Best piping engineer I have ever worked with is a local on site contractor. We have tried to hire him, but he knows he will be doing the same job, including unpaid overtime, as he does now but instead he gets paid overtime and is paid hourly instead of salary. No brainer on his part. And we eat it because he’s fucking good.
The biggest problem I’ve seen is the George Floyd era resulted in a lot of younger females in Technical Group Leadership. But they gossip, overshare shit they shouldnt, and generally favor women over developing either sex technically (if that makes sense).
Retirement brain drain is hitting hard. And we prioritized “leadership” skills aka bullshitting skills over the introverted, bowels of the plant technical folks. So now we’re left with a fuckton of young engineers that want to be business people and can’t calculate an energy balance or read a pump curve.
