A little less engineer bashing maybe? 1

[Dinosaur]

Guys,

I recently returned from a steel fabricator we do business with. I now work in the fabrication inspection field having moved over from designing. Once the fabricator and his shift manager realized that I was not an arrogant designer, they started hitting me with all kinds of questions about why designers don't like this or that type of detail. I answered the questions as forthrightly as I could given my limited understanding of the specific design. There were clear instances of designers that didn't understand fabrication but there are an equal number of situations where the line workers don't know anything about the code requirements.

But on the drive back (of several hours, giving me plenty of time to reflect) I thought more of the situation. First I recalled the number of times my own former boss said we didn't have time in the contract to work out the tiny details and we needed to get something on the plans and then move on. Bottom line is that designers I worked with wanted to do a good job but didn't have time to address unusual circumstances as well as they would have liked.

The bigger issue though was that most of the fabricators I spoke with on that visit were paid more than the engineers I work with. Now these fabricators know steel pretty darn well. And they do a damn good job most of the time under difficult circumstances correcting errors and adapting to material shortages and the like. Yea, they know their steel. But they don't know jack about reinforced concrete. They don't know diddly about prestressed concrete, or air entrainment or silica fume or segmental concrete construction or bridge scour or a stiffness matrix or ... you get the picture.

We engineers hold ourselves to a high standard, and I am never ashamed to tell folks I am an engineer because other folks think highly of us as well. But even here, I see some fairly profound engineer bashing. When I stop to consider the great breadth of knowledge we have to demonstrate just to get by in the structural engineering community, I wonder why we work ourselves to death and worry ourselves sick for benefits to our client dramatically overshadowing our cost to them.

Well, it is what it is. But maybe a little less engineer bashing wouldn't hurt.

 

[cvg]

why bash each other when there are perfectly good architects out there to bash? (tongue in cheek...) I think it is done out of frustration and that detailers don't understand or appreciate what is expected of the design engineers, just as design engineers don't understand what a typical architect does and of course we all fully understand the contractor's point of view...