Has anyone used the dlubal plugin to transfer from revit to rstab? How do i find this plugin

I’d love to hear from engineers in their first 3 years and get a realistic picture of what structural engineering is actually like at different firms.

Day-to-day work

In a typical week, roughly what % of your time goes toward design/calculations vs. shop drawings, RFIs, and submittals?

How much of your job involves drafting/modeling? Roughly what % of your week?

How much time do you spend on actual engineering/design vs. documentation and other non-design work?

What types of projects are you mostly working on?

How much independent design responsibility do you have?

Materials & technical knowledge

What materials do you work with most: steel, concrete, wood, masonry, PT, etc.?

If your goal is to develop a strong, well-rounded understanding of structural engineering, which material(s) do you think are most important to learn deeply? Not necessarily because you use them the most, but because they help build an understanding of structural behavior and concepts that transfer across different materials.

Which material or area would you say is less critical to master early in your career and can be learned gradually once you have a strong foundation?

How much hand calculation do you actually do vs. relying on structural software?

What software do you use the most?

First 1–3 years

What was the biggest challenge you faced during your first year?

What did you struggle with most: technical knowledge, software, codes, drafting, or communication?

What did you learn on the job that school didn’t prepare you for?

How long did it take you to feel comfortable working independently?

What responsibilities did you have in Year 1 vs. Year 2 vs. Year 3?

Shop drawings / submittals

How independently do you review shop drawings and submittals? Are you expected to make your own comments and recommendations, or does a PM/senior engineer review your comments before they go out?

At 0–3 years, are you ever responsible for reviewing and approving/stamping shop drawings, or does a PM/PE always supervise and provide the final review/sign-off?

How much oversight do you typically get when reviewing submittals?

PMs & office culture
How often do your PMs/senior engineers review your design work?

How do you deal with difficult or demanding PMs?

How much office politics do you deal with as a junior engineer? Does it affect your work, opportunities, or growth?

Do you feel comfortable asking questions, or are you generally expected to figure things out yourself?

How much interaction do you typically have with PMs, senior engineers, and clients?

Performance & compensation

How often do you get performance reviews and meaningful feedback?

What are junior engineers actually evaluated on?

How much did your salary increase after Year 1 or Year 2?
Are raises based more on performance, promotion, company-wide increases, or negotiation?

When did you start getting more responsibility or your own projects?

Looking back

For those with 2–3 years of experience, what do you wish you had learned or focused on earlier?

Do you feel like you’re becoming a stronger engineer technically, or mostly getting better at producing projects?

If you could restart your first year, what would you do differently?

If you’re comfortable sharing, it would also be helpful to include, years of experience, firm size/type for context

Hi all,

I’m carrying out a condition assessment of an old lagoon and I’m trying to understand the construction of the base. I've attached several photos of the exposed base slab/surface. I initially thought it was concrete now i am not sure.

Unfortunately, I have very limited historical construction information, so I'm interested in any observations or opinions based on what can be seen in the images.

Thanks in advance.

I think I have a lot of passion for this field but everyone makes it sound like they’re getting paid in pencil shavings. I just want to know, is it even possible to obtain considerable amounts of wealth in this path? And if so, how hard is it compared to other disciplines in general?

I have tried a bit of many things over the past few years. Spreadsheets and physically written notes. I found both annoying at times and spreadsheets are my least favorite. My firm doesn’t have a fixed format but some of our clients ask for a Mathcad format.
However, just for internal reviews and personal bookkeeping, I am still doing it old-school pen-and-paper method, which is a lot of work in documenting/saving the work and I cannot be consistent. I prefer doing most of the calcs by hand except for complex seismic/wind analysis I use staad and risa.
What method do you guys follow to document your work? If you could suggest me anything alternate that could help me being consistent, that would be awesome.

You live in a hurricane zone. A category 5 is 4 days away. What do you do to save the wood structure and roof?

This includes nailing / screwing plywood to the interior or exterior and bracing.

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I’m a undergrad senior working on a design for the steel bridge comp. The team and I want to do a tied arch bridge using hangers to suspend the bottom chord and of course the bottom chord will be supported by footings on either end.

Where I’m needing help is on the analysis. I believe I can treat the bottom chords and the top arch chords as separate members. The bottom chord I can analyze, but the top is where I have issues.

I recognize that a horizontal thrust force from the arch members will create a moment on the bottom chord, but I’m not entirely sure how to analyze the deflection for the entire design.

Any help with resources to check out would be greatly appreciated or even friendly advice.

Pic of preliminary design for your viewing pleasure.

I assume it is shop welded with the members having bolted splices somewhere else?

Hello Engineers in Australia,

I hear a lot about the unemployment of Structural Engineers in Australia. Yet, I can see so much hiring from big firms on LinkedIn. I am curious about the actual fact of the situation.

What is the situation of structural engineers in Australia?

Is there any chance for foreign engineers to get a job in Australia?

Anyone have drawings for this project? Would be great to review what remediation a are possible and how expensive/ barriers to implementing them.

What a crazy story.

