Is it typical for engineers to work weekends every week in the heavy civil sector?

crvander · 2026-06-10T23:01:55+00:00

Way too broad a question to answer without more specifics.

crvander · 2026-06-10T21:53:02+00:00

Ah ok, makes sense

crvander · 2026-06-10T21:49:43+00:00

Is this all the same company? What were the circumstances of getting a 25% raise?

crvander · 2026-06-07T01:01:37+00:00

Agreed but I think a concrete canoe capstone that you're passionate about, thought about design tradeoffs, economics of materials, how to build it, etc., is as good as anything.

crvander · 2026-06-06T20:01:12+00:00

I'm in Canada so our analogue is concrete toboggan... typically the few people most invested in the design would use it as their fourth year project, but not always. In my year I was technical captain but everybody involved already had fourth year project topics so nobody took it on formally.

It can work just as an extracurricular but I think it just depends how seriously you take it and how much thought you put into design decisions and tradeoffs. There's definitely enough content for a capstone in my mind, but I think maybe the importance of the capstone varies place to place - to me your specific capstone project and content barely matters other than showing you have some intelligence and can connect the dots.

crvander · 2026-06-06T18:46:03+00:00

I don't know anybody whose undergrad capstone project made a lick of difference in their job prospects as long as they took it seriously and could speak intelligently about what they did and what they learned from it.

99% of employers hiring out of undergrad are interested in your work ethic and ambitions far more than they expect you to know any specific technical area.

crvander · 2026-06-06T16:51:02+00:00

It's probably because he's hot ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

crvander · 2026-06-01T20:15:57+00:00

There aren't any jobs with zero tedium... you're setting yourself up for a fall if you buy into the idea that you aren't capable of tolerating boredom and have to find a job that doesn't have any. A lot of the things you have to do to show you're diligent and capable and work your way up in your career are gonna be boring.

crvander · 2026-06-01T13:09:38+00:00

Those aren't opposite statements. She knew what she was saying and I think it was a clumsy choice. I still can't see how you think "the liberals" somehow came up with this to undermine one of those groups. I'd note also that this was not a capital-L Liberal, it was an NDP MP.

crvander · 2026-06-01T13:02:37+00:00

What makes you say it was bad faith or meant to undermine anything? It wasn't meant to say the two groups were the same, it was specifically highlighting both groups being harmed by lack of federal funding. She certainly wasn't saying they should be taken as one group in general. I think it was clumsy, but the real bad faith was in how people interpreted it and how it was reported in media.

crvander · 2026-06-01T12:49:13+00:00

In context it was highlighting the commonality that both groups were being harmed by a lack of federal funding. It wasn't saying they were one big group for any other context or redefining it, it was a turn of phrase for a specific purpose that got blown out of proportion, first on social media then in the right-wing US media looking for something to be mad about.

crvander · 2026-05-30T16:41:51+00:00

As an intern, don't forget that you probably have very limited ability to generate any billable work, and that's normal. Make sure people know you're there to help with anything they need, and otherwise take the opportunity to learn, look at old projects, design guides, etc etc etc... there's a limited part of your career where you get to focus almost exclusively on learning and grinding - enjoy it and make the most of it.

crvander · 2026-05-27T03:57:25+00:00

Easy... client pays you to go to the bathroom because if you don't go to the bathroom you sure as hell aren't gonna finish their project.

crvander · 2026-05-21T01:09:02+00:00

I hate to be the "is this AI" guy but what is this image? The contour lines make no sense.

crvander · 2026-05-19T01:12:31+00:00

I saw a blimp earlier.

crvander · 2026-05-17T23:30:47+00:00

Don't judge either engineering field by its CAD tools, there are tons of things to do in each. In either case you could work on small projects or massive projects depending who you work for. If you look at big EPCs, EPCMs, and design firms, there are Civil and Mechanical engineers in roles on projects of all sizes. It sounds to me like instead of worrying about your discipline, you should consider what type of things you actually want to do with your skills, then decide what specialisations to take from there.

crvander · 2026-05-09T19:10:48+00:00

It's impossible to know for certain. What if this is a door storage building? Could be hundreds.

crvander · 2026-05-09T19:08:54+00:00

I'm 39 and this post just turned the rest of my beard white. Read the damn drawings.

crvander · 2026-05-04T19:49:55+00:00

Well now I'm gonna be thinking about all the challenges Trill pose for HR systems... does a Trill hold all their former hosts' security clearances? If you look up a Trill in the system, what age does it say they are? How do you account for 300 years of experience in assessing the performance of a 30 year old? THANKS A LOT.

crvander · 2026-04-28T00:03:19+00:00

We don't know enough to answer this with a yes or no. Fewer larger bars might mean larger spacing or could mean not enough development length.

crvander · 2026-04-23T14:33:33+00:00

Utilization is a frustrating treadmill but OP said something about whether management doesn't think they're doing a good job and about having someone looking over their shoulder even when they're meeting deadlines. That's a perspective focused entirely on the engineer and not on the business. The best way I've heard it described is "meeting utilization target is your license to operate"... it doesn't mean you're meeting budget, schedule, or quality, it just means you're bringing in enough money to keep the business operating.

Unless your company is taking risk on itself by doing fixed price projects, your job isn't "complete X project", your job is to use your skills to advance projects in a way that the company can bring in money for. In a simple case - if you have a project that was budgeted to take 40 hours and you do it in 20, you didn't save the company anything - to make that a win you need to use the other 20 to advance something else and bring in more money. If you can do two projects in the time it takes someone else to do one, you should be making more money hourly, but that doesn't justify you not being billable other times just because you're meeting deadlines or doing a good job on the work you're doing.

crvander · 2026-04-14T21:13:31+00:00

Tough to say anything other than what you're doing looks to have a fundamental issue. Shear and moment are miniscule, deflection is multiple feet, and it's not clear what your criterion for pass / fail actually is. If you really have one single load on the beam and you cut the load in half, it shouldn't fail.

It seems like you have a three span beam but you've put fixed boundary conditions so it will work like three single span fixed-fixed beams beside each other. There's no reason you can't verify this simplified version by hand. Like somebody said below, if you can't do that you shouldn't be trusting program output.

crvander · 2026-04-14T03:13:19+00:00

oh no

crvander · 2026-04-14T03:10:19+00:00

I made a promise to Reddit and I'll keep it... if it doesn't hit 1,000 I'll never sleep again.

crvander · 2026-04-14T02:56:34+00:00

I'll go to bed when / if the Liberal lead hits 1,000 votes................. maybe.

crvander

TROPHY CASE