Now that we’ve passed Thanksgiving, eaten plenty of food and told our families everything we’re thankful for, it’s time to explain why I’m thankful to be an Engineer in the modern age.
- Access to a wealth of knowledge, design manuals, township/state codes and GIS information in an instant.
Now more than ever, with a quick Google or ECode search, a perusal through your favorite regulatory agency website or a pan around ChescoViews, you can find any bit of knowledge you need, far quicker than for the engineers who came before us.
- This may be a controversial take, but AutoCAD.
Yes, I know AutoCAD certainly has its bugs and, at times, makes me want to throw my whole computer out the window, but you can't deny that, in the modern age, AutoCAD is vastly superior to anything that has come before it. The time saved is hard to estimate- setting up sheets, grading sites in 3D, using the extensions for stormwater calculations, accessing a library of notes and details, creating profiles, laying out pipes, even just drawing lines.
- AI has slowly been creeping its way into my daily work life.
It's not doing design for me or doing my job for me (at least not yet), but I have found it most useful as a better version of Google. In the same way that the first thing you see on Google is not to be blindly trusted, the first thing AI spits out is not to be blindly trusted either. But, need to come up with a complicated Excel function? Just upload your file and ask for it. Have an engineering-related question? Want it to do some bulk analysis? Experiencing some odd AutoCAD error? Want to know how to do something obscure in AutoCAD? Just ask it. (Schmidt, please ignore those last two.)
The list could go on and on, but the underlying theme is that, over time, engineers have greatly increased their productivity and accuracy. Not too long ago, engineers drew with pen and paper, using slide rules and scales. Now we have computers, triple monitor setups, software to crunch all the numbers instantly and a magic website that answers any question we can type in. So much to be thankful for, right now.
Soon, I will probably just put a hat on, think about what I want to do and the computer and AI will do it for me! Right?
