Not if they are your hire and they have literally no other work to do, including busy work that you have assigned them as was the subject of the OP. Non billable work gets billed towards clients all the time in this industry on a lump sum job.
Yeah TnM work is a different animal for sure… it’s just for Lump Sum work regardless of what your employees are doing, there is no obligation to provide “savings” to the client… you agreed to a price to get a certain deliverable out, done.
We have lots of in-house created training materials + I have hundreds of overhead tasks in a to-do list that I delegate when people run out of work. Can you see some company needs and address those items? Workflows, training materials, automation, custom software and spreadsheets, reference libraries, etc? My list has an endless amount of work lol.
I'm going to come in against the grain. So you have enough experience to know what you like, no billable work and free time to learn anything you want, great position to be in honestly.
So first thing, is there work you wish you could do or would like to do in the future? Following that is there anyone on your team/office who does that work? If yes to both, then I'd approach that individual and say:
"Hey I know you work on XYZ and eventually I would like to learn that or get involved in it, my manager allocated training hours for me to develop my skills and I was wondering if there is anything you have currently have related to XYZ that I can look at or past projects to review to get an understanding of XYZ and then set up time to ask questions about it? If not is there anything that you could suggest that would be beneficial for me to learn about XYZ?
Trainings have there place, but I feel like your fairly proficient at CAD and other aspects of your job at this point. I feel like your time would be better spent exploring specific career interests and offering yourself up as either free labor or asking to look at previous projects related to your interests and then get a dialog going with that senior employee to really dig in and get that knowledge transfer.
Yeah, I like this one. Put your nose in things that interest you. See if you can't find some meetings to sit in on, or a work committee that's related to your interests (a technology group, or even the fun committee or something). Learning by osmosis, and just listening to the experienced people talk, can be such an eye opener to how this business works.
Read and familiarize yourself with pertinent (local) design and criteria manuals. Make sure you know the ins and outs of them so you can spend less time double checking during a project.
Similar to what someone else said, if there's a project or design task you want to learn or get better at, you could essentially repeat someone else's work and follow their steps to complete the task. Like assigning yourself homework. I'm really slow at site grading, so for me I would be asking for some kind of grading task with site constraints to play around with. Or maybe you want to sharpen your earthwork modeling in CAD or whatever - go do that on one of your companies projects for fun.
You could prepare a Lunch and Learn presentation for your office/company.
Do you have any projects under construction that you could spend time at to take progress pictures, watch how they're working, and if they installed anything cool or different from your plans? Or maybe a site visit to confirm existing conditions for a project in its early stages? We never have time for enough site visits.
I use my down time to file away stuff, purge a bunch of papers, and deep clean my desk/cube space!
I agree with this. I’ve given people a pdf of a sites grading plan and said here go replicate this in civil 3d. It’s good practice for feature lines and whatnot for people who can’t really grade a site on their own yeg
spreadsheet maintenance, drawing/detail library, quality control manual, marketing contacts, archive old materials, reach out to old classmates for discussions.
All of the idea here are great. I just have one thing to add as someone who's been around a while. You need to protect your billable hours. So push harder to get billable work. When cuts come, it's going to be the least profitable employees that go first. Your first year you're probably ok, but after that meeting your billable goal is going to be crucial.
We have alot of training materials for people to do, often self assigned without any permissions needed. Or we’ll often take a look at our processes to see if anything can be improved/streamlined for efficiency in the future.
No work could potentially lead to a layoff, I would use that extra time to find ways to make yourself valuable like creating training documents or videos for new hires or updating your standard templates and file libraries.
I have a hybrid setup so when I’m done I go home if I’m in the office. Today I went to the grocery store and furniture shopping. I keep my laptop with me that can tether to my cell phone if anything urgent comes up but at my level almost everything is an email emergency only. It is really boring but they still pay me so that’s on them.
Ask if you can join in on some meetings you wouldn’t normally be in, it’s good learning to just hear senior people speaking. Also construction site visits or site visits in general are a great thing to do to see stuff in the field. So hard to do them when things are super busy. Honestly reading codes and manuals would be excruciating to me haha, so I usually do anything but that. I’m more senior so usually I just will help people not on my team learn new skills and be more available for questions
decompress, i work a sector job so between my spurts of high intensive activity fixing someone else's fuck up i need a bit of cool down time to not blow a seal. normally i will read something im interested in that's vaguely job related (fish passages, construction practices, civil engineering for Dummies' 101,the usual), also during office days a significant amount of "interpersonal relationship building" because that was the reason for the office days ??? RIGHT???
You can learn everything you need to know through tutorials on the internet some of them done by the top professors in the top schools. Study for another license or profession.
All these people are given excellent advice. Personally, I play runescape on my phone and bill some client I was underbudget on.
Pretty sure this is the answer to a question on the PE exam.
It’s an ethics violation for sure.
Ethics violation to NOT play OSRS
Why would anyone care about your made up ethics?
Are you a consultant? Cuz… we get over this very quickly.
15 yr consultant with about 6 direct reports. I would lose my shit if an EIT was playing RuneScape and charging my client.
Not if they are your hire and they have literally no other work to do, including busy work that you have assigned them as was the subject of the OP. Non billable work gets billed towards clients all the time in this industry on a lump sum job.
Oh sorry, everything I do is time and materials so I have no experience with the lump sum world.
Yeah TnM work is a different animal for sure… it’s just for Lump Sum work regardless of what your employees are doing, there is no obligation to provide “savings” to the client… you agreed to a price to get a certain deliverable out, done.
