u/8CobaltRift

I spent the better half of yesterday afternoon dealing with an interview panel that perfectly highlights why tech recruiting is totally broken right now. The company is a mid sized infrastructure firm that advertised a massive need for internal workflow optimization. On paper, they wanted someone who could sit down, look at their engineering bottlenecks, and build custom scripts to stop their production team from wasting hundreds of hours on manual data entry inside their modeling environment.

The panel consisted of a young HR representative who looked completely lost the entire time and a senior engineering manager who apparently had not touched a production environment since the late nineties. The first twenty minutes were just the standard corporate buzzword bingo about synergy and adapting to corporate culture. I played along, nodding my head like a complete idiot, waiting for the conversation to finally shift to actual technical mechanics.

When the manager finally asked how I would approach reducing their turnaround times on large scale data checking, I decided to just show them instead of talking about it. I pulled out my laptop and walked them through a custom library I built last year. It is a clean, modular Python setup that automatically parses clunky model data, cross references it against design specs, and highlights critical geometry clashes in under two minutes. It is a tool that literally eliminates three days of mindless clicking for a standard engineering team.

Instead of being impressed, the manager completely froze. He stared at the terminal output like I was running some kind of illegal operation on his network. Then he looked at me with genuine suspicion and asked what happens to the junior staff if a script can do their entire weekly job before lunch on Monday. He literally said we have established protocols for a reason and introducing automated overrides might disrupt the internal harmony of the drafting team.

The HR girl immediately chimed in after that, asking if my approach meant I was difficult to manage because I preferred working with code rather than collaborating through standard company touchpoints. They did not care that the script was clean, well documented, or completely accurate. They were terrified because it was an actual functional solution that threatened their bloated, slow corporate timeline. They wanted a tech innovator on their job board but what they actually wanted in the office was a compliant drone who would manually click buttons for eight hours a day without asking questions.

I closed my laptop, told them that it sounded like their current workflow was exactly what they deserved, and left the office before the HR rep could finish her wrap up speech about their open door policy.

My cat has a better understanding of macro efficiency than that entire engineering board combined.

I recently had an interview where they showed me some of their current Revit models and honestly I felt like I was witnessing a slow motion car crash. When you spend enough time in BIM coordination you develop a specific type of cynicism where you can spot a project that is built on pure hope rather than actual engineering logic within five minutes. This particular model looked like it was designed by someone who thinks gravity is just a suggestion and that clashing pipes with structural beams is a valid aesthetic choice. I spent ten minutes pointing out why their mechanical systems were physically impossible to install and the lead engineer just sighed like I was the one being difficult.

The chaos in these files is usually a direct reflection of a broken workflow where speed is prioritized over system integrity. You see Revit families that are basically empty shells with no data and naming conventions that look like a cat walked across a keyboard. It is a systematic failure of logic that usually starts at the top and trickles down until the actual builders on site are left holding a set of drawings that are essentially fiction. I tried to explain that if they actually tried to build this the change orders alone would bankrupt the project but they just kept talking about the vision. In my world a vision without proper LOD 400 coordination is just a fancy way of describing a massive lawsuit waiting to happen.

I honestly find it fascinating how some firms manage to stay afloat while producing such garbage tier technical documentation. It is like they are playing a game of chicken with the contractors and hoping no one notices the ductwork is running through the elevator shafts. I ended up declining the follow up because life is too short to fix models that should have been deleted and started over from scratch. I would rather spend my time writing AHK scripts to automate my own sanity than spend forty hours a week untangling a digital Gordian knot made by people who dont understand basic collision detection.

The highlight of the day was coming home to find Bonik had knocked a glass off the counter which was still more structurally sound than the structural frame I saw earlier.