When you're old, you have stories to share...
Many years ago, a friend from college took a job at Caltrans. She had wanted Fluor or Bechtel, but didn't get offers from them before graduation, so she took Caltrans instead. She could stand no more than four weeks of it, and it was so bad she left without having another job lined up. Fortunately for her, Fluor offered her a job a couple months later.
This is a summary of the story she told me soon after she left Caltrans.
On her first day, after filling out the required forms, she was taken to meet her new supervisor. He thought she was starting the next Monday, so he had not prepared anything for her to do. After he thought about it for an hour (!!!), he finally gave her the Caltrans Highway Design Manual (HDM) to read and that was it.
On Tuesday, he proudly declared he had something for her to do. My friend finished this assignment in about half an hour and took it back to her supervisor to review. Unfortunately, he had no more work for her that day, so back to the HDM.
On Wednesday, he again proudly declared he had something for her to do. His instructions to her were--and 40+ years later, I still remember this quote she told me-- "Pace yourself. Take all day."
It was then that she began to realize that she might need to leave sooner rather than later. She stuck it out a couple more weeks hoping things would change, but they never did, so she finally left after just four weeks.
That type of "work" environment is very difficult for a not-quite Type A personality.
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BTW, I did a summer internship myself at the same Caltrans office and it didn't take me long to realize that I would not want to work there permanently. I met exactly one person (a senior level civil engineer) who had the work ethic of the outside world, but that was it. I could just see him from my desk and I never saw him not working hard. In fact, he had the reputation that if you really needed something done, give it to this guy because nobody else would do it. On the other hand, another seasoned engineer with nothing to do would wander the hallways on our floor and randomly stop to talk to people. As far as I know, he did no work while I was there.
That summer, Caltrans had hired nine civil engineering students from my university. The five that worked out in the field (inspections, geotech, surveying, etc.) were fully utilized all summer. Of the four of us working in the office, I was the only one with a full work load. I had a full work load because my supervisor handed me all of his work so he could cat nap frequently or spend time on the phone doing real estate deals (he was also licensed broker). He probably spent no more than 8 eights all summer actually supervising me. The largest part of my job was to update planning-level cost estimates that he had done in previous years. The fun part was that most of his estimates had major errors, like forgetting to include aggregate base for one five mile stretch of highway, forgetting to include bridges for a proposed freeway that would cross a river, being off by a factor of two on the length of a rural highway, etc.
One of my classmates was hired to work in the environmental section. Unfortunately, even though that section had been budgeted for a summer intern, it not been budgeted for ANY work that entire calendar year. So, the two permanent engineers in the section and my classmate had zero work to do. Also unfortunately, I was not allowed to give him some of my work and I had enough to give. His singular accomplishment that summer was spending enough time in the cafeteria with other, regular underutilized employees and learning how to play backgammon really well.
The other two classmates in the office each had about 50% workloads.
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"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill
