HNTB Corporation
Transportation Engineering
Orlando, FL
May 1993 - March 1995
At Intergraph Corporation, I became increasingly eager to use InRoads in production - I am first and foremost an engineer.
At my interview, after the sixth person asked if I played basketball, I started answering "Yes, of course" rather than "occasionally." It turns out that the Bridge Department had been owning the Roadway Department for several years now. It might have been the first job I got because 6'-2" was a consideration.
This was my first large "production house" experience. Being new to it, I didn't fully appreciate how well managed the Roadway Group was. A really high-quality team of young Engineers, run very well by Yassi Myers. Mo Harmon was part of the design team; he is now Director of Industry Strategy at Bentley Systems. Kevin O'Connor was a new-grad Drainage Engineer. He is now my boss at Parsons Corp.
The work, of course, was a lot of fun: I quickly got to model a long rural widening in the panhandle and soon got to manage the electronic design of Interchange: I-4/Conroy just out of view to the south.
At one point Tom, the I-4/Conroy Project Manager, came to me late in the project with his face all pale.
"Tom, what's wrong?"
"Jeff, they changed the baseline! How many days will it take to update everything? Can we get it done in a week?"
"Tom, I can have the geometry, cross sections, quantities and earthwork done in a couple of hours. It will take longer to get the cells (guardrails, etc.) on the cross sections, but all the modeling can be done in a couple of hours."
You could see right there and then as Tom - an experienced but manual designer - grasped the benefit of software. A budget- and schedule-busting change was a minor temporary blip.
Nowadays the quick-update capabilities integrate much more closely to the final sheet deliverables. Details and annotation update automatically now as well.
I worked with the Bridge Department on some structural geometry for the I-95 Fuller-Warren Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida.
The office had a trend of losing young engineers to other companies and they didn't know why.
It was pretty clear to me and I shared my recommendations with the Office Principal. The InRoads-proficient young engineers were essentially drafters for the more senior engineers who did all the design using hand and paper methods. This is inefficient, and the young engineers were bored enough - not challenged enough - that they left to work elsewhere. Most of the recommendations were implemented and we stopped losing our young engineers.
In 1995 we had transitioned most of our InRoads machines from Unix to Windows, but Joa, our lead drafter, kept using the the Unix machine. "Joa, why do you keep using that Unix machine?" "That plotting menu script you wrote is a whole lot easier than what we can do in Windows, Jeff." "Really? I can port that over to Windows..."
That was one of the first times I was surprised that someone still utilized an improvement that I had made but forgotten about. The most recent surprise like that was when doing Discovery Interviews with the City of San Diego, when I noticed an icon on their standard desktop: "Is that FlowMonster?! Do you still use that?! I wrote that almost twenty years ago!" "Oh, yes, we use it regularly..." It also wasn't the last time I wrote code to bypass (!) FlowMaster.
I left HNTB to go to San Diego to help with their InSewer/GIS implementation on a temporary contract. HNTB had a great team and was a great experience. I think after 25 years the team has fully dissipated. Mo is a big shot at Bentley; Yassi and Jim Myers run their own successful consulting company, and Rebecca Gault - now a PhD Math Professor at West Georgia College - remains one of my dearest friends. Kevin O'Connor, a fresh-grad Drainage Engineering (who now eschews any knowledge of drainage), is my boss at Parsons Corp.
And the members of the Bridge Department still have to bear the stigma of the startling upset loss to the Roadway Department in the 1994 Office Basketball Championship.