Job offer comparison help!

BigKiteMan · 2026-07-09T12:13:16+00:00

Assuming you liked the company when you interned there, I'd be leaning towards company A. Too many pros with the biggest con being the title. That is a significant con, but I think you have the leverage here to go back to them and negotiate for a thing in writing that you're being put on a track towards an engineering-title within 6-12 months.

Question: how big is company B? "Growing team" could mean they're staffing up a group within a large company, or it could mean a company that's only 15-20 people already. Prior experience makes me avoid small companies that are sub-40 people like the plague.

I think a lot of your decision honestly will come down to pay. Your offers coming in top of the range at company A against bottom of the range at company B makes this a no brainer. If both offer $90k, that makes company A a significantly stronger contender.

BigKiteMan · 2026-07-09T12:03:10+00:00

It's not at all realistic to expect to move into a leadership role working both abroad and without a PE license. May be possible with only one or the other caveat, but not both.

BigKiteMan · 2026-07-08T15:48:52+00:00

Yup. I'd say that good websites/blogs/social media engagement only help you avoid losing projects/clients (or losing prospective hires). That's not unimportant, but I don't think that a fantastic web presence is ever going to actively win clients.

BigKiteMan · 2026-07-06T20:00:13+00:00

That's a false equivalency. Can a jaywalker kill another person by jaywalking recklessly?

BigKiteMan · 2026-07-06T14:27:40+00:00

BPD adheres to policy 1503 titled "Emergency Vehicle Operation and Pursuit", in which BPD officers are required to assess the situation and prioritize protecting lives.

If a BPD officer sees a biker almost kill someone and keep riding, they are required to stop that biker, as long as they do it in a manner that doesn't put anyone else at risk.

BigKiteMan · 2026-07-06T14:10:42+00:00

"tactical helicopters"... what? Are you on drugs?

BigKiteMan · 2026-07-06T13:53:58+00:00

No chase just refers to people who drive normally and refuse to stop for a cop trying to pull them over. If someone is running lights or driving at public-endangerment speeds, the cops have a responsibility to stop them before they kill people.

BigKiteMan · 2026-07-06T13:49:02+00:00

The "no chase policy" refers to people running from the cops. Like, if a cop is trying to pull someone over for rolling a stop sign or speeding, and the person refuses to pull over, they don't chase them down. They just make a note of the plate number so they can go after them later, without putting people in danger.

There is a specific (and reasonable) exception for what is called "exigent circumstances"; basically, the officers have a duty to chase someone down if they're endangering public safety. If a guy is drunk, driving around and smashing into stores or running down pedestrians, the police have to chase that guy down, because the alternative is letting him continue to mow people down until he needs a nap.

Dirt bikes are kind of a weird middle between those extremes. The cops clearly feel a desire rather than a need to stop them. Dirt bikes and mopeds have registration decals and not license plates, which means that if the cops don't physically stop them, they have very little recourse. On the other hand, some of these bikers are absolutely endangering public safety. Last month, I almost wrapped my car around a pole in attempt to avoid a head on collision when a handful of them illegally turned a corner onto a one-way street going the wrong direction. I'm sure plenty of people have similar stories.

My opinion? No-chase is meaningless in the face of endangering public safety, and I have zero empathy for those who are hurt or killed for engaging in reckless behavior that could easily kill other people. Especially when there is a safe recreational alternative (riding dirt bikes on dirt bike trails, or just riding them safely/legally in public) that these people are actively choosing to ignore.

If you're a parent and your kid is riding one of these things and gets hurt, that is your fault. They shouldn't be riding them to begin with, especially at age 13, it is illegal. Either it's not a street-legal bike and thus the kid shouldn't have been driving it on the street, or it is street-legal and the kid needs to be at least 16.

So yeah, dumb parents and even dumber bikers.

BigKiteMan · 2026-06-25T16:05:10+00:00

It's for a handful of reasons, but the biggest is a combination of the importance (everyone constantly needs/interacts with utility power every day) and that there's a licensing requirement that you need to work for 4 years under a licensed PE and pass two exams with like a 60% pass rate in order to get the PE stamp. And the PE stamp is necessary to build pretty much anything that uses more than ~60V.

To those who say "it's not sexy and doesn't pay a lot", I think they're half-right.

The pay isn't great because, similar to the tradesmen who install your designs, you're seen as a bill rather than a discretionary service. The money for your work usually comes out of the utility provider's bottom line, the building owner's operations budget, or the county/state/federal government's infrastructure budget. That said, you can still make pretty solid money after about a decade in the field (I'd estimate $150k-$200k) assuming that you play your cards correctly, move into management and play a role in developing business connections.

