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How do you make a living


Scorcher
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I have part ownership in a family owned construction company. We primarily build hospitals and schools, as a construction manager at-risk. I am a project manager. I manage 3 to 4 projects at a time. I am really busy the first couple of months and the last couple of months of each project. At the beggining of a project, I will review plans, and give suggestions to architects on how to make the project more affordable (this is all done in the design developement phase of a project). I also review plans and specs for errors and ommissions at that time, and help provid budget pricing. Once the plans are finalized, I do quantity surveys, and schedules for bidding purposes, and solicit bids from trade contractors. Once I've priced out the portion of the work that we will do with our own forces, our cost for supervision, and qualified the bidders, I provide the client with a gauranteed maximum price. Then me and my assistant send out contracts. After contracts are sent out, I have to review submittals from trade contractors. Once that is done, all I really have to do is update schedules, price any changes the client might want to make, and conduct progress meetings (usually once a month). I also have to deal with any problems that may come up durring the construction process regarding the contract documents. During the middle of a project there really isn't that much to do, so I have a lot of free time. At the end of the project, I'm normally lighting a fire under people to get them to finish on time, as well as doing quality control inspections.

 

Most of the time I like my job, but when I get a couple of jobs finishing at the same time, or one finishing and one starting at the same time, it gets real hectic and stressful. During the month of October, I don't think I had a single night of good sleep because we were trying to finish a project on a real tight schedule where the owner made several changes, but did not want to give us any additional time to finish. While we were entitled to the additional time, and they could not have gone after us for liquidated damages, had we not finished when the client wanted us to, it would have been bad, as they are a large client of ours for whom we have done repeat business for about 20 years as their primary contractor. In addition to that, I was bidding out another project. That was real stressfull, so had you asked me then if I liked my job, I'd have told you I hated it. Now, I like it.

 

I'm a slave to schedules, when deadlines are coming, I migh have to work 100 hour weeks for a month or so, but when the projects fall right, I might have a month or two where all I have to do is come in the office for a few hours a day or a few days a week, just to make sure everything is going smoothly and update schedules. I could probably take about 1 month off a year for vacation. The only problem is, because of problems that arrise on projects, or new projects that come up unexpectedly, it makes it real hard to schedule vacation time with out really dumping on someone else in my office.

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Development Engineer for a large telecommunications product company. I work for our managed services group. I'm responsible for the platform that knows when our stuff breaks in the field. Take what cliaz does, add in what CowboysDieHard does, then throw in some architecture development, coding (multiple languages including a lot of 4th generation BS scripting fekked up stuff some brainiac developed because he thought he knew better than everyone else) and documentation and that's basically what I do.

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Not many teachers out there? What about anyone involved with the radio business? I'm planning on getting involved with the radio business after I graduate. I have an internship with ESPN Radio this summer so hopefully that will springboard into something. If not, I would love to teach too and would consider Teach for America.

i think there areabout 5-7 teachers here... all of them very cynical

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i think there areabout 5-7 teachers here... all of them very cynical

 

 

Well, when I'm not logging out of Coos Bay, Oregon, I'm a teaching machine. But I don't know if I'd call myself cynical, though. More like...aggravated that I'm home for another snow day. :D

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