Professional and Career Topics

Hi everyone, I'm looking into how we pass down institutional and field knowledge from senior/retired engineers to the younger generation. Codebooks and textbooks are great, but they don't capture the actual 'lessons learned' on the job site or during a failure. To the seasoned PEs here: what is a rule of thumb or technical nuance in your discipline that you only learned through years of trial and error? I'd love to gather these insights.

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Michael Sanchez S.M.ASCE
Intern
Staten Island NY
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To find the area of the triangle whose 3 sides are given 

And analytical geometry equation of st line circle 

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Alex Thomas R.Eng, C.Eng, M.ASCE
Senior Site Engineer
Geo Structurals Pvt Ltd
ErnakulamAlexThomasR.Eng, C.Eng, M.ASCEIndia
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I would help illustrate to the younger engineering students the importance of Statics fundamentals such as free body diagrams, sum of all the forces equal to zero, reactions and fixed ends, etc. are the building blocks to complex underground shoring systems, sizing of beams, struts, and walers, and permanent underground infrastructure.  It's series of free body diagrams rotated 90 degrees.

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Wallis Lee P.E., M.ASCE
Senior Engineer
City & County of San Francisco
San Francisco CA
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I have a few pointers (speaking specifically to civil/structural/construction engineers):

1. Try to spend at least two years working in the field. Don't be so anxious to go into an office with two widescreen monitors and the latest software at your fingertips. The end of civil engineering is to build something, be it a culvert, bridge, building, road or just a simple stop sign post. Many young engineers forget that someone has to build their design. I was doing a summer internship at a engineering firm during my first year of university; the best piece of advice the firm's principal gave me was regarding constructability. He gave me a magazine article about it and it has been the central guiding principle of my career and designs. 95% of the problems you're going to face has to do with constructability. Is this particular steel section available? Do I really need a piled foundation or is just a wide isolated footing just fine? Do I really need five different unique bar shapes or can I simply increase the member thickness and keep it down to one (or even two) bar shapes? Someone, somewhere is going to building your design. They don't care how clever you are or if you used the most sophisticated and modern software. They're just interested in building the thing. So you need to be in the contractor's shoes for months at a time and learn how they build, their mindset, the level of skill of their laborers, and just simple economics. After that, things get somewhat more manageable.
2. Learn to sketch. Yes, I know BIM and CAD software is widely available, and AI is here and everyone has a tablet and so on and so forth. But learn to sketch. It forces you to slow down and think things through. Also, you don't have the luxury of time or artistic liberty. You need to sketch something plain, quick, and immediately obvious to the recipient. Learn to sketch typical details (e.g. typical square column section, a beam section, anchorage details). It's a useful skill. I've resolved several problems on site with just paper and pencil. Technology is everywhere but sometimes the old simple solutions are the best and quickest.
3. I may be oversimplifying it, but steel design for buildings is deceptively simple: design for deflection, check the rest for compliance. Also, the secret to understanding steel design is to thoroughly understand buckling. I know I'm still young in my career (this year makes 10 years)  but most steel design provisions seem to be a mutation of a buckling provision (yes, there's bearing, yielding, etc). Again, I know I'm oversimplifying but to the young engineer, he/she will get lost and bewildered at the sheer scale of textbooks, manuals, reports, etc. Take a few principles and go with it. In my experience so far, deflection and buckling are one of the foundational pillars of steel design. Understand those and then you work your way through.
4. The secret to concrete design of any section (i.e. beams, slabs, shear walls) is (*drum roll): similar triangles. That's it. That's all you need to know (again, I know I'm oversimplifying stuff, not ignoring shear design provisions, etc). But for strength design of concrete structures, similar triangles are used to assess the design capacity of a given concrete member's section and rebar arrangement. The number crunching is taken care of by software. The textbooks don't explicitly mention it (they just give you the ratios and do the math) but it helps to state specifically what device is being used (in this case similar triangles). What's obvious to you is not immediately obvious to someone else. Sometimes it helps saying it out in the open.
5. Good rule of thumb, I can't remember where I read it: when people are pressing you for a timeline, gauge how long something will take you, double it, and move up to the next largest unit of time. Someone wants to know how long it'll take you to design a floor slab system. Let's say it's an hour. Double it to 2, the next largest unit of time after the hour is the day, so tell them two days. If something will take you 3 hours, tell them 6 days. If it'll take you 1 week, tell them 2 months. I know I might get flak for this, might be accused of being an inefficient engineer, etc. but life just happens. I'll be lucky if I get a few hours of quiet time during the day with zero distractions, phone calls, meetings, emergency site visits, etc. Also designs need to be redone, rechecked, sent for comment, received back with comments, reworked, etc.
6. Keep a construction journal. I took this piece of advice from a YouTube video. The details are hazy (please forgive me) but I think it was an interview of Ralph Peck, one of the greats of geotechnical engineering. He ask Karl Terzhagi on advice for improving his engineering skills; Karl Terzhagi told him to just keep a journal. Carefully observe the construction site, see how the workers deal with a problem. Write down the steps in a clear, logical sequence accompanied by sketches (trust me, this is much harder to do! It really forces you to slow down and observe). Keep that up for years. Engineering involves a great deal of common sense and observation.
7. If you're working on a construction site, stick to the iron workers bending the rebar. The most valuable and insightful lessons were not from my professors, not from my boss or coworkers or textbooks, but from the seasoned iron workers. Early in my career (about a year or two after university), I was working on bridges with a precast design-and-build firm. The iron workers and rebar fixers spotted all my mistakes. At first I was annoyed they kept barging into my small site office two or even three times a day (sometimes every hour), asking questions. And I was tempted to retort back with a "Stick to the design and leave me alone" but when I sat down and saw their thinking, I realized I made several mistakes. They caught them all. Here's the thing, these guys will be cutting and bending steel (hundreds of them) under the hot sun for 8 to 10 hours a day. The last thing they need to hear from an engineer is "Oops! Sorry! The rebar had a mistake, it's off by 3in, redo everything". They won't respond politely is all I'll say, you'll quickly find out how...er....certain words can be stringed together in combinations you've never heard of before. This ties back to my first point: learn what these guys go through to make your design a reality. Your job as an engineer is to try and make the contractor's job as simple and straightforward as possible. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't try innovative designs but keep in mind: someone is going to build this. Don't just shrug it off as "it's their problem now".

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Jonas Sanchez P.E., M.ASCE
Civil Engineer
Arguelles Architects
Belize City
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