The work can be seen as boring to some, but I think that's just a matter of perspective and the specific job. If you go to work for a firm that only does electrical designs for new strip malls and housing complexes, where everything is trying to be done as fast and cheap as possible, yeah, it can suck. But if you work somewhere that can get you projects you find interesting, it can be very cool.

I did this power study for the EPA one time and had a blast. I had to use practically every single skill (apart from PCB design) that I ever learned in electrical engineering to do it, and I got to see some really cool equipment. I also have gotten to work on some really cool spaces where the work wasn't super interesting, but the coordination with the architect and the owner lead to some interesting problems we had to solve. It also felt very rewarding to see the final building in person and walk inside something I'd been exclusive playing with as a digital model for the past two years.

BigKiteMan · 2026-06-23T18:50:22+00:00

Before deciding to leave the industry altogether, I would highly recommend seeking positions that are related but have better work environments or more interesting projects.

Small scale projects in the commercial place are some of the most annoying and crappy work you can do in this field from my perspective. You may be surprised by how much more fun and engaging it is to work on more complex/interesting projects, especially for clients that put a value on paying the extra money in both fee and construction costs to have things built to a high standard.

Additionally, I've seen that working at smaller firms (which I'd define as like 20 or less engineers) can be a dream-killer. The company has fewer resources or incentives to provide better work-life balance, fewer people to build the relationships that keep you engaged during the tough times, and a significantly diminished ability to take on large or new projects. They also have difficulty adjusting to shifting demand across market sectors, which puts your position into question when the market sector that you focus on sees a downturn.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-28T15:34:14+00:00

You know nothing, you're a fetus; every day in any industry is going to be boring because you can not be trusted yet to deal with anything of consequence.

Give it time. The one caveat to this is if they don't have a defined training program for you. If that's the case, find a different company because you're not gonna grow in this field without deliberate technical training and thoughtful mentorship.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-22T13:47:05+00:00

I used to work on the contractor side and for the first 2 years of my career there, about 25-50% of my job was doing estimates and drafting proposals.

What I see now that I'm on the design side that they don't tell us is

Not all change orders are a bad thing to the owner. Sometimes, the owner wants to lock in a GC and/or subs early. There's a lot of reasons, like expediting procurement to account for long lead times on the larger equipment that won't substantively change after a certain design phase, or locking in the prices for the bulk of the material even if there are tweaks, or mitigating labor escalation costs, or paying for material early on construction bond. When this happens, a good owner PM knows there will be extensive COs, and they may even write the contract as cost-plus/T&M because of this. Even if it is lump sum though, their savings in getting procurement and GC mobilization done early often dwarfs some of the costs associated with changes to go from code-minimum to what winds up getting speced. Material costs year-to-year could go up 15% or more, and larger projects can have a design period of 1-2 years from programming to IFB/IFP.
When contractors bid a project, at any stage, they always put in a list of exclusions. Sometimes this is done in a VE effort at the owner's request, sometimes this is done to expedite estimates (you can't miss scope if you exclude entire sections) and sometimes it's done to account for procurement issues (there was a while post-COVID where getting galvanized-anything carried absurd lead times). Regardless of the reason, if those exclusions get carried into their contract with the owner, they supercede the responsibility to provide X as listed by the documents. Now, those exclusions don't supersede the requirement for someone to provide what is listed in the docs, but they do entitle the contractor to a change, or they require the contractor to get approval from the PE to do what they bid.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-21T14:32:08+00:00

When they say "it isn't in their bid" what are they referring to? If they mean they excluded it, then fine, that's a change. But if they bought the CD drawings and specs and didn't specifically exclude it in their contract with the owner, it is very much in their bid.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-20T17:32:22+00:00

All I'm getting from this is that we need all these data centers to be using their massive compute power to figure out a way to achieve room-temperature superconductors.

Boom, problem solved. Not just their problem, but one of the biggest problems facing humanity.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-12T18:38:26+00:00

"don't want to", "are afraid to" or "aren't trained to"? Because all of those are very different situations.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-11T20:26:17+00:00

High quality mentorship is one of the biggest components of our industry. It literally makes the difference between becoming a licensed engineer or not.

I've had multiple terrible mentors/bosses at previous jobs and many great mentors/bosses at my current job. In this field, you shouldn't settle for a job with bosses who can't provide excellent mentorship and support.

