Devin Friske, July 10th 2025
America’s needs require a mix of private/public partnership and a balance of power between private and public entities. In handing off some duties better suited to private party, the federal and state governments award contracts which have easily verified public accounting, performance targets, and corrective measures… they can do this and it’s perfectly capitalistic and, honestly, a good thing that a private entity that is bidding a government contract must compete with other firms to win.
Many lump sum contracts are finite – they have a beginning and end specified in scope of work documentation, and sometimes performance targets or penalties associated outlined in the contract. They’re great for getting a quantifiable and well-documented task done, such as supporting a new program for improved naval control by building a new ship suitable for multiple types of missions not previously performed. When there is an end goal in mind, a final state, then a project manager (with proper experience with their teams and resources at their company) would quickly be able to estimate the timeline, budget, resources, and the critical elements of getting the job done.
What they are not so great at is for managing difficult, fast-moving target type work, with constant changes, each one requiring multiple levels of approval from both client and company leadership in order to work out both the technical and commercial sides of things.
Honestly, sometimes it’s very difficult to know how a budget and resource planning meeting should go on a bespoke project with little to no reference material, especially when there have been massive layoffs (a.k.a. brain drain) over the past years, leaving a wide gap between the marginal overperformers who survived the culling and brand new hires (who are, nearly by definition and by no fault of their own, underperformers in comparison). This gap grew so large that the overperformers were required to do twice as much work as before, as the new employees badly needed to be trained up on the types of skills necessary to do their jobs – engineers getting used to their ASME BPVC code, material science knowledge, and a myriad of analysis techniques (modal frequency vibrational analysis, force body diagrams and thermal analysis), while drafters needed to understand the CAD software inside and out to make rapid fire 3D objects appear out of thin air with complex geometries and elements.
The overperformers were working hard, but becoming exhausted at their own mental expense. One employee who would later leave the role named “J,” our best drafter, had a problem with recurring migraine headaches as they worked diligently to make up for shortcomings in the team w.r.t. project management and document organization. There was little to no time set aside for these gifted employees to pass on their hard-earned knowledge to the new employees, as there were live contracts due which needed quick turnaround. This left the new employees with not very much to do, the old employees with a grudge, and everyone in the department with a bad taste in their mouth.
All that to say – it’s a very difficult task to plan for a budget and resources in a new product or new industry (or at least new to the new employees), especially when the technology in question was cutting-edge, non-trivial, and at the other side of the contract sat a client rushing to complete their task, who themselves had not fully worked out the design basis for their final approach and who were later responsible for over half of the project’s 26 change orders. The company I was at had in the past handled all types of plate steel structures – everything under the sun from spherical storage vessels, energy industry equipment like fusion Tokamaks, aerospace equipment like vacuum testing chambers employing turbomolecular pumps to completely evacuate the particles from the vessel (even working on contracts for the gov’t’s space program), as well as bread-and-butter government contracts in water and waste water (CB&I pioneered and sold a lot of its steel clarifiers). This meant that while the company was a trusted name, the internal department at the company did not match the resume that was sold on the project job – the sales routine of these EPCs seems to be set up to always, always, always be a tough act to follow, with broken promises lying in wait all the way to the bottom.
The bread and butter type contracts were the ones which kept the budget in check – the work that was contracted for was well-understood, and like a good mechanic at a reputable dealership, the team could accomplish that contract well under time and therefore workhour budget. These contracts were repeatable, with a formula based on 7 different size offerings sold to customers, all of whom had very similar and well understood industry requirements from American Water Works Association (AWWA) standards, the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) standards, Uniform Plumbing code, EPA guidelines for effluent and discharge, and state and local codes (such as those in Illinois for specific design and operational loading requirements revolving around designed flow rates and plant layouts).
Obviously, the fun projects were not the W&WW contracts, but the aerospace and energy ones. That said, there was no cookie-cutter formula like a sizing system for the difficult aerospace and energy contracts and during my tenure as project engineer, 90% of my effort in communicating and working with a client was focused on these big bears which were holding up the department from taking on any new work at the time. The fun projects were fun, because of the fact that they were rather difficult, not in spite of it. The fun projects, however, were the ones which ultimately led to the departmental-wide failure. I bore some responsibility, but having been with the company only a short time I felt it unfair to put the burden so squarely on my shoulders alone. There were things I could have done to drive project success, had I better understood my personnel, my leadership, and myself.
