What do you do?

Borzak_sl said:

We've tried direct hire in the past. People who are able to do the job feel it's below them even when we give them an above average pay. We had a a woman who was working out but soon she said that the work was "below" her. It's not mega intensive. We get revisions that come in over night. They move them to the correct folder and move the ones that were revised into another folder. Plot 6 copies a few times a week for the shop. Answer the phone ever so often, every person in the office has a regular phone and a VOIP phone and most have a company provided cell phone. Since we don't deal with the public we get maybe 2-3 phone calls a day thru the main line.

I looked into it today. When we did direct hire we paid $27.50/hour to start and this is not exactly the most expensive part of the world to live. This posistion is the only temp to hire we have. We only have 35 people in the office. We do direct hire in the shop of 100 at this location and direct hire at the other shop of 140, but that's a totally different ball game. Those guys have to pass a long line of test. Depending on the customer they have to do a background check, a drug test, a physical including hearing test and pass a variety of welding test etc...Something you really don't want to go thru the hassle and expense for a temp to hire.

As it is now one of the other project managers or project coordinators takes an hour out of their day to do it.

I'm going to put an ad online and one in the paper (go ahead and laugh most of good hires have been from the paper and that includes PM's) and see what the cat drags in this time.

Apparently it's a little better now than it was last year sinc ethe nearby fracking boom has shut down. We lost a lot of shop workers, and a few of the office ladies left when their husband started making 2x as much over night. I'm sure they are all looking for a new job now.

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Fuck man, that's about $55,000 a year(assuming it was full time) for doing jack-all, something a recent highschool grad would be easily qualified for. I'd say your pay was WAY more than fair. Jobs around here pay about $12-$14 an hour for that type of data entry work.

Was talking to procurement guy, in his office, and Tammy comes in, tells me to move, goes behind his desk, picks up a bag of potato chips, and starts eating them right beside the fucking guy I'm talking to and staring at me. It was like an SNL skit

The Tamster. Tamarino. Eatin' some tater chips. Starin' me down.

lol my mother-in-law's name is Tammy

I also had a turtle growing up named Tammy

joeboo_sl said:

Fuck man, that's about $55,000 a year(assuming it was full time) for doing jack-all, something a recent highschool grad would be easily qualified for. I'd say your pay was WAY more than fair. Jobs around here pay about $12-$14 an hour for that type of data entry work.

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I really don't know what the low end pays. I literally have no clue. My brother in law was a supervisor for 75 McDonalds for the local franchise (Baton Rouge, down to New Orleans and part of MS) and they couldn't hire people for minimum wage for years. He left 2 years ago ago and they started at $11.50 per hour to get ANYONE to show up and apply.

We have two people that do data entry to our program that keeps track of weights, shop pieces etc...I really can't compare that to anyone else tho. Both are daughters of other employes who are in college and do it part time since that is all that is required.

When I owned a company we had nobody at that low end. Shop guys started at around $20/hour and welders started at $25/hour and went up to about $40. In the office I think the lowest we had was around $52k/year for the lady that answered the phone and odd job stuff like run and pick up the mail each day from our box and various light filing duties. Account and payroll was contracted off site.

It's been a VERY long time since I started off at the low end of pay, 25 years. Minimum wage was $4.25 I think and I started at $8/hour out of high school and got a raise to $10 in the first month and in the 3rd month I went to $12/hour. After a year I left and went to work on site where it paid more.

If we were located in towns I had previously worked there would be a larger pool to draw from and companies that supplied that type of temp. Not really around here.

Because of the odd schedule I worked this week I'm off till Monday and I'll look into it. Our shop went to 24 hours a day for a short period and since we shipped 1/3 of the job lots of people took time off/vacation. I had to stay a few nights since some of our shop foremans left. At least we have internet and cable in the office, pretty boring but I'm not quiting because there was nobody to talk to lol.

