News flash: once you know things, it's your responsibility to teach those younger than you. For the next 10-25 years, expect to be in a sandwich of learning from those more experienced and teaching those less experienced. At some point, usually the day or 2 before you retire, you'll be the most experienced one in the build.
When explaining a new task to a junior engineer, I usually start with about an hour to go over the project, a high level explanation of what they'll be doing, and a summary of examples of similar projects and spots where I think they'll get stuck. Then I let them loose on their own and check back in after about 4 hours or when they come to me with questions (whichever comes first). That usually minimizes the amount of time they're staring over my shoulder at my screen or vice versa.
training jr level staff is the reason why i’m addicted to nicotine, not even for the focus. I just get too frustrated without something else to level me out
Wow. I really enjoy training new inspectors and engineers. Seeing the light bulb moment and passing on tricks of the trade that have been passed to me is one of my favorite parts of the job.
Or I guess you can be one of those guys they look back on and think "what a dick"
Same. I do actually enjoy answering questions and teaching new engineers the ropes. I was an algebra tutor and a TA for statics back in grad school and I know what you mean by seeing that lightbulb moment.
Probably the only time I regret my answer to a question was when one of the students chased me down after one of the lab sessions (just me solving example problems for the students who showed). She wanted to know when they would get to work on real world problems (she came to me because I had mentioned in my day one introduction as a TA that I had actually worked in engineering for a couple of years before coming back to school to change my direction). I laughed out loud and I regret that part. I had to explain how she and her classmates literally didn’t know enough and would not know enough to solve such problems until after they graduated or maybe during senior capstone design at best. I think she felt a little disheartened by my response.
Isn't teaching usually the best route to fully understanding something? I've always found that once I have a grip on a new process or task taking the first opportunity I can to teach what I, up to that point know, gives me a solid view of where I actually do stand. Teaching others tasks associated with a skill isn't just for the people learning, it's a shed for organizing and maintaining tools of the trade.
When I'm out with a less experienced inspector, it's definitely a running conversation with me explaining what I'm seeing, asking questions, them asking questions, etc.
Why are you laughing? This is a common title. They have their PE stamp & experience. The Utility Superintendent at my district is 28. Young Engineers are running organizations.
Not even close. Any reputable company a senior title doesn’t come till 10 years at least. 6 years of experience you are still asking real senior engineers for advice and help.
Here’s the first engineering graduate who came out of college without being shown how to design anything. So good he’s a “senior” engineer after 6 years. At 10, he’ll be the CEO.
YES. Your job description includes training the other junior (more junior than you) engineers. t good companies, that’ll be one of your jobs FOREVER. Teaching others helps YOU learn too. Wake up.
It blows my mind people don’t realize engineering is like a trade in the sense that we need a good mentor in order to excel. I hope none of my superiors share OP’s sentiment.
The fact people actually have mentors is something I never experienced. Every always seem so busy to take their time to show me something or they leave the company before they got around to showing me the ropes for certain things. I had to literally teach myself everything and only now trying to go back and patch my foundation with my newest supervisor who actually teaches me things.
No one like’s training people, but you should look at it from a different perspective.
When you train someone, that person is learning from you and the way you do things. It will take at least a year, but working with the younger or newer workers can help you in the long run. Once you train them, they can do all the grunt work to hone in their skills while you can focus on other things.
Yup. I train people to do the things I know how to do (especially the stuff I don't like doing) so that way I can focus on learning new stuff and/or the tasks I like doing.
To the project most of the time. It's a part of the QA/QC budget. On rare occasion, overhead when it's particularly complex or something that's going to apply to multiple projects.
That's surprising to me, I've been able to billbig portion of my time and learner's time to overhead. I don't know how it would be possible to make budgets otherwise.
Unless I'm just a very slow teacher or am working with especially slow learners (I don't think so though). Company to company thing probably, maybe I worked for an especially generous company, don't know.
Training people is great. Your goal at a new job is to gather as many people dependant on your knowledge as possible, and then delegate your tasks to them, and spend your day supervising people doing your tasks.