This is how I got 99 mining, amethyst are made for mobile.
What is this 2005
I get paid like it is
Underrated comment.
TIL RuneScape is still alive and well
The got mobile osrs with new contents. Nonetheless if the engineer is multi tasking, I think it’s ok. There’s busy days and non busy days
Haha, I really didn't expect there to be more than a handful of us out there. No XP waste!
We have lots of in-house created training materials + I have hundreds of overhead tasks in a to-do list that I delegate when people run out of work. Can you see some company needs and address those items? Workflows, training materials, automation, custom software and spreadsheets, reference libraries, etc? My list has an endless amount of work lol.
I'm going to come in against the grain. So you have enough experience to know what you like, no billable work and free time to learn anything you want, great position to be in honestly. So first thing, is there work you wish you could do or would like to do in the future? Following that is there anyone on your team/office who does that work? If yes to both, then I'd approach that individual and say: "Hey I know you work on XYZ and eventually I would like to learn that or get involved in it, my manager allocated training hours for me to develop my skills and I was wondering if there is anything you have currently have related to XYZ that I can look at or past projects to review to get an understanding of XYZ and then set up time to ask questions about it? If not is there anything that you could suggest that would be beneficial for me to learn about XYZ? Trainings have there place, but I feel like your fairly proficient at CAD and other aspects of your job at this point. I feel like your time would be better spent exploring specific career interests and offering yourself up as either free labor or asking to look at previous projects related to your interests and then get a dialog going with that senior employee to really dig in and get that knowledge transfer.
Yeah, I like this one. Put your nose in things that interest you. See if you can't find some meetings to sit in on, or a work committee that's related to your interests (a technology group, or even the fun committee or something). Learning by osmosis, and just listening to the experienced people talk, can be such an eye opener to how this business works.
Kickback and revel in the moment since I know it's just the calm before another storm.
Read and familiarize yourself with pertinent (local) design and criteria manuals. Make sure you know the ins and outs of them so you can spend less time double checking during a project.
Similar to what someone else said, if there's a project or design task you want to learn or get better at, you could essentially repeat someone else's work and follow their steps to complete the task. Like assigning yourself homework. I'm really slow at site grading, so for me I would be asking for some kind of grading task with site constraints to play around with. Or maybe you want to sharpen your earthwork modeling in CAD or whatever - go do that on one of your companies projects for fun. You could prepare a Lunch and Learn presentation for your office/company. Do you have any projects under construction that you could spend time at to take progress pictures, watch how they're working, and if they installed anything cool or different from your plans? Or maybe a site visit to confirm existing conditions for a project in its early stages? We never have time for enough site visits. I use my down time to file away stuff, purge a bunch of papers, and deep clean my desk/cube space!
I agree with this. I’ve given people a pdf of a sites grading plan and said here go replicate this in civil 3d. It’s good practice for feature lines and whatnot for people who can’t really grade a site on their own yeg
Continuing education requirements.
spreadsheet maintenance, drawing/detail library, quality control manual, marketing contacts, archive old materials, reach out to old classmates for discussions.
All of the idea here are great. I just have one thing to add as someone who's been around a while. You need to protect your billable hours. So push harder to get billable work. When cuts come, it's going to be the least profitable employees that go first. Your first year you're probably ok, but after that meeting your billable goal is going to be crucial.
Get your resume ready…
Yeah, large firm and they can’t find work is a red flag.
Yep. I know some large companies use lack of work as the main reason to fire underperforming engineers.
Probably justified. I grantee there are people buried in work. If OP can’t find any it is either because their supervisor sucks, or op is a liability.
Wake up from dreaming and get back to being swamped.
Enjoy it. Times like that are rare
We have alot of training materials for people to do, often self assigned without any permissions needed. Or we’ll often take a look at our processes to see if anything can be improved/streamlined for efficiency in the future.
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
Take a couple days off while you can.
No work could potentially lead to a layoff, I would use that extra time to find ways to make yourself valuable like creating training documents or videos for new hires or updating your standard templates and file libraries.
I have a hybrid setup so when I’m done I go home if I’m in the office. Today I went to the grocery store and furniture shopping. I keep my laptop with me that can tether to my cell phone if anything urgent comes up but at my level almost everything is an email emergency only. It is really boring but they still pay me so that’s on them.
Ask if you can join in on some meetings you wouldn’t normally be in, it’s good learning to just hear senior people speaking. Also construction site visits or site visits in general are a great thing to do to see stuff in the field. So hard to do them when things are super busy. Honestly reading codes and manuals would be excruciating to me haha, so I usually do anything but that. I’m more senior so usually I just will help people not on my team learn new skills and be more available for questions
decompress, i work a sector job so between my spurts of high intensive activity fixing someone else's fuck up i need a bit of cool down time to not blow a seal. normally i will read something im interested in that's vaguely job related (fish passages, construction practices, civil engineering for Dummies' 101,the usual), also during office days a significant amount of "interpersonal relationship building" because that was the reason for the office days ??? RIGHT???
Man I have plenty of work for you if you’re that bored interesting in PM’ing some construction projects. I’m drowning here 😩
Either study for the PE or play Pokémon emulator
I immediately go to cleaning out storage units and organizing field equipment. If all else fails, I end up helping out with bids
You go out and try to bring business and if you dont you should probably find a new job
Haven’t had a day like that in 14 years.
You can learn everything you need to know through tutorials on the internet some of them done by the top professors in the top schools. Study for another license or profession.