I just looked it up, county here is at 3.3% unemployment. It's really booming here. The shop is in what basically developed into a industrial park (the shop has been here 50 years and the park grew up overnight around it. Mostly shipping etc. But lots of shipping and offices for places like FedEx, Amazon. I counted 75 companies in the park one day, 3 years ago this was a pasture and our shop/office. Our shop actually straddles 3 communites. One as mentioned was 750 people according to their wiki page 10 years ago, now it's $20k+. The biggest town it is part of also has an air force base etc...The president of the company said his retirement plan was to sell off part of acerage we're not using and take a kickback from it.

According to the chamber of commerce we were the largest employer in this town minus the air force they don't count up to about 10 years ago. Now we don't rank in the top 25.

This is TX and you see about 1/3 of the license plates are from CA. About 25% of our office staff including 2 VP's were moved here from CA. They are all "OMG I can afford a house here", and I'm like "OMG I have to drive further to work now to avoid you all and not live on a 1/10th acre lot ". LOL.

Oh well first world problems. We'll figure it out eventually, luckily it's something that 1/2 the people in the office are qualified to do as a fill in. They had actively been looking for another project manager for 3 years before I sent them my resume. I didn't get hired as a PM, we're still looking. First day here the HR lady asked if I knew any sites to put listings on. She also said they were taking ads out in Houston and Baton Rouge (makes sense the petro chemical industry is our biggest draw) and Dallas. Then she asked if I had heard of this little freebie give away paper outside Baton Rouge. Nope but I called someone and asked if they had heard of it. Yeah but it was something you pick up at the flea market or something. She took an ad out in it. Apparently they get a lot of applicants for PM posistions but nobody has a clue what we actually do, which is why I was hired lol. She also said since we're right near Austin we get a lot of IT people who see PM and apply like this is a PM job in the IT world. OK.

Odd things.

Picasso_sl said:

Was talking to procurement guy, in his office, and Tammy comes in, tells me to move, goes behind his desk, picks up a bag of potato chips, and starts eating them right beside the fucking guy I'm talking to and staring at me. It was like an SNL skit

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The few Tammy's I know are pretty fiery, but their all coon asses who run mostly men oriented businesses so they don't take any shit off anyone really.

Iannis_sl said:

Man, that sucks.

I'm a firm believer that there is no such thing as a small job.

But it does kind of sound like she was saying, "This shit is BORING." And I am a firm believer that there are very many jobs indeed which are fucking boring. You can find the right personality type for it though. They exist.

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I take the boring jobs and make them more challenging by trying to figure out how to eliminate them, either by changing the process or some form of automation. I tell my boss my goal is to work as little as possible while still collecting a check. Not out of lazyness mind you, but its a good way to take a boring job and make it challenging and interesting.

Well part of document control will never be automated. They have to do a page turn and document what changed on each drawing for each revision. So 1000 drawings might hae 3 revisions total for each drawing. All that has to "page turned" and looked at and decide what was changed and document it.

Borzak_sl said:

Well part of document control will never be automated. They have to do a page turn and document what changed on each drawing for each revision. So 1000 drawings might hae 3 revisions total for each drawing. All that has to "page turned" and looked at and decide what was changed and document it.

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I'm sure there are software packages that can track changes like that automatically.

No it can't. For one thing it's in our contract that we must "page turn" and that's what is in the contract to document the changes so we can bill for them as revisions. Another is we don't get electronic design drawings or engineering drawings from the customer or the engineering firm hired by the customer. We get regular old PDF's. Even if we got the design drawings in a cad format it wouldn't help us out. They only specify a weld symbol for instance, it's up to us to specify what prep is required, how it is to be cut (CNC plate burner, shear, press brake etc...). All that is up to us and we bill for whatever is affected.

They make a change to a weld symbol even if we got it in electronic cad format we have to ID what it was before, what it is changed to, how many feet of weld are affected etc..So say a weld goes from 1/4" filet to 3/4" full pen weld. We have to document which piece that occurs on, how many feet of weld is affected, and what other prep is involved. So a 1/4" filet will be no prep where a 3/4" full pen weld will require beveling both plates on both sides and I need a linear total.

Without all that information we don't get paid and revisions can account for about 20% of a total job.

So you may get 1000 drawings on a job and they average 3 revisions per drawing but on each revision there may be 5-10 things per drawing that need to be documented.

