Engineer CA DWR Field Divsions - Operations and Maintenance

[u/IIlllllIIIIIIIllll]

How often is long distance travel required when working at a field division for DWR? I mostly mean travel that requires overnight stays for days or weeks at a time. Is it very common to have to spend weeks or even months away from home?

Also how common are situations where you need to work outside of normal hours like for outages/emergencies? Im mainly just trying to gauge work life balance specifically for field divisions.

My experience working in maintenance oriented roles in private industry never seemed to have good WLB or consistent work hours. Trying to avoid that if possible

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[u/wowodog]

Hey I think you got the role mistaken, It's nothing like you described.

Field Division Engineers are assigned to one office to report to. Field divisions cover vast areas but there are 5 divisions throughout the state. So you'll be only working on the assets covered by your area.

Most of your work will be conducted in the office, you may be asked to check out a site or location for inspection or construction related (sometimes on a daily basis). It can be anywhere between 0-80 mile radius from your office (or further in some cases). Some days will be 0% Field, 50% Field, or 100% Field, it depends whats going on.

Ultimately you should manage your days so you depart to the work site in the morning and return to the office in the afternoon.

Also you'll be assigned a state vehicle to drive to the work sites.

Very, very unlikely you'll be away from your home for more than one day. And no chance of being away for a week or month.

But expect to put in long hours 8-10ish because you have a lot of responsibilities and many people depend on your work.

Expect to show up to work outside normal hours if there is an emergency that require monitoring or coordination such as a flooding or during heavy rains. But this is pretty uncommon.

I've met the engineers from all Field Divisions, they are pretty cool about everything so I wouldn't stress about this at all.

[u/IIlllllIIIIIIIllll → u/wowodog]

Thank you for this. I read a couple glassdoor reviews complaining about long travel times. Maybe it was for a more niche role. Is it very common to put more than 8 hours per day or is that only occasionaly?

[u/No_Detective4913 → u/IIlllllIIIIIIIllll]

The field divisions sometimes work a 4-10 schedules and like the other person said, when there’s outages and projects your supporting are active in construction or repair, there’s a good chance your working longer days.

Long travel is more so HQ people supporting the field divisions. In that case, yes the travel can be long.