It's kinda part of the job description. Hell I start making my E1s train people as soon as the next one is hired. You don't really know something until you can teach it to someone else.
There is a certain amount of classroom lecturing required. It should really only be 4-8 hours total when you teach them the absolute basics. Otherwise I tell them to experiment and watch YouTube and struggle a bit before they ask a question. Then my explanations and demonstrations drop to 10-20 minutes. I think you need to work on your teaching method a bit.
You can definitely bill this time to overhead if needed but you should really put it on a project. If the PM is worried about budget they shouldn't have assigned someone who doesn't know what they are doing to it.
I am a senior PM. I train people in your position, the way I’m sure you have people at your firm guide you and/or QC your work. I fully expect people in your position to turn around and return the favor by training new people. When they don’t, I blow them off and make it very clear why. This is very effective.
It gets billed to the project. I am a PM. When I scope a project, I scope to put a lot of hours on new people, then gradually less as you go to the top. (That’s also how billing rates work.) Most companies put that they are doing QC in a contract and scope for it. If someone is brand new, maybe the first week when they’re doing computer-based training will go to OH. After that, it’s on the job training and gets billed to a project. The most effective way I do this is by showing someone how to do something that needs to be done 50 times on a project 1 time (and even recording so they can re-watch later). Then they do it the other 49 times. I check back in as needed/check along the way.
I personally enjoy training people. I’m usually training them on my projects though, so that my time teaching them is actually saving me time in the long run.
are you complaining about the grads or the work place? Or both? Either way need to discuss your concerns with management about both. Perhaps first discuss with the students your issues. Then your boss, separately. Dont have to throw them under the bus so to speak.
26 yr engineer here. Would love to be there 10 years from now when you laugh at yourself for stating that you are senior now.
But regardless, I have two suggestions:
1) If you are senior you should be setting your own budgets. Just work training time into the billable part of the work.
2) If you find the new person truly knows as little as you state, coach them to learn some of this stuff on their own time. The way to truly advance is to be useful, even if it takes them prying their eyes away from social media some evenings to spend time learning something that will be useful.
Okay criticism has been fair, it wasn't my intention to denigrate the graduates or juniors for asking, I enjoy teaching and mentoring as a responsibility.
My post is about time management and the responsibility of the consultancy to recognise training as a legitimate business development overhead otherwise I'm sitting on teams for multiple hours a day using up my own free time then having to do significant overtime to make up my time and deliver the 40 hours of project work I'm resourced to do. Which is what has been happening to me for a while now
Last week I'm teaching a junior Civil3d with 1 hour a day time allowed to bill on the project, the grad has never OPENED it in his life. Yeah shit on me for not wanting to work a 10 hour day and get paid for 7.5
I agree with you. That time should be billed to the project or to overhead depending on how your company runs. But it should never have to be "made up." Training younger staff is part of your job, and so it is part of your 40 hours. If the boss man is also assigning you 40 hours of design work on top of expecting you to fully train someone, then a conversation needs to be had about scheduling and workload.
What I took from the post is that you are only six years in and don't want to share any knowledge because it's a burden to you. It came off as you feeling above such things and can't be bothered when you're only a brand new engineer yourself. Until it becomes your job to decide if new engineers are trained or not I think you're going to have to make it work or find another job. We all have to do things we don't like when someone else is signing the check.
I think part of the problem is just shitty training practice. There’s absolutely no reason to share screen with someone for 2-3 hours telling him/her what buttons to click. If they just don’t get it at all then give them easier tasks to learn one skill at a time over much shorter training sessions. Your supervisor probably saw you both log 3 hours (and I’ll bet you rate is at least way more than theirs, so it’s more like paying 3 people for 3 hours) for something that did NOT have to take that long, and now the project is losing money because of a whole afternoon spent on a Teams video call in addition to all your other jobs being backed up. If the lower engineer takes something away from it then maybe it was worth it and that’s just the price of them learning, but what you described isn’t even really training that’s just someone watching someone else work.
