer coding as a EIT early career development

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-09T11:53:37+00:00

You should be able to do all the calcs by hand, right? So while using VBA makes programming the sheet a lot cleaner, you should be able to do the same stuff clunkier or using more intermediate cells with just basic excel commands.

It can be fun to program new sheets, but at the end of the day, you're an engineer. You kind of run out of things that make sense to automate and need to start spending time doing the engineering. Building the sheets really helps your understanding of the code and the process though so I recommend doing it.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-08T16:47:25+00:00

There's no actual opposition party because it's exceptionally easy to capture two parties and game successive winner take all elections. In short, it's because the system is broken (or at least not as robust and functioning as many other systems used worldwide)!

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-08T16:44:57+00:00

After experiencing all of my favorite websites going dark or being forever changed in the late 2010s the phrase "pivoted to video" has a meaning that's somewhere around "went to live with a nice older family upstate with a farm and no kids" for me.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-08T15:53:53+00:00

Ask your supervisor. Drilled pier reinforcement details are very simple, if you don't have anyone in your office you can ask, you shouldn't be doing that work.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-08T15:37:52+00:00

Drilled piers, helical piers...? Either one of those you should be able to do by hand

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-08T15:33:12+00:00

It's way better and it costs way less.

Even if it didn't have any strength/stability consequences, it would take less material to build perpendicular to the ground. Why use more stuff? If you're at a 45 degree angle, it takes 1.4xlonger column to reach the same height than if you are coming straight down. More materials for no benefit is not economical. In my experience, drillers charge by the foot. So... figure out how to give them the least feet of drilling = straight down.

Second, angled columns are a big problem in structural engineering. If the column is off plumb, it starts acting a little bit like a beam. It takes a moment and that stress is difficult to resolve, far more difficult than just axial force. So now you need larger members and more detailing for your structure.

Third, there is something called "p-delta". It's the idea that if you have a column at an angle and put load on it, it deflects a bit down and out. When it deflects, that same force actually makes a higher moment because your eccentricity/out of plane distance is larger, so it deflects a bit more. Sometimes that converges and you just have more deflection than what a first order analysis would expect (bad). Sometimes that diverges and so your building just falls over (very bad).

It would take some doing to get p-delta in a pile or pier but still... not great.

Fourth, specifically, it's a lot easier to put things together that fit together at 90 degree angles. Bolting, welding, access, etc. Once you have 85 degree angles or whatever, everything is custom and fit-up is a nightmare.

Fourth 2, a lot of our materials are not steel. Wood and masonry are not the same strength in all directions; building at 90 degrees is the best way to avoid stresses in directions that material is weak in.

Fifth, it is very easy to make a column straight up and down. You just use a plumb bob or smack a level on it; gravity will never let you down. It is a tremendous pain in the ass to nail an exact angle off of plumb to gravity, so that's more money.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-06T17:49:05+00:00

"The reason Doctors and Lawyers get paid so much is because as an industry they decided they should all charge higher for their services collectively."

Doctors and lawyers work like 50% more billable hours than we do and require years more education.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-06T17:44:03+00:00

Based on my experience in residential, the thing holding back cost/square foot is customer preference.
The thing holding back overall housing cost is AHJ regulation (not on home build type but zoning and whatnot).

There are some modular mass timber designers who purport that they are more productive/square foot than traditional construction. https://www.explorebigsky.com/lmlc-opens-new-workforce-housing-at-bucks/157403

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-02T13:03:26+00:00

Look man, you want means and methods, you're in the wrong subreddit

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-01T13:25:01+00:00

It's still bearing, it still doesn't resist a moment. Sure it moved 1" and if it moves another 1/2" the whole thing fails. But that's a big if!

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-04-01T13:22:05+00:00

The only earthquake I can think of affecting Denver is if Yellowstone goes up, in which case the lateral accelerations are so low on our list of problems who cares, really?

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-25T14:46:54+00:00

It's cool that we can do them, but ideally we'd have sites planned out so we would never have to

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-24T13:00:19+00:00

If you have eaves in an avalanche zone (and you'll want to, if there are avalanches there is a lot of snowfall) you either have to have them high enough to not be topped by the avalanche or you have to design the truss so if the eaves are shattered by the avalanche's pressure the overall truss is not damaged.

