Making Ethical Bids in a Competitive Market :: Engineer Engineering Job Papers

Making Ethical Bids in a Competitive MarketAs the United States economy struggles by a sluggish time with the stock market dropping and unemployment rising, be competitive in the job market has become extremely main(prenominal) among professionals. Engineers argon no exception. For most engineering firms, being competitive and favored requires obtaining protrude projects offered by companies in other fields. These projects can range from shrewd heating and ventilation systems for office buildings to water systems for cities to computer networks for businessesthe list of possibilities and disciplines is extensive. To protrude these jobs, engineers must make a bid proposal for the project. Bidding involves estimating the whole cost of the project, including the designing and building processes, as well as the materials and labor. Usually, the fraternity with the lowest bid and the best plan gets the job. The ethical issue in this process is determining the cheapest building ma terials and construction procedures possible without compromising mankind safety. The enormous responsibility that an engineer has when designing a project is ofttimes overlooked. His or her job is not only to create a design that will work under ideal conditions, but that will catch the regulations of environmental and building codes and will also survive the unpredictable forces of personality that structures are sometimes subjected to. An article in the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, Structures are Held up by Both Skill and Luck,1 describes many risks heterogeneous in the designing process and the failures that can occur when small detail are overlooked. In light of a recent surge of failures in the Northwest, the article says While the Northwest has experienced some unusual hold out conditions this year, the effects of these weather conditions were not all unpredictable. Many tragic failures in the Pacific Northwest (and in other parts of the country) can be traced to poor land-use planning decisions. Despite the availability of hazard mitigation teaching and qualified technical consultants, the information is often ignored and the consultants bypassed as study continues in the flood plains and on unstable hillsides. Often, unwise site infusion and ill-conceived site development results in unnecessary exposure to stark(a) natural hazards. Although the initial reason for not hiring a technical consultant in these cases of poor land choice is most likely an try on to lower design and construction costs, in retrospect it seems obvious that the gold spent on the expertise of a geotechnical engineer would have been significantly less than the millions of dollars of direct losses and litigation costs.