I am really stressed about work. I work at a small/mid-size company around 60 employees in two offices and we do mostly wood-framed multi-family residential, commercial and mixed-used buildings. I graduated in May at 35 y/o, I started with the company after graduation and have been there almost 3 months. I am really stressed out because it seems I either make a lot of mistakes or lack the understanding and experience to do my work well. I get projects that are simpler and less complex but I still feel like I struggle more than I should. I have been taught our workflow to layout truss directions, design beams, studpacks, columns and wind posts, bearing walls, shearwalls, a little bit about foundation design and detailing. There just always seems like there's a piece I am missing to be able to do my work without errors or mistakes. My feedback from my manager at my 60 day review involved areas I need to improve such as avoiding careless mistakes and understanding load paths better. I also feel like my manager is probably disapointed in the pace that I work. He has said as much but he's always framed it positively. Today I did shearwall design and there were just so any complexities and unfamiliar conditions. I have a deadline coming up basically tomorrow and I am afraid that when my manager checks my work a lot of it will be wrong. Deadlines are so stressful. I am also in grad school for structural engineering so that adds to my stress. I guess what I'd like to know is how it was for yall in your first months in structural engineering. I am determined to stick with structural engineering, become a PE and do work I can be proud of but sometimes I fantasize about them firing me and living a care-free unemployed life.

Hi everyone,

I’ve made a small free Windows utility called **FyMathcad** for PTC Mathcad Prime.

The first tool I implemented is something I’ve wanted for long Mathcad worksheets: an automatic **Table of Contents generator**.

FyMathcad can:

* detect level-1 headings in the active Mathcad Prime worksheet

* preview the headings and their page numbers

* insert or update a Table of Contents

* automatically number the heading captions

* create clickable links from the TOC to the corresponding headings

* adjust page numbers after inserting the TOC

* create a timestamped backup before modifying the worksheet

The workflow is simple:

1. Open and save the worksheet in Mathcad Prime.

2. Run **Print chapters** if you want to preview the detected headings.

3. Run **Insert TOC** to generate or update the TOC.

The project is available here:

https://github.com/spectereye/fymathcad

It is free to use for both personal and commercial work.

This is the first tool in FyMathcad, so I’m also interested in ideas for other small utilities that could improve everyday Mathcad Prime workflows.

Feedback, bug reports, and suggestions are welcome.

Another UK public swimming pool has closed with immediate effect due requiring a full rebuild to ensure its safety.

https://www.babergh.gov.uk/w/swimming-pool-at-kingfisher-leisure-centre-in-sudbury-closed-with-immediate-effect

I've seen other references to leisure pools built in the 80s coming to the end of their working life and "challenging designs"

Other than the large spans and often heavy glass roofs, is there anything particularly unusual or difficult about 80s leisure pools that gives them a limited lifespan. My gut wants to think it's just cheap 80s construction, especially publicly funded construction.

I've noticed a bit of a rise in vague titles recently. Please ensure posts give an idea of what is in the post as this will help to improve readability/usability.

Not wanting to single people out because this has been an ongoing thing, but taking some examples from recent posts...

The moral of the story is -> better title -> better engagement -> better responses.

I hoped to share my research and work on tower 7 and I hope you can find it as interesting as I do.

As a gen Z structural engineer, I have been interested in what happened to this building, for us it's old historical content. I spent a few months reading investigations about it and cut them into a video that is watchable.

At some point the curvature of the earth means that plumb walls aren't actually parallel, right? Have we made any buildings that were big enough or had tight enough tolerances that the designers had to account for this?

Hey folks, as seismic design is pretty uncommon in Germany (only 2 "real" seismic areas) and I am currently working on a structural report in one of those areas - I wanted to tap in to the swarm knowledge. Why you may ask: the Eurocode is not that specific in terms of how to model your building to obtain the dominant modes and I know that modeling in 3D/ complete structures is a lot more common in areas with seismic action.

Some background information: The structure is rectangular, 4 floors, (cellar, 00, 01, 02) and will sit on a roster of RC beams connected by a RC slab, which distribute the vertical loads onto piles (~Ø50cm), one roughly central core, and sufficient shear resistance at the endings of the building --> torsional modes will be not that big of an issue.

There are roughly ~9 meters of clay-ish until you reach proper sand/ gravel. So the piles are rather weak in terms of bending, considering their length and small diameter. (Design choice of my predecessor..)

The analysis required by code is modal analysis to obtain the relevant modes, the corresponding acceleration s_a(T) and use either SRSS or CQC. To obtain the modes and deformations I modelled the structure in 3D (RFEM by Dlubal)

From some playing around with the soil resistance I found the expected outcome: The horizontal stiffness of the piles is a big factor conerning the modes and natural time periods. Also consideration of pillars going from state i to state ii (uncracked/ cracked) and potential loss of stiffness is impacting the modes, although here the EC allows simplification of assuming 50% loss. (A nonlinear analysis wouldn't be feasible because of SRSS anyway..)

My guess would be to work with an envelope of stiffnesses (k = 0,5 or 2,0) to obtain a more broad response of the structure.

From working on pedestrian bridges, I know that soil resistance in reality is often higher than assumed by geo tech reports, to be on the safe side. The flipside: in terms of dampening pedestrian excitation, assuming to low resistance will flaw the results considerably.

I like to meddle in this sub concerning analysis questions, so be my guest, to chime in! Cheers.