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Honestly, I've been in the industry for 7 years and I'm still doing production work. Probably won't stop until I become a manager
Correct Answer. Always be grinding homies! It’s great to be technical and embrace that for a while eventually I just didn’t have time!
That's dependent on your firm. I've seen engineers enter without even doing CAD.
I never had to do cad. I had a phenomenal cad program in high school and was able but the owners of my past two firms had cad departments that handled that part of the work load.
I’m an entry level structural design engineer and I’ve (thankfully) never done my own drafting. We have an in house drafting department
Same as well. Only do sketches in cad.
out of college I went straight into engineering work and had drafters that did all my cad. I switch companies and had to learn how to do all my own cad and am leaving after just a year. They told me I needed to do 4 years of production work after I was hired. Going from experienced engineering to doing production work feels like way too much of a step back for me.
I’ve been an engineer for 24 years and I still use AutoCAD every day. I work with a partner engineer who handles more of the financial dealing and client relations and I handle more of the design and technical side. We both do both but I’d say it’s a 60/40 split. Even when not using CAD specifically, I’m still using other design software. Even if I was at a larger firm and had a large team of techs to delegate 100% of my drafting to, I’d still use CAD nearly every day for design. And I’d still want to have intimate knowledge of every component of the project and every design decision if it’s a set of plans that I’m going to stamp.
My partner on the other hand only pitches in on CAD work when we’re short handed in a pinch before a deadline, so maybe only a few days per month direct on CAD, but still a lot of time spent reviewing drawings and writings specs.