That *could* be automated/computerized. Its pretty complex, but there's a ton of complex shit in the world that is computerized that you would think that only a human could do correctly.

Of course, it would require having some custom software written and that might be more of an ordeal and more expensive than just hiring some schmo to manually check them all.

I really doubt it could as well, especially from a pdf. Autocad programs will have some built in revision tracking that could work on the engineering end, but he's down the line and it's probably better to have him looking exactly at what it'll look like to the guy standing there and building it.

A lot of time we are under time constraints. Many of our projects are fabricated while the design is being finished. Normally we capture a lot of the issues and they are incorporated in later drawings further into the project.

LOTS of times a revision is a phone call saying revise all welds of X to Y. Revise all material in a certain section from A36 to inconel which cost 5x as much. I'll make a shop drawing revision in hopes that it gets revised in the design drawings and will send an email to get it in writing, but it's not official till the design drawing comes out. Which many times is post fabrication, and sometimes post erection.

I make the revisions on the drawing manually lots of times, fabricate it, ship it, and then we get an actual hard copy revision before it is erected and product on site will match the revised drawings the end customer will use to verify it at erection time, and many times they get them the day they check it.

It's not as easy as picking up what has been revised on a drawing, since we don't get an actual design drawing. We have to also capture the revisions in the shop drawings which may/may not come from a design drawing.

It's cheaper and quicker to just have someone page turn it - since that is specifically spelled out in our contract. They define page turn as actually turning a hard copy of drawings and documenting what was changed.

A lot of that has to do with the projects being cost plus which in recent years has increased the amount of documention, which makes sense since you used to just send them an invoive for material and make up an invoice for labor and that was it. Less than a page. Apparently someone/multiple someones was fudging the numbers.

Customers have multiple inspectors on site during the fabrication process, but normally they don't check any revisions or make sure that the actual fabbed stuff matches any design drawing. Normally they make sure you have a written procedure to do X and follow it like welding certain materials.

I find it very relaxing. It's very slow paced to me. The president of the company thinks I'm on drugs when I talk about how slow paced it is. In the past the company I worked for had the contract to keep the 2nd largest refinery running including all structural and plate maintenance. It's amzing how much shit breaks at 2am. Seen a guy ignore an automatic stop of a 300ft. coker unit water jet drill. It pulled the top half of the tower down on itself...at 2am. We rebuit the tower from measurements we took off the other 3 that were still standing and had it designed, fabricated, and erected before noon the next day.

People always says "Money is no object'. I can literally say when you are keeping Exxon from refining oil at the 2nd largest refinery in the country they mean it and back it up often. I needed some special allow plate to go into a furnace. I found some in MI. I hired 3 truck drivers to drive in shifts to get it to Baton Rouge the next afternoon.

That wasn't fast enough. I hired a company in MI to go pick it up, cut it into smaller pieces. I hired a cargo plane to go pick it up and deliver it the same day. I paid $300k for enough steel that could have been delivered in my 3/4 ton truck. But I got in there in time and I got a letter thanking me lol.

Some days I miss it, some days I don't. Not being on call 24/7 is nice. Not carrying a sat phone on vacation while backpacking the teton crest trail is nice.

Now my major road block seems to be hiring a paper pusher lol.

I start again on Monday. I never thought people would turn down decent money because the job is "boring". Maybe we should hire some union people. The few I have worked with (not boilermakers) seem that has been key in their career. Do as little as possible.

We have a union shop in MS out of 2. Oddly enough the two shops are located 15 minutes apart. One builds stuff and sends it to the other who finishes assembly. One is not union. I looked at the pay. The union shop makes less than the non union shop.

Borzak_sl said:

Which many times is post fabrication, and sometimes post erection.

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Maybe it's just me, but I prefer it to come post erection.

r

Picasso_sl said:

4 layoffs in my office out of 16.

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Field?

Picasso_sl said:

4 layoffs in my office out of 16.

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Time to update the ol' resume

2 draftsmen

What kind of draftsman, I'm hiring just north of San Antonio. Prefer someone with structural or plate work in a petrochemical environment but you never know.

You don't want these two.