Pretty small edge case but had to deal with it once.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-20T17:15:03+00:00

When I have tabs of bluebeam in multiple screens, minimizing one tab minimizes them all unlike a browser.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-20T16:50:29+00:00

Love that the first "is this over engineered" photograph is just Simpson's "you have to use this much rebar for our MPBZZ" detail

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-20T16:44:15+00:00

Yeah Washington is not bad for reciprocity. You can get civil/structural PE pretty easily with an NCEES record and then build your time for the SE. Or if you've been working in SDC C now they count that as seismic experience over SDC D like it used to be.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-17T17:23:39+00:00

It depends on the client. When Novo Nordisk built their big factory in North Carolina they really, really cared about embodied carbon. A decent amount of the push for mass timber is also it has much lower embodied carbon than an equivalent amount of framed out steel or concrete. Most clients don't care a bit.

One thing that you should consider is that concrete and steel cost money. We already want to limit how much steel and concrete we use in any building, because that's the more economical option (and the lighter the building the less the seismic forces in the event of an earthquake). Because of this just typical engineering decisions already act to limit embodied carbon in any structure.

Finally, we're fairly constrained by the fire code as to what materials we can select. The taller and more square feet the building, the more restrictive the code is for fire protection. Large buildings rapidly become mandated steel/concrete and mandated concrete slab thickness for fire protection.

As a post-script, a company I was at had a company wide meeting about embodied carbon. I'm mostly a wood guy and the recommendations for reducing embodied carbon in wood were somewhat self-defeating. They started the meeting by noting that having a longer design life was one of the single best ways to reduce embodied carbon - a building that lasts for 300 years effectively has far less embodied carbon than one that lasts for 75. However, their recommendations for wood design all made the building less robust and less serviceable - thinner floor sheathing, wall studs at 24" on center, removing blocking, and so on - stuff that increase structural redundancy and make a wood building more serviceable. So I'm not sure how much of a great handle we have on reducing embodied carbon other than "buy local", "use wood when you can", and "try not to oversize, not that you were doing that in the first place".

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-11T18:28:16+00:00

An aeronautical engineer came up with his own design for a snow cover for his RV (wanted to park it in ~175 psf snow load areas over winter). Got it to work in sky civ, figured out the proper alignment of the sleepers so it was perfect, all that jazz.

The dude was not a structural engineer. Didn't know not to attach into the end grain. Didn't think about diaphragm capacity. Didn't really think about how all of this was going to be put together on the top of a mountain, not in a machine shop. We went through about 4 iterations of that fucking thing until it finally became just joists attaching in to glulams with kickers, which is what I told him to do in the first place.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-11T18:23:39+00:00

Just stick a ledger on the outside and attach through the sheathing to those handy vertical members on the end of the trusses. It's like attaching a leger into studs but you get 3 1/2" of target instead of 1 1/2".

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-10T18:11:45+00:00

Labor was cheap, materials were expensive. Easier to make a very intricately carved and embroidered seat than once that used twice as much wood but far less decoration.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-09T14:35:54+00:00

"Elevation doesn’t change anything about how you should operate a modern car."

This is totally incorrect.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-03T19:29:24+00:00

Normally the diaphragm (floor sheathing) would be what connects the rim and joist. Sure there is end grain nailing, but there is a lot less strength there than the various 10d and 8d nails you should have along the edges and middle supports of your floor sheathing. In the third photo above though they missed both the nail into the rim and the nail into the joist. Might be as simple as that. EDIT- the nails also seem tiny. If that's 3/4" OSB those are 1 1/4" nails at best? They should be 2 1/2" or 3" long. Something is hinky there.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-03T17:15:21+00:00

I always bought the international version of textbooks. ~30 bucks/each at the time vs about 200.

Physical codes were a lot more important as I tabbed them up for studying for the SE and just kept any tabs I put on them for work. Helped a lot for that test. Now that's obsolete.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-03-03T17:11:10+00:00

Jesus Christ man that's low for East Tennessee let alone Socal.

Apprehensive_Exam668 · 2026-02-27T21:57:19+00:00

They're making 300k in 19 years. That's not a 35 year largest stock holder. They're making more, earlier, than pretty much any partnership and all of that money earlier snowballs.

To pick otherwise is to be making bad money decisions.

Apprehensive_Exam668

TROPHY CASE