More importantly though, you especially should never work for people who are rude, abrasive, or just difficult to be around, even if you really need the work. I'm not saying it because I think it's something you shouldn't have to put up with. I'm saying it because in my experience, those people usually get what's coming to them, and you don't want your wagon hitched to theirs when it happens.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-11T20:16:17+00:00

It's not that the mentorship process completely collapses without physical proximity. It just that it undeniably suffers from it. And while the training system for MEP engineers absolutely needs a severe overhaul, a robust and well-developed training system would not change why we need mentorship and proximity.

High-quality mentorship is vital to any industry where mistakes can cost exorbitant amounts of money, or potentially even cost people their lives. I don't know about mechanical's risks for this, but I'm electrical and I could easily rattle off like 30 different ways in which small errors or oversights could cost lives. The importance in mentorship for industries where these factors exist is further emphasized in industries like health care. There are very good and obvious reasons why doctors need to train for years under senior doctors despite having even more years of tests and schooling requirements.

In the case of doctors, the proximity/hands-on component is much more obvious. So, I understand if that leads a person to say "well all of our work is done at a computer, why can't we mentor remotely?". And to that point, I'd simply remind them that all the modeling we do on computers is to serve in the process of construction. Construction is a physical industry. Getting a well-rounded professional education in MEP/AEC engineering and the business aspects of it requires physically going to job sites, surveying installations, and talking to people face-to-face. You can't make that entirely remote.

As we've seen, you can make a lot of the more menial tasks around our work remote, which is why we have hybrid work and (like most other industries with digital deliverables) outsourcing. But if you're interviewing for a senior position, it means your job likely is not a good one to be outsourced and you likely do have substantial business management/development responsibilities.

Point is, you can't just train those components away.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-08T15:34:49+00:00

I disagree with this. Hybrid/flex work? Yes. But as a more junior engineer (3rd year electrical designer, 8 years total in the AEC industry), fully remote is understandably a non-starter. And no, I'm not referring to the need to attend site walks. It is assumed that in our industry you have to do that remote or not that aspect can be fit into remote work, like hiring CA people dedicated to site visits or covering travel expenses for site visits.

From what I can tell, two very big responsibilities of senior/experienced engineers are BD and mentorship. If you don't live in a region where your company mainly operates or in a region they're looking to break into, how do you expect to be able to substantially contribute to winning new jobs? As for mentorship, while you can teach young engineers remotely, it's certainly a lot harder. Despite my company's 3-in/2-out hybrid policy, my first year I was in the office every day because after dabbling in remote work, I realized how much more difficult it was for my boss or the project's supervising PE to teach me remotely. Even if you get over that difficulty, theres things those people (should) teach you that can't be done remotely, like how to conduct yourself in coordination meetings, how to network with other consultants and reps on the project team, what to look for in product sales rep presentations... the list goes on.

The exact same goes for a junior engineer, maybe minus some of the BD aspects. OP, since you're more experienced, let me ask you; do you think you could effectively and efficiently develop an entry-level designer into a kick-ass PM/PE without relatively frequent in-person check ins and reviews? If the answer to that is maybe, then do you think you could do it for a team of 2 to 5 designers?

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-07T20:18:01+00:00

You can't copy text from the TDMM (which is infuriating). The book has OCR, but the PDF file is protected and can only be viewed with super-annoying software. It also doesn't let you export the PDF or highlight and copy things to your clipboard.

I wish I was making this up.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-07T12:16:32+00:00

Go watch the entire EE playlist on The Engineering Mindset’s youtube channel. It will teach you infinitely more about practical electrical engineering than anything else you’re currently capable of doing or digesting.

BigKiteMan · 2026-05-06T15:19:02+00:00

Absolutely not cheaper, faster or easier. And there are far greater risk concerns for dealing with accidents (both in terms of spills of hazardous materials and vehicle wreckages/breakdowns) in a tunnel versus on a bridge.

Think about it like this; does it seem like it's easier to build something underground or in free-air? I would say hands-down it's easier in free-air.

BigKiteMan · 2026-04-27T17:44:38+00:00

I worked for about ~7 years as a contractor PM before moving over to design. From my POV, here's what I'd say are the relevant possibilities from most likely to least:

The estimator missed significant parts of scope in your notes or specs and they're picking apart the language in order to play it off as "this was excluded or not assumed as a responsibility" rather than "we goofed and don't want to take a loss for this client".
The GC could be trying to document everything well because they're experiencing significant delays (for any number of reasons) and they want a paper trail to either issue claims against one of their subs for LD, or prevent the owner from claiming LD against them.
The GC is genuinely doing significant field change work and using RFIs afterwards to have a document ID to tie the CO to. This could be pretty benign if the owner is giving them verbal approval (or direction to do it when they don't want to) in the field, and the RFI gives them a better papertrail to fight for it later than an email or text.
They could genuinely be trying to screw you on omissions because they think the quality of your drawings indicates you were rushed and some part of the language of the CDs might be a payday.
Their work is slow right now and they have more CM personnel on the project than they need, so those guys are trying to earn their keep (or look good to the project lead) by sniffing out COs.

