Civil engineering career thread

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Picasso3

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A general thread for the civil engineers or aspiring civil engineers to discuss the career. I realize it's a broad thread but we can make more specialized ones later if we need to.
 
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Borzak

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I am not an engineer. I work with a lot of engineers above and below me. I would say the biggest thing that separates those that making a good engineer living and those that make a fantastic (like 7 figures) salary for a civil engineer is be well versed in the end of people who will actually build/fabricate what you design/engineer. Not saying you should work in the shop, but I know engineers who won't walk out in the shop or make a field trip to talk to people where all you will do is stand there for 5 minutes. I've noticed in the last 25 years those that are well versed in a variety of fields related to including the guys on the "rough" end everyone calls them boss.

Same applies to my field. By trade I am a draftsman. I know people who won't to the shop when it's on the other side of the wall from their office, and yet complain when people pass them up.

My last company that owner was an engineer and while his son was in engineering school he had him work summers in the shop. Always told him to pay attention and learn what works and what doesn't. Saw him run a grinder a lot.
 
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Borzak

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Anyone ever seen the HP calculators that had a printer attached and you put little cards in it to load the programs. Those were incredibly popular for a while in my industry. Ever so often I still see one on a bookshelf in the corner somewhere.

I know when my dad got his and could load a bracing program it went from an hour long deal to figure one out to about 2 minutes.
 

Dandai

Lesco Brandon
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Does civil engineering cover how much load a floor can sustain? I'm looking to put approx 60 lbs/sq ft (310 gallon barrels on their side) on a floor, but I'm not sure where to start as far getting a professional opinion.
 

Dandai

Lesco Brandon
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Lol, thanks. It's actually a brewery, but you had a solid first guess.
 

Borzak

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Well just going by water that would weigh 2,500 pounds give or take if it was full. So as much as a real small car, or 4 motorcycles at once. You really want that in your house in one spot?
 
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Dandai

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Did you mean 31 gallon barrels?
We'll have four 310 gallon (10 bbls) barrels (technical term is foeder) when we open and plan to acquire 4 more per quarter for the first year.

Well just going by water that would weigh 2,500 pounds give or take if it was full. So as much as a real small car, or 4 motorcycles at once. You really want that in your house in one spot?

The property in question was originally built as a grocery store and has HUGE steel beams running the length of the floor. The barrels will be mostly full, though some volume will be fruit and an even smaller volume will be head space for gas expansion/blowoff.

The reason I posed the question to you guys is because I was curious (hopeful!) if it's feasible to strengthen the floor enough to sustain the load or if a structure designed to support that kind of load is something you do during the initial build or not at all.
 

Picasso3

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Post some pictures, mainly because all this sounds cool.

Close to the wall and on the beams etc certainly helps. I don't think 60 psf is that big of a deal (I think that's about what i planned for a for a hot tub on my deck) but I certainly understand the caution. You may call and get a structural inspector (one that does structural home inspections may be the cheapest route) to give input or say it's ok for a few hundred bucks, but I wouldn't count on it.

If you have room to put in jack posts (Shop Tapco 93-in Adjustable Jack Post at Lowes.com) it's easy and a no brainer, the hardest part is getting something rigid enough in place above to bridge a few joists, but if you're right below a beam you're good to go. Besides that you'd be looking at adding steel to the beam prob and that would not be a happy cost.
 

Lenardo

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You mean the HP 41 series of calculators?
we still have one at work i think. hp41 & memory "slot" plus survey"slot" with an Infrared "out" that you put the HP thrermal printer in line with.....
we also have a few hp48's that still work with TDS survey Gx installed with 256mb card
and 2 Recon data collectors -one with bluetooth, one without- the one without shit the bed but works kinda.

Anyone ever seen the HP calculators that had a printer attached and you put little cards in it to load the programs. Those were incredibly popular for a while in my industry. Ever so often I still see one on a bookshelf in the corner somewhere.

I know when my dad got his and could load a bracing program it went from an hour long deal to figure one out to about 2 minutes.

Land Survey/Civil Engineer/CAD here. filling out the paperwork to take my PLS exam in MA(stamp for professional land surveyor) been doing this type of work since i was 7yrs old- my father owns the company- been working full-time since was ~20, so i have ~30 years fulltime experience in the field.

mostly i work in the office doing the design plans since i am better than anyone in the office with CAD - started with autocad 10 with DCA software, now we use land development desktop 2006(which came with that piece of shit software autodesk civil 3d pro(it sucked-installed it, tried to do a job in it and there was no way to actually import my data from the field...so installed land development desktop, did all we wanted and haven't looked back) , will upgrade ONLY when the city of boston updates their minimum submission cad format (v2002 or higher)

I do subdivision design/layout/etc house plot plans, septic system designs, building layouts, condo plans, building design (rarely i hate doing interiors), title insurance plans, land court plans (MA has a Land Court that has specific regulations), boston water and sewer renovation plans (our most steady work, we do a couple hundred a year), beam calculations, drainage design (we use Hydrocad) work pretty much anywhere in eastern mass, but 80% of our work for the past 8-10 years has been in Boston. during our work we have found things the city had no clue were there....
 

