Hate my job 14

[tumbleleaves]

1) I am a civil engineer in California.
2) I have been looking for employment elsewhere, for over 3 months.
3) An across the board pay-cut was instituted at my current employment.
4) I took this job when I was laid-off due to lack of work in 2009, when construction froze up. It did not pay well, but I thought it was secure, and thought there was no way they would reduce the pay further.

I work with old people that are hanging on to their positions (protecting their turf), should have already retired and are dysfunctional and out of touch. I've been carrying these old people. Now the job bugs me so much that it affects how I feel when I'm off work, and the last couple of weeks is affecting my performance at work.

I can't afford to quit, have been unable, so far, to find a new job... How are other people doing and coping?

 

[patprimmer]

Hmmm. I am showing my age, but if it comes from a computer I don't trust it until it earns my trust via repeated verification.

Regards
Pat
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[jgailla]

I'm in my mid 30's, and I have a distrust of computer results.
I don't think it's just age, but rather a knowledge (or belief) that trusting a computer without some sense of the basics and doing things by hand will lead to problems.

 

[PicoStruc]

What I find fairly common is the belief that, if it doesn't come from a computer, it's wrong. I know young engineers that won't look anything up in a book, they believe that everything will be delivered at the end of a keystroke.

I am a young engineer revolted to see other young( and not that young) engineers trusting blackboxes eye closed.

I as always say : garbage in -> garbage out.

If you dont understand what your doing nor are not able to calculate by hand... don't use it, especially all software based on finite element method. When you fully understand it, you know it not as straightforward it look like and can be dangerous when used by novice !! I am only talking about analysis here, automatic design in these software in even worse !

I have seen some engineer doing design by pressing that 'play' buton...scary !

 

[Gymmeh]

Ditto... PicoStruc.


"garbage in -> garbage out" I say that almost any time someones has not done a hand calc first. Then asks me for help, I will not help them till they show me some hand calcs, FBD, supporting info.

I have been know to yell at people for not doing such basic things

 

[patprimmer]

Even good input data can go haywire. It only takes one glitch in one line of code among maybe thousands used in a calculation or analysis. Even if the calc is to complex to do by hand (after all, that's what computers are for) at least check if the answer is reasonable by other methods including reference to similar real world examples.

Regards
Pat
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[dwallace1971]

A while back I had a colleague ask me how to pull stresses from a model she had built in PATRAN and had run in NASTRAN. One look at the model told me she hadn't a clue what she was doing. I tried to explain how her model was rubbish and that any stresses she might pull from it were rubbish as well. She simply smiled and asked "but how do I read the stresses"? I walked away.

 

[ewh]

At one aircraft manufacturer where I worked as a structural designer, we were given a mandate not to make any changes requested to a drawing or model file unless the calculations were shown. We weren't expected to verify the accuracy of the calculations, just the fact that they had been gone through, by hand.

Technically, the glass is always full.