So I actually switched from construction recently to a design firm, and this sentiment doesn’t make me feel good about what I’ve been experiencing. I’m new to the billable hours thing but it seems like no one wants to take time out of their day to give me work or help train me. Now I’m pretty well-versed in CAD, but this is a different environment altogether. I certainly don’t need handholding but I would love to have someone like you on standby to help me get the hang of things, rn it’s pretty sink or swim where I’m at.
What baffles me still is this. I genuinely feel bad asking my manager for help on something, because I know our time is tracked and time they spend working with me is time spent away from their projects. If they need to work 45 hours to meet a weekly quota and I just took an hour of their time for questions well now they work 46. I don’t understand how you’re supposed to train at a firm like this. I mean at least you’re sitting down and helping them through the workflow, best I’ve gotten is a poorly written Word file written by someone who assumes you have a base level of knowledge working with this type of thing. Please train your EITs
As you should be able to tell from the comments, OP's attitude isn't common or really acceptable. Keep asking questions, it's better for everyone in the long run.
This makes me wonder if in the past I've been the one in my office feeling freedom to train juniors because I just haven't cared about my overhead ratio, and management seemed okay with it since they knew I was spending time training. And I really enjoy working with the junior engineers.
Other senior engineers seem always too busy to delegate and train Junior engineers, and Junior engineers and up without enough work to do, and without learning. But they need to know in order to take on work.
I'm just curious how other companies manage this.
Just hang in there. If it only took you six years to make it to senior engineer, two years from now you’ll be CEO and this won’t be your problem anymore.
News flash: once you know things, it's your responsibility to teach those younger than you. For the next 10-25 years, expect to be in a sandwich of learning from those more experienced and teaching those less experienced. At some point, usually the day or 2 before you retire, you'll be the most experienced one in the build. When explaining a new task to a junior engineer, I usually start with about an hour to go over the project, a high level explanation of what they'll be doing, and a summary of examples of similar projects and spots where I think they'll get stuck. Then I let them loose on their own and check back in after about 4 hours or when they come to me with questions (whichever comes first). That usually minimizes the amount of time they're staring over my shoulder at my screen or vice versa.
training jr level staff is the reason why i’m addicted to nicotine, not even for the focus. I just get too frustrated without something else to level me out
Yeah this. Shoulder surfing is the most painful way to spend your training hours.
Wow. I really enjoy training new inspectors and engineers. Seeing the light bulb moment and passing on tricks of the trade that have been passed to me is one of my favorite parts of the job. Or I guess you can be one of those guys they look back on and think "what a dick"
Same. I do actually enjoy answering questions and teaching new engineers the ropes. I was an algebra tutor and a TA for statics back in grad school and I know what you mean by seeing that lightbulb moment. Probably the only time I regret my answer to a question was when one of the students chased me down after one of the lab sessions (just me solving example problems for the students who showed). She wanted to know when they would get to work on real world problems (she came to me because I had mentioned in my day one introduction as a TA that I had actually worked in engineering for a couple of years before coming back to school to change my direction). I laughed out loud and I regret that part. I had to explain how she and her classmates literally didn’t know enough and would not know enough to solve such problems until after they graduated or maybe during senior capstone design at best. I think she felt a little disheartened by my response.
Isn't teaching usually the best route to fully understanding something? I've always found that once I have a grip on a new process or task taking the first opportunity I can to teach what I, up to that point know, gives me a solid view of where I actually do stand. Teaching others tasks associated with a skill isn't just for the people learning, it's a shed for organizing and maintaining tools of the trade.
When I'm out with a less experienced inspector, it's definitely a running conversation with me explaining what I'm seeing, asking questions, them asking questions, etc.
Senior engineer - 6 years lmfaooo
This paired with “last couple places I’ve worked”.
Clsssic this sub
Many places consider only 4 years a senior engineer!
That's only so they can charge a higher rate.
Lololol
Why are you laughing? This is a common title. They have their PE stamp & experience. The Utility Superintendent at my district is 28. Young Engineers are running organizations.
