Contractors and Engineers

Rachel Walla
My dad is a general contractor who works in logging, excavating and construction. Throughout the years I’ve spent a lot of time working for him and other contractors in the area as well as some on internships. Getting this experience has let me see a different side of the industries many of us here at Tech will be connected with. The biggest lesson I have taken away from the real-life applications of working in the field with contractors is their attitude towards engineers. You may find it surprising. Then again, you may have dealt enough with these conflicts to gag at the thought.


There is a general saying among contractors that if a job you are bidding involves an engineer, charge more. Why? Well, engineers are very detail oriented people and a lot of the time a contractor will have extra hassle involved when an engineer comes on the jobsite. This could be anything from an engineer slowing down work, having certain aspects meticulously reworked, or just extra communication between the managers that takes up time. Either way, it seems that no matter how perfectly a plan gets laid out, there will always be some adjustments when it comes to real-life implementation. Often what looks great in the office will have to be adjusted in the field. This is where the problems come in between the engineers and the contractors. Contractors tend to a lot of estimating and adjust for the job whereas engineers like to stick more rigidly to the plans. Sometimes meeting somewhere in the middle becomes a major issue.
I’ve found that the longer an engineer has been out of school working, the more likely they are to look at the work and sign it off as a good job, while young engineers tend to get caught up in the details and create more hassle. One of the best examples of this was on a road project I was on a few years ago. A younger engineer who was only about a year out of college came out to survey the road. It was sloped to encourage drainage and but the slope wasn’t the specified grade. She was staking out the areas that needed to be adjusted when her boss, a more senior engineer arrived. He looked at it, without taking any measurements, and said it was fine. They talked for a while then agreed that the most important aspect of the road was that it would shed water, which it did. They signed off on the job and left.
I’ve seen other engineers on tree-planting jobs come out with a yardstick to make sure that every tree is planted the right distance apart. The problem with that approach is that in nature, trees don’t grow exactly 36 inches apart and often the best place to plant the tree depends more on the nature of the ground than perfect spacing. This is just another case of workers and engineers needing to meet somewhere in the middle. If the spacing is far off the plans, the end result will waste a lot of time and money and might meet the required specifications. If the plants are perfectly spaced, more than likely their survival rate will be less due to less than optimal planting zones.
As an OSH Major one of the more upsetting things I’ve heard from friends who do contracting is that they don’t know what OSHA does, they just know that if someone from their shows up on the job its time to get your hard hat on. Obviously, this proves that the safety program isn’t working for anyone since its just seen as an inconvenience to the contractors and only enforced when some Safety Manager is on site. I think in all these cases, it’s important to inform the people you’re working with of the reasoning behind the plans and find somewhere to come to a compromise so that the worker can be productive and the plans can be implemented. Often in between the office and the field, there needs to be some adjusting.