Dude. A fucking Men.

I have been dealing with a young engineer here lately who is exactly the same. Text or calls at all hours asking stupid shit any mechanical engineer should know by his 2nd year in school. Then forgetting and asking the same question again 2 days later.

There is a fine line between being an asshole and ensuring new engineers learn the business. Factor in the needs of the business for additional complexity. I used to be a hard ass because if I was always the one giving answers then my team wasn’t learning and I became the weak link/bottleneck. Now that I’m in a much larger company I see the effects of engineers that have been soon fed their whole careers. They get promoted and really have little depth. Such is life.

It’s almost like crowdsourcing works...

I have learned that a 5 minute conversation can at times avoid hours of researching because the person I am speaking with knows their shit. The same goes in reverse too. I will gladly take 5 minutes out of my day to help because it might save that person 2 hours and they can work on other tasks.

I used to give new hires a legal pad and a pen first thing. I expected them to take copious notes and read procedures (I provided or at least showed them the location) as part of their training. When they asked a repeat question, I’d ask “what’s the procedure say and/or what do your notes say.” If they had already referenced the procedure and notes, I’d help them and we’d evaluate if the procedure needed updating. It usually takes a few times to train them to seek the answers on their own first. I’ve had many conversations explaining that I’m not trying to be an asshole that my intent was to teach them to be independent. I’m pretty sure they still thought I was an asshole.

Often times that research is valuable because you won’t always be around.

OP PLEASE tell me you work for the company with the big red trucks and a white W on them.....

I have some prints without dimensions I have questions about.

I once got hired at a job shop as a project engineer. I had been in the industry, but not in a service capacity. Probably my second week there I asked the other engineer if he could walk me through the process of quoting a job. "Nope. No one helped me when I started. Figure it out".

I did, but it could have been a lot faster and seamless had the guy just walked me through it. It wasn't like I was asking for the secret family hot wings recipe.

What the hell is wrong with this place? Four damn pages and no "need pics of female engineer".

In my experience those that say "look it up", do so due to them not knowing either. Not all of them but the majority.

Another poster said what I was thinking, you maybe ruined an opportunity down the road with that person. You never know when you may cross paths later in life and she and probably her boss will remember how the "SME" was useless to them.

You have a lot more to learn like don't burn bridges. You blew that one up SME.

Valuable how? The net result of both ways is that you learned how something works, one only took five minutes and the other one took potentially hours.

Please describe this in a way that I could explain to my boss without getting chewed out for wasting time. I have my note paper ready.

OP, find her and apologize now.

This industry can't get enough female engineers. She will be a manager soon regardless of her talent, skill, or knowledge levels. At best, she is sharp and has pegged you as useless. At worst, she is a petty dumbass and will pigeonhole you until you are fired.

Fix yourself while there is still time.

"As built"

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

You seriously don’t understand the value of an engineer knowing how to find an answer vs just knowing the answer? That’s like the very definition of an engineer vs a tech. I’ve never had a job that black and white. Or where concepts take 5 minutes to learn.

My new engineers are similar.  Can't take any ownership for themselves, must have everything spoon-fed to them.  I can't count the number of times I've said a variation of "I don't have any more information on this than you do.  I'll have to figure it out just the same as you."  when they come to me with some problem and "I don't know what to do".  Now they are starting to get pissed off and bitchy that I and a small handful of others expect them to actually think and problem solve.  "But no one has trained us on that!"  Guess what honey, you've had far more training than I got.  Yet here I stand, fully qualified and possessing the ability to think for myself.

None of them come to me for checkouts anymore, because I make them demonstrate actual understanding.  If you don't know something, we will slow walk this for as long as it takes for you to figure it out.  Because you CAN with what you already know (or should know).  Stop fucking whining for the answer to just be there.  That's not engineering, that's... well I don't have a good word for it.  What's the opposite of data entry?

ETA read a bit of the thread now and feel I should clarify most of the 'new engineers' I'm talking about are in the training pipeline.  I usually DO just do it for the qualified ones that can't think, because yeah it just needs to get done.  But that results in them continuing to slack and not learn how to do their damn job they trained 3 years for, so it still pisses me off to the point I start getting snippy despite having a VERY passive/introverted/conflict avoidance personality in person.  I'm a great get-shit-done-er, terrible manager.

There is an I in FIRED, though.

This, what the fuck? I tell young people in my bus they get 5 minutes to research/ figure it out yourself. After that you need to come to me and ask, because you're not getting shit done and I can easily get you back to making yourself money.

National Pipe Taper?

NonProductive Time

OP is a millennial complaing about millennials while exhibiting all the traits boomers attribute to millennials

Consider finding some training on social styles and task readiness.  These people will start leaving soon due to your inability to communicate with each other.

Yea much better to have the engineer waste company time looking for answers when you could have provided help quickly.

Teach a man to fish and you have to get up at 0500, bring a boat, and who's paying for the beer?