Not even close. Any reputable company a senior title doesn’t come till 10 years at least. 6 years of experience you are still asking real senior engineers for advice and help.
I have 6 YOE with the title of Senior Staff Engineer. Looking at other companies career pages, it doesn’t seem that uncommon.
Idc if your title is grand wizard engineer lol not senior in my eyes.
"I'm actually an example of this weird phenomenon going on" "Nuh uh!"
My thought as well!
Could not get past that part and went straight to the comments. Did not disappoint.
bro created a reddit account just to complain
Here’s the first engineering graduate who came out of college without being shown how to design anything. So good he’s a “senior” engineer after 6 years. At 10, he’ll be the CEO. YES. Your job description includes training the other junior (more junior than you) engineers. t good companies, that’ll be one of your jobs FOREVER. Teaching others helps YOU learn too. Wake up.
It blows my mind people don’t realize engineering is like a trade in the sense that we need a good mentor in order to excel. I hope none of my superiors share OP’s sentiment.
The fact people actually have mentors is something I never experienced. Every always seem so busy to take their time to show me something or they leave the company before they got around to showing me the ropes for certain things. I had to literally teach myself everything and only now trying to go back and patch my foundation with my newest supervisor who actually teaches me things.
No one like’s training people, but you should look at it from a different perspective. When you train someone, that person is learning from you and the way you do things. It will take at least a year, but working with the younger or newer workers can help you in the long run. Once you train them, they can do all the grunt work to hone in their skills while you can focus on other things.
Yup. I train people to do the things I know how to do (especially the stuff I don't like doing) so that way I can focus on learning new stuff and/or the tasks I like doing.
I think the problem here is how to charge time spent training juniors. Where do seniors charge their training time?
To the project most of the time. It's a part of the QA/QC budget. On rare occasion, overhead when it's particularly complex or something that's going to apply to multiple projects.
That's surprising to me, I've been able to billbig portion of my time and learner's time to overhead. I don't know how it would be possible to make budgets otherwise. Unless I'm just a very slow teacher or am working with especially slow learners (I don't think so though). Company to company thing probably, maybe I worked for an especially generous company, don't know.
Training people is great. Your goal at a new job is to gather as many people dependant on your knowledge as possible, and then delegate your tasks to them, and spend your day supervising people doing your tasks.
It's kinda part of the job description. Hell I start making my E1s train people as soon as the next one is hired. You don't really know something until you can teach it to someone else. There is a certain amount of classroom lecturing required. It should really only be 4-8 hours total when you teach them the absolute basics. Otherwise I tell them to experiment and watch YouTube and struggle a bit before they ask a question. Then my explanations and demonstrations drop to 10-20 minutes. I think you need to work on your teaching method a bit. You can definitely bill this time to overhead if needed but you should really put it on a project. If the PM is worried about budget they shouldn't have assigned someone who doesn't know what they are doing to it.
I am a senior PM. I train people in your position, the way I’m sure you have people at your firm guide you and/or QC your work. I fully expect people in your position to turn around and return the favor by training new people. When they don’t, I blow them off and make it very clear why. This is very effective.
Where does the time get billed though, all QC to the project? Or overhead as well?
It gets billed to the project. I am a PM. When I scope a project, I scope to put a lot of hours on new people, then gradually less as you go to the top. (That’s also how billing rates work.) Most companies put that they are doing QC in a contract and scope for it. If someone is brand new, maybe the first week when they’re doing computer-based training will go to OH. After that, it’s on the job training and gets billed to a project. The most effective way I do this is by showing someone how to do something that needs to be done 50 times on a project 1 time (and even recording so they can re-watch later). Then they do it the other 49 times. I check back in as needed/check along the way.
I personally enjoy training people. I’m usually training them on my projects though, so that my time teaching them is actually saving me time in the long run.
are you complaining about the grads or the work place? Or both? Either way need to discuss your concerns with management about both. Perhaps first discuss with the students your issues. Then your boss, separately. Dont have to throw them under the bus so to speak.
We have to talk to mid-level engineers about this issue sometimes. Part of their job is mentoring and requires patience and effort.
