Reply To: Who is going to take your place when you retire?

We just had a free engineering intern over the summer. The only thing that we could give him for work was to send him out as part of a survey crew.

Everyone thinks that you’d be stupid not to take free help. I can tell you that I saw a totally different side of that. You can’t just give an inexperienced person work and expect them to get it done. Even if they have skills and brains, you still have to go over the project with them, show them how you want it done, train them on the office drafting standards, …… You lose three hours a day of your own production time in order to get five hours of rookie production work done. That is very tough when you are keeping your prices down in order to stay busy.

It was a very short discussion on what we could do for the intern. The only reason why we took him at all is because both our survey crews are one man. Having an extra guy did not displace anyone and a 23 year old can dig in bounds a lot faster than a 60 year old.

It would have been nice to have him in the office and learning, but we could not take on the added burden. He was happy as hell that he finally landed an internship and never complained one bit.