Ahh. Check. I need to update my douche acronym lexicon.

nobody is a "expert"at anything in life at 28 yrs old.except ...maybe...maybe..jerkin off...just sayin

Looks like they pulled the drawings and went to the SME to check status and relevancy. As the SME, that IS your job to answer questions. You might find the next time the industry takes a downturn they don’t need 2 SMEs and you just became redundant

I was and still am an SME on decom'd land based missile sites at 24, as a co-founder of a company that salvaged them. It's not impossible, depending on your proclivities.

So you're a self proclaimed SME. Someone comes to ask you a question and you tell them to go figure it out themselves.

You had an opportunity to show some leadership for your young age. Instead you just showed you are immature.

"This engineer comes to me and the lead maintenance guy with a drawing asking about cables, what they are for and if they are abandoned."

"Go check "the drawings?"  You aren't going to depend on the drawings for pinpoint accuracy/currency when excavating anyways.

We used to find surprises in aerospace drawings.  There was/is a reason we did functional and physical configuration audits, etc.  My wife is in a civil engineering section for a large utility and my daughter is an architect.  It seems like there's almost always at least some kind of surprise when one hits the field and starts dealing with the "as builts" (if there are any) and the reality on/in the ground, in the walls, etc.

One placed I worked at had a layoff and they got rid of all the older engineers and replaced them with guys right out of college. My foreman about blew half his veins out. Over the next few weeks and months they kept sending down plans that couldn't be built in our shop. He'd roll the blueprint out on his table in the shop and his face would start getting redder and redder and veins in his forehead an neck started appearing. Then he'd let out a long string of expletives, roll up the blueprints and march up the stairs to the office with them. I felt sorry for them really. Even on a good day he was an asshole, I can only imagine how he acted on those bad days. Best days we had at that job was when he spent most of the day on the shitter.

Yep, nothing is better than making someone spend several hours looking up something that you literally could solve in a minute or two because you want to teach them a lesson.

What he said echos my intended reply.

What do they do with the solos after the scrap comes out? And do you leave the structures on the springs or just take everything out?

And op, keep doing you, ftw.

Lol, someone's going to get a utility trench dug right through a critical waterline or power cable with an attitude like that.

You've never worked on a non oil-gas site, or a site with a LOT of private utilities - have you?

You always go to the guy that knows the site, you never rely on the drawings since I don't know if the drawings you gave me are complete, if they're the most current version, or if the guy that put together the existing conditions plan had access to all of your historic mapping (and how complete or current THAT was).

Just play nice, give her the information, and you can't be blamed if there's ever an outage.

An "SME" who is not willing to answer a question on the "SM" he is supposedly an "E" in is a useless fucking turd.

The steel is all you can get. There was a primary salvage by the mid seventies-early eighties at the latest for all the cool stuff. By the time we got there in the early nineties, all that was left was the #2 medium carbon steel in the silo doors. But there was a lot of steel. I mean a LOT. This was before Ed Peden and www.missilebase.com drove the price through the sky and the prepper movement. My farm in Keene was two miles south of Ed's site.

To answer your question, the sites were generally obtained, originally, by eminent domain. Out in bumfuck wherever. You found a site, back in the day, by obtaining county road maps and documents from the SAC Office Of The Historian, which no longer exists. Then you look for a road listed as reinforced interstate highway that dead ends in a pasture somewhere for no discernible reason. That's a missile base. Then you searched the county ownership maps for the farmer they ceded it back to when it was decommissioned, and go pay him a visit. 9/10, again before the prepper movement was a thing, it was completely of no interest to him. One guy we contacted used it to dump dead sheep.

They were built to withstand nuke blasts. You can't really demolish them, even the earliest hard sites, Atlas-D above ground coffins, with anything less. Those were only 15psi overpressure.
To compare, an ordinary window such as installed in your house, will shatter fully at ~0.275psi overpressure.
The Atlas E was designed for 25psi OP. The Titan I 3 missile sites were good for about 125psi OP, and the Titan IIs like the one that blew up in KS, about 225.
Then came the solid fuels. Every gen starting with the Minuteman I has been a retrofit at 300 PSI, because by then, the weapons had reached a CEP accuracy of less than 100 yards, so there was no point. You can't build a structure that can withstand a nuke hit within a hundred yards that you can reload. You can maybe survive inside, but you can't make it re-usable.

Up until then, they were designed with the fantasy that they could be reloaded for rounds 2,3 or 4. When the guidance systems got that precise, and the solid fuels eliminated the need for huge complexes of tanks and refrigerators for cryogenic hypergolic fuels, it was obvious that paradigm was absurd.

So today's land based sites are tiny spots, with ten missiles or so, controlled from a tiny hard launch facility where the men are. There was no longer any need for huge multi acre sites all for one missile, to be fueled and launched in a half hour. 87% of 50s, 60's, 70s, and early 80s sites were just giant fuel complexes. There will never be another advance in silo construction, because there is no point. No known materials are capable of withstanding a direct nuke, with today's accuracy.