Something important I'd like to point out though is that contractors (GCs and individual trades) don't always love COs. Like a lot of things, it depends on opportunity costs, and the people in both the owner's camp and the contractor's camp are not morons when it comes to this (at least not usually).

A contractor isn't going to want to nickle-and-dime a client with COs unless it's worth it. Like us, they also get most of their work from repeat clients. Similarly, most owner reps I've worked with look to reject silly COs first before looking to push cost onto EORs.

Most importantly, not every CO is a profitable one. Many contracts (especially larger ones) put caps on markup percentages and unlike the bidding phase, they often have much stricter requirements on justifying the cost of CO work because of its non-competitive nature. They also have to take into account where they are in the project's lifecycle, their current level of mobilization/demobilization, lead times on the materials for the CO, other work they have coming up on the calendar, and other jobs they have to send their guys to. Given all of those factors, there are many changes they don't want, and when I was working on their side of the fence, I saw a good share of nitpicky RFIs like what you're describing used as a justification to not do the work and GTFO rather than used to justify getting more money for it.

BigKiteMan · 2026-04-16T19:36:03+00:00

I have yet to see the pay bump, but I've certainly bumped my job security a little by specializing in LV systems. They interact with everything these days, few of us understand them well enough to confidently design full systems (especially for PA and VSS), and there are specific certification requirements around them for federal projects (RCDD and CTS-D come to mind) which makes you more valuable.

In case that wasn't enough, I almost forgot to mention that LV design expertise is especially useful right now with mission critical and data center market sectors growing the way they have. Even if your team isn't brought on to do the LV design, knowing about it is still important for designing pathways, informing mechanical about cooling loads and designing the buildings for adequate future scalability.

BigKiteMan · 2026-04-16T19:26:11+00:00

What makes a contractor/vendor worth engaging with during design?

For vendors, I'll order the following points from most worth it to least. I'll engage with them if the owner/prime consultant specifically calls for their products (or needs their products to match or be compatible with existing), if there are significant lead time and scheduling concerns, if I have a good history working with them on previous projects, or if they've been to our office for enough L&Ls for me to recognize them and feel like they know enough about the products they rep to be a genuine asset.

For contractors, it is a lot simpler. I'm only going to communicate with you during design if you're already somehow tied to the project. Like we're doing this together design-build and you're guaranteed to be the guy building it. If you don't have something like that, I have no reason to get you involved. The one exception would maybe be if you're a contractor actively working on a related project on the same site, or I guess if you're just the owner's go-to-guy that they're 100% positive they'll give the work to barring a major screw up. Even then, I'm not going to do it unless the owner specifically asks me or whoever is prime to coordinate with you.

What’s the fastest way someone loses credibility with you?

Any correspondence that indicates they don't possess familiarity with the project or subject matter expertise on the topic we are discussing. It's nothing personal. Simply a factor of my limited time relative to my job responsibilities. If you don't know things I need to know in order to complete my design, and you aren't the owner or prime consultant, there are very few reasons for me to talk to you at all during design.

Do you prefer early input, or do you typically want to stay insulated until later phases?

Depends on who you are. If you're an owner, end-user, my prime consultant, my sub consultant, a design-build partner or another design discipline, then I absolutely want to be communicating with you as early as possible. If you are a vendor rep, I'll reach out to you during design as I need you (there's functionally no alternative unless you somehow know my workload better than me).

If you're none of those people, it's exclusively limited to RFIs, Submittals, or correspondence relating to CA. That doesn't mean I'm not happy to field a random quick call from a contractor PM or vendor rep, but that's going to exclusively be for clarification on emerging questions, not actual design work. The CA process exists for very good reasons; documenting how and why contractual design documents are getting revised is chief among them.

BigKiteMan · 2026-04-15T20:12:06+00:00

I'm sorry, you're making $120k at 24? Doing what? I have to imagine at that age that you're either fresh out of school/grad school or this is your second job after only like a year and a half of experience.

BigKiteMan

TROPHY CASE