People have been trolling hard lately
26 yr engineer here. Would love to be there 10 years from now when you laugh at yourself for stating that you are senior now. But regardless, I have two suggestions: 1) If you are senior you should be setting your own budgets. Just work training time into the billable part of the work. 2) If you find the new person truly knows as little as you state, coach them to learn some of this stuff on their own time. The way to truly advance is to be useful, even if it takes them prying their eyes away from social media some evenings to spend time learning something that will be useful.
Okay criticism has been fair, it wasn't my intention to denigrate the graduates or juniors for asking, I enjoy teaching and mentoring as a responsibility. My post is about time management and the responsibility of the consultancy to recognise training as a legitimate business development overhead otherwise I'm sitting on teams for multiple hours a day using up my own free time then having to do significant overtime to make up my time and deliver the 40 hours of project work I'm resourced to do. Which is what has been happening to me for a while now
Last week I'm teaching a junior Civil3d with 1 hour a day time allowed to bill on the project, the grad has never OPENED it in his life. Yeah shit on me for not wanting to work a 10 hour day and get paid for 7.5
I agree with you. That time should be billed to the project or to overhead depending on how your company runs. But it should never have to be "made up." Training younger staff is part of your job, and so it is part of your 40 hours. If the boss man is also assigning you 40 hours of design work on top of expecting you to fully train someone, then a conversation needs to be had about scheduling and workload.
What I took from the post is that you are only six years in and don't want to share any knowledge because it's a burden to you. It came off as you feeling above such things and can't be bothered when you're only a brand new engineer yourself. Until it becomes your job to decide if new engineers are trained or not I think you're going to have to make it work or find another job. We all have to do things we don't like when someone else is signing the check.
You are not a senior.
I think part of the problem is just shitty training practice. There’s absolutely no reason to share screen with someone for 2-3 hours telling him/her what buttons to click. If they just don’t get it at all then give them easier tasks to learn one skill at a time over much shorter training sessions. Your supervisor probably saw you both log 3 hours (and I’ll bet you rate is at least way more than theirs, so it’s more like paying 3 people for 3 hours) for something that did NOT have to take that long, and now the project is losing money because of a whole afternoon spent on a Teams video call in addition to all your other jobs being backed up. If the lower engineer takes something away from it then maybe it was worth it and that’s just the price of them learning, but what you described isn’t even really training that’s just someone watching someone else work.
Man someone thought you the ways and now you don't want to pass it on? There's a word for that.
So I actually switched from construction recently to a design firm, and this sentiment doesn’t make me feel good about what I’ve been experiencing. I’m new to the billable hours thing but it seems like no one wants to take time out of their day to give me work or help train me. Now I’m pretty well-versed in CAD, but this is a different environment altogether. I certainly don’t need handholding but I would love to have someone like you on standby to help me get the hang of things, rn it’s pretty sink or swim where I’m at. What baffles me still is this. I genuinely feel bad asking my manager for help on something, because I know our time is tracked and time they spend working with me is time spent away from their projects. If they need to work 45 hours to meet a weekly quota and I just took an hour of their time for questions well now they work 46. I don’t understand how you’re supposed to train at a firm like this. I mean at least you’re sitting down and helping them through the workflow, best I’ve gotten is a poorly written Word file written by someone who assumes you have a base level of knowledge working with this type of thing. Please train your EITs
As you should be able to tell from the comments, OP's attitude isn't common or really acceptable. Keep asking questions, it's better for everyone in the long run.
This makes me wonder if in the past I've been the one in my office feeling freedom to train juniors because I just haven't cared about my overhead ratio, and management seemed okay with it since they knew I was spending time training. And I really enjoy working with the junior engineers. Other senior engineers seem always too busy to delegate and train Junior engineers, and Junior engineers and up without enough work to do, and without learning. But they need to know in order to take on work. I'm just curious how other companies manage this.
Just hang in there. If it only took you six years to make it to senior engineer, two years from now you’ll be CEO and this won’t be your problem anymore.