I had an argument with my boss about getting to know the people working for me – as an honorary member of department leadership with a dotted line to all the employees I managed on specific projects, I was expected to be able to discipline them or refer them for discipline, but I found myself more and more understanding of the department’s deep flaws, likely more deeply than my boss. My boss, who referred to underlings as “worker bees” and therefore somehow part of a different team than myself, called me out one day for telling him that I needed to get to know the people in the department even better in order to understand how to lead them. He looked at me quizzically and told me that’s not how this works. A true hell of an engineer in every sense of the word, my boss had completely ignored the human element so brashly that he was affecting the department at a very human level. People were calling in sick to avoid tasks, people were talking about the boss in hushed tones behind their backs, and generally people feared him and the Machiavellian-style leadership style which had worked in the past with more malleable humans who didn’t need anything more than a handshake to shit out beautiful drawings. But because the remaining employees after the previous years’ layoffs were by all statistics the best they had, the drafters and engineers remaining knew they had ground to stand on when things didn’t go according to plan; after all, they were the best CB&I had to assign to the contract. They couldn’t possibly have a problem.
So the blame went back and forth – and boss man continued to be difficult with the employees, even as HR complaints were filed and one of my coworkers felt targeted by cruel jokes about foreigners (in a department staffed by majority foreign white collar workers) intended to make people laugh but which sparked outrage in the cubicles. A department that fears its leader only laughs at the jokes that are humorous and good-spirited, and his jokes were neither.
Working on these contracts was hellish, brutal, fraught with hurdles, and I sat in many a tense meeting over missed deadlines, untamed expectations, change requests, etc. What made it so difficult was that I was asked to come up with budgets with essentially no prior knowledge of the company and its inner workings, and no experience in the industry – that job was something that I was not only very bad at, but that I was very unsure of myself while doing. I felt that no matter what I did, I would be the whipping boy if things didn’t go according to plan, which even with a department with high spirits can be a difficult task when there is so much unspecified, all to save the veteran chief engineer’s neck when things went wrong by him being able to throw me away to remove the “problem” in the department. To me, it was clear that I was not getting the training I needed, and I did not even know sometimes what training I should have had in order to accomplish that, and I was having trouble to explain myself when I would inevitably make mistakes like promising deadlines that the lead engineer had not previously agreed upon before the meetings (and pissing him off, causing him to write a 7 paragraph email that would lead to my dismissal). I remember the meeting with the lead engineer, a PhD Mechanical Engineer, quite vividly, as he told me “Devin, nothing personal, I really do like you as a person, but you’re making mistakes that are jeopardizing the department.” I understood, and told him I understood, but he had made up his mind by that point already that he would rather push me out than take me under his wing and mentor me correctly in the way to do things. I mean, he tried half-heartedly, but if I didn’t immediately grasp something, he would grow frustrated that I didn’t already know something and he would tell me that he told me 7 times about that already to management, which was a dogged exaggeration rather than the absolute truth of the matter (2 times, maybe 3 times, most). Having patience is a virtue – it’s important to give people the space to learn, to grow, and to have successes, but I was being stressed out as much as the rest of the individual contributors, and I was being stressed out by things outside of my control as well. The stress, as I have always come to know, makes it harder to accomplish tasks, placing roadblocks, adding weight to my shoulders, and making it more difficult for me to want to get out of bed in the morning and accomplish my tasks. I remember being so stressed out by work that I was not really sleeping much, I was waking up exhausted, and my short term memory was very heavily impacted. I recall a meeting discussing dates and times for deliverables, and not being able to keep up with the rapid barrage of information from all sides of the room. I knew I was smart, but I was being asked to take notes and keep memos of things which I didn’t have the requisite technical knowledge for to already know was important, and asked to keep memos for all the client and internal meetings as well and to publish those to the internal project document archive.
By all means, low performing teams can have individual high performers, but this mix of high and low performers was mismanaged because not only did my colleagues not trust the department that had in previous years laid off nearly an entire office floor’s worth of people, but they did not wish to invest in new employees who may or may not have a long tenure with the company. It’s a bit of a viscous cycle, really, caused by COVID’s economic downturn and a breach of trust at a historically great employer who doesn’t indiscriminately fire floors of hardworking employees. In the end, everyone as a project team wins or loses together, and the mechanics of failure were quite hard at the time to process and to explain to upper management in order to enact real changes that would have turned the projects, and therefore the department, around.
