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I can sympathize with many of the comments and observations noted above. My first two jobs I was paid hourly and worked a lot of overtime. We were only paid our hourly rate for the overtime hours. The second company was a design/build firm that was bought by a European competitor that had an...

I never did any work on pole barns, but I saw one collapse. Our neighbor in a small town in Upper Michigan was a beer distributor and had a pole barn erected as his warehouse. Our town was about 700 people and he had the barn erected on the empty lot between his house and ours. This would...

I had a similar situation with columns in the basement of a paper manufacturing plant about 25 years ago. These columns were on concrete piers that extended a foot or so above the floor slab. I did a combination of what you have described. I reinforced with plates where the corrosion was not...

I took my first concrete design class in 1971 and they taught both WSD and LRFD (USD) because they were not sure that LRFD would catch on. My first boss in 1973 had never heard of LRFD, so he let me use it and checked all of my calcs with his WSD method. After a while, he was convinced that my...

I graduated in 1972 during a poor job market, so I decided to stay and go for a non-thesis MS degree. I chose to be a Teaching Assistant and was then limited to 9 credits per term. The degree would take 5 terms. Over the summer term (1973), the main-frame computer was replaced and my Finite...

My career started just over 50 years ago in Michigan. I worked on commercial buildings, but nothing over six stories tall. 3 ksi concrete was the standard back then. As I had learned LFRD (now USD) my boss checked all of my early calcs as to how they compared to his WSD results. Part way...

This thread is very interesting and brought back one specific incident. At the end of my career I was brought back out of retirement to work on an industrial rework project on a building built in the early 1970’s which I had experience from that time; not this specific building. In the next...

Our three kids are now in their 40’s, but I remember having to buy new calculators almost every year in Jr High and High School. You’d have thought we could hand some down from the oldest kid, but many years we had to buy two or three new ones. Somebody was probably getting some kickback. gjc

I had my first interview with a large well known firm in San Francisco in late 1971 or early 1972. I was from a small town (700 people) six miles from Michigan Technological University in Houghton Michigan. First time anyone in my family flew on an airplane. There were several people that I...

I had this be a problem once, with almost 28 years of experience into my career. I had a one story structure with two equal spans of precast planks. They had embedded plates at their bottoms and were to be welded to the steel beams. I had assumed they would be installed from one end to the...

I used calculus once in my 40 year career. Working in Minnesota’s Iron Range and we were designing silo’s with conical hoppers to store taconite pellets at the port of Duluth. Our boss said “I wish there was a way to minimize the surface areas of the silos for the volume required. I said It...

When I worked on Minnesota’s Iron Range our company had standard details that included “rock anchors”, to provide fixity for the foundations. They were rebar grouted into drilled holes in the rock and projected and bent into the footing. As this was ages ago I don’t have those details. My...

In the mid seventies the multiplier was 2.5 at my first two jobs. During a slow period in the second job, they lowered the rate to try and get work. Third and fourth jobs I was salaried and put in lots of hours. At the end of each year, I would look at my bonus and divide by my overtime...

I had a project a long time ago with two equal spans of hollow core slabs. I designed the center beam for the total LL and DL. The contractor placed the hollow core slabs the full length on the rear span. Full bearing on the edge beam and half bearing on the middle beam. The center beam...

My school was behind those referenced above. Took my first design classes in 1971. Steel was Allowable Stress Design and concrete was both Working Stress and LRFD as the Professor stated that they weren’t sure LRFD would be used by everyone. First job, the boss did the concrete with WS to...

I never thought my MS directly affected my pay. Indirectly I’m sure the extra classes I took helped me. I completed all the course work for my masters in 1973. A replacement of the IBM main frame made my thesis program unworkable. Still all the advanced courses gave me an advantage over my...

My experience echoes a lot of what’s already been stated. Got my BSCE in 1972 and had two job offers. First was $10,500 in San Francisco and second was less money with a metal building company in Arizona. My professor’s said you can’t live in SF for that wage. I was not interested in the...

Looked at my first concrete textbook and for Working Stress the maximum concrete compressive stress for bending was 0.45f’c. For 3000 psi concrete that would equal your 1350 psi value. When I started working, in 1973, 3000 psi concrete was the standard, unless you were willing to pay more for...

Having started my career with a slide rule, everything was done by hand. Moments from 2D moment distribution. Shears from member statics. Design was an iterative process. Members were grouped and designed accordingly. Calculators did not change much. With computer programs, I developed a...

Early in my career I was managed in a way that gave me specific tasks and expected time frames for review by the Project Manager. This helped my get to a project management position at my second job; a design build contractor. Third job was for a consultant working on commercial projects for...