I used to work for a branch of a large, national corporation in one of the hottest development markets in the USA, and the multipliers for the project engineers in that office were between 3.2 and 3.6. This was all for study, modeling, and design work on behalf of area public water utilities...
zdas04, you are right. Micromanagement persists because it is such a great tool to tweak the books, minimize the overhead and maximize the profit. I commend any worker who can tolerate it for a significant period of time, but that's me. And to some of the more seasoned engineers, ineffective...
"As an Engineer, I have seen it's tough to make money working with Architects."
When you say this, I am reminded of how difficult and unreliable architects were when it came to paying the subconsultant, my former employer, who engineered the HVAC, plumbing and power for their buildings...
Although I am unsure this is the problem in question, in my experience, ineffective technical managers are challenged to retain the staff required to effectively get things done. That is what is sad to me, that technical managers with reasonable people and presentation skills when dealing with...
Those are good questions. We recently applied a couple pipe capacity analyses for a site design. To estimate the capacity of a pipe and channel, we used the equation Q=1.49/n*R^(2/3)A*S^(1/2), which, of course, gives us the maximum discharge for the pipe or channel, for whenever it's flowing...
"How can you effectively get things done in an ineffective managerial environment?"
Might I answer your question with a couple of questions, and the first one is rhetorical: are you the new guy, or are you the new sheriff in town? As a follow-up, how much of your time are you willing to...
There are a couple typos in the above post. Please note the CORRECTION (deletion) below.
Based on a drawing showing the PLs, existing and proposed contours, we took six sections of the site at 50 ft intervals from the west PL to the east PL. To help us organize the sections, we defined the...
This may be related to your request. It is real simple to produce an estimate of cut and fill volumes. Since we are just wrapping up a cross-sectional analysis for a site design by hand, I want to share our easy method, if not just to provide a perspective.
We began by reviewing the site...
Please just take any of my tips for what they're worth to you. By the way, some photos would help, too. Perhaps, a link to a webpage with published photos is as good as it would get at this point.
To add to cvg's suggestion, if you want to consider going that route, you might install a "brow ditch", a shotcrete channel or earthen swale along the edge of the top of your slope, that collects the sheet or surface flow as it runs toward the slope, before it continues down the slope. From the...
Well, to be specific, the company I worked for is primarily a civil engineering consulting company HQ'd in Florida. The Board of that company revised the company policy a year or so ago in response to a recently signed state law. Therefore, only licensed engineers working for that company are...