Lenardo

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as for the beam bit, we are actually doing in salem ma something similar, OLD building has ~20" steel ibeams that were installed ~1920 and the new owner wants to do some work and it is required that we do the calcs for what load can be supported.

huge beam across floor- open span or colums along the beam...

check here for a GENERAL idea of what the load can be- it all depends on the size of the Beam and the SPAN...

https://cfsei.memberclicks.net/assets/docs/designguides/3_loadspan.pdf
 

Lenardo

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pe- in the house.

our plans are ~50-50 PE/PLS we currently have 2 pls's in house the older of the two is also a PE(he is also 83 or 84 but works 30hrs a week, is in an orchestra, etc.
we also are associated with 3 other PE's( and know several others) that we get in on a per job basis depending on what they are needed for, and one of those 3 is on semi retainer- he does work for us, we do work for him since the surveyor he tends to work with, well his plans suck since he is mostly just a surveyor and despite 20years of using CAD..his plans he does NOW, look exactly like the plans he did 20 years ago...while my plans, most aspects of the plans are significantly better- i look at a plan i did 20 years ago and went, damn i sucked.

the other main CAD person in the office is going for his masters in CE, BUT, due to his experience level cannot take the PE test, he graduated last year (he started as an intern with us, and never left.) or the year before, so has 2 or 3 more years to go before he can take the test, you need at least 4 years experience, unless you have a masters degree, then it is 3 years.
 

Lenardo

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Bruce- our older pls/pe...well i was wrong about his age,.,, he will turn 90 in november.

work wise, we are still busy, busy busy.

i've almost finished filling out the paperwork for submission so i can take the PLS test- should be finished next week or so - i have to figure out what jobs i've done to submitt- according to the test, my job is classified closest as an analyst (rankings in descending order go- owner, manager, administrator, analyst, investigator, party chief, researcher, post processor, cad, instrument person, rod person, training or other. i tend to do most of the research, i do most of the cad, i do most of the evaluating of plans to field calculations etc, the one thing i RARELY do is,,,go out in the field and do the actual Survey part.

side note:

The city of boston water and sewer commision is starting-this week- electronic only review submissions of plans, currently only 2 companies were admitted to the program to submit in this manner, the company i work for is one of them. looks fairly simple for submissions too, we log into the website, upload the file, it gets reviewed, revisions required will be noted to us somehow we have not submitted one - and i have not reviewed the procedure yet) we make revisions, reupload- gets review approval, we print out plan, stamp it, bring 5 copies to engineering, they send it up and it gets signed/approved, hopefully this will streamline SOME of the process and make it a bit faster to get approval (not that it takes us long to get an approval, typically a max of 2 meetings for approval- bring in, gets reviewed in meeting, then says, i want this or that (if something is not right, or he wants a different connection, or a profile if there is a bigass pipe in the way) we take notes back, make changes, bring back in, done..

found a cool plan for one of our projects that we are doing on dorchester avenue in boston, there is a sewer easement across the property, typically we cannot BUILD on the easement but can on this one, the city has nothing shown inside the easement, so i just had to find out why, and did, the reason why it is not on the city system is...the sewer interceptor is too deep to be shown on the city gis, the 10' diameter interceptor is 200 feet underground......i found the plan at the registry that shows the profile, initially i was confused as to why it was not shown, until i looked at the vertical scale,...1"=50 feet...pipe is 7 miles long and goes across boston to deer island(where the main treatment plant is).
 

Haast

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The property in question was originally built as a grocery store and has HUGE steel beams running the length of the floor. The barrels will be mostly full, though some volume will be fruit and an even smaller volume will be head space for gas expansion/blowoff.

Are you setting up a Burton Union?
 

Lenardo

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mine shaft- was probably built that way yep, but its pretty much just a big ass drain let me see if i can grab one of the plans (19 plans in the set) oops i was wrong 317 feet down and10' diameter at locus-- starts ~350' down and 11.5' diamter. slope is basically 0.0001

Massachusetts Land Records

click suffolk county
under search criteria select plan by book(year) search
book 7019 page 232
uploading the sheet to imgr now to link here - reduced the size of the image from my scan
a2itOFi.jpg

a2itOFi
 
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