One example – I worked on a sustainability project (under NDA) which had to do with cutting-edge, brand new work for the company. I was selected because I was enthusiastic, smart, and the only project engineer or manager in the department who was able to communicate effectively. The project was a FEED study with a budget about $6mm in engineering and operations hours alone (mostly personnel, some materials and cost, some subcontracts). The FEED study was to be used to create a bid package (later with an internal estimate that the contract for the plate steel vessels could easily total $120mm) that would go out and get bid on by our competitors, but since the work was close to the company’s chest, it would have a head start on the competition and was likely to win the bid by being the most prepared to deal with the cutting-edge work, talking early with the steel mills and determining material specifications accordingly. One of the key decisions on the project was whether or not to use stainless steel clad carbon steel plates, explosion bonded clad plates, or fully 316/316L steel plates. The pricing came back and we learned that the most important cost element of the project would be the welding and cutting hours – after speaking with our most experienced estimator who had built one before (in Canada), everyone was shocked and surprised that the full 316/316L plates would be most economical overall, so it was specified on the bid documents we created. The difficult part of managing the project was the fact that we had not done one of these before, and that the mid level MSc. Mechanical Engineer with 10 YoE had left the role to flee back to his old job for work life balance (I didn’t blame him, he was tasked with working 2 jobs worth of work while mentoring and teaching the other newer engineers). I was saddled with some of the responsibility for communicating why we would be missing deadlines and stressing out the client and our own team, but ultimately, our subject matter expert up and left, on this potentially $120mm contract, and the other experienced MechE was stretched far too thin. “K” was a bit of a jackass too, telling us he was going to ASME code meetings, which he presumed was “too nerdy” for me (mind you, a Rose-Hulman engineer with a passion for engineering and a ChE department award for my persistence and curiosity), when in perception of those in the department those “code meetings” started to feel more like code for taking a break from the grueling minutiae and detail work that the employees “in the trenches” were slogging through. With too little help, and too little time, and a project schedule proposed by the very engineer who now didn’t have to clean up the mess by leaving the role with unprecedented technical debt, left me with the difficult decision of steering a ship with no compass or map that was worth anything, and trying to work day-to-day to correct client expectations as soon as I knew we were charted off course. The proposed schedule handed to me from “M” was incorrect after the first week, and each subsequent week, as deadlines shifted, work was rearranged to accommodate the best strategic approach for stress analysis, and I learned exactly how these types of vessels are put together (turns out, very carefully and with a lot of heavy machinery and automated welding rigs).
I had walked into a company doing critical work suitable for someone who had been there 5 years already, lacking the organizational/departmental experience in doing work and having little understanding of the team’s capabilities so little understanding of where I should put my expectations for my colleagues, drafters and engineers alike. That was why I was so confused with my boss’s attitude toward getting to know my colleagues instead of demanding them around like peons. It felt like I was being pinched from both sides, uncomfortably. We were drowned in work and the emotional bandwidth of the leadership was so low that I had to put in work essentially acting as a guidance counselor, being the preferred party to air all management grievances to, which put me in to a tough position on who to believe – management’s high expectations, or the reality of what was under my nose when I was watching my colleagues struggle with mental health and burnout. I was put into a spot where I was being asked to estimate deadlines for my company which was struggling to keep personnel happy due to toxic leadership and unreasonable expectations. This was the type of leadership that lacked the emotional intelligence to avoid making racist jokes in an extraordinarily diverse department with only white male leadership. Nothing wrong with white male leadership inherently, but the toxicity boiled over into the day-to-day banter, with my boss’s “worker bees” (as he called them) becoming disillusioned with the overall mission, stressed out by lack of leadership and lack of planning, and barrage of negativity causing them to feel resentment.
At the end of the day, these were all great lessons to learn, and I know that I will absolutely crush my next project management role, knowing what I know now and having the confidence in myself to know that I am doing the right thing making decisions. I know how to speak with people in a way that preserves their dignity and meets them where they are, and after much internal deliberation I decided to make this post to commemorate the lessons I learned in my valuable time at the company, in what was lauded as “the worst department in the company”. The truth was, the company was the worst, the department wasn’t the worst, but the team dynamic and enthusiasm for holding the entire team to excellence had been poison-pilled by poorly chosen contract terms (there is a reason Fluor moved to T&M on these uncertain contracts) and bad people skills across the leadership teams. All lessons learned to carry forward into the future.
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Stay up,
Devin Friske
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