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

Making Ethical Bids in a Competitive MarketAs the United States economy struggles through a vacant time with the stock market dropping and unemployment rising, being competitive in the job market has become extremely important among professionals. Engineers be no exception. For close engineering firms, being competitive and successful requires obtaining send off projects offered by companies in other(a) fields. These projects can range from intention heating and ventilation systems for office buildings to peeing systems for cities to computer networks for businessesthe list of possibilities and disciplines is extensive. To get these jobs, engineers must make a bid proposal for the project. Bidding involves estimating the entire cost of the project, including the designing and building processes, as rise as the materials and labor. Usually, the company with the lowest bid and the best plan gets the job. The ethical issue in this process is determining the cheapest building mat erials and construction procedures possible without agree public safety. The enormous responsibility that an engineer has when designing a project is often overlooked. His or her job is not only to create a design that will work under ideal conditions, but that will meet the regulations of environmental and building codes and will also survive the unpredictable forces of nature 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 involved in the designing process and the failures that can occur when small details are overlooked. In light of a recent surge of failures in the northwest, the article says While the Northwest has experienced some unusual weather 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 dec isions. Despite the availability of hazard mitigation information and qualified technical consultants, the information is often treat and the consultants bypassed as development continues in the flood plains and on unstable hillsides. Often, unwise site selection and ill-conceived site development results in unnecessary motion-picture show to severe natural hazards. Although the initial reason for not hiring a technical consultant in these cases of poor land choice is most likely an onslaught to lower design and construction costs, in retrospect it seems obvious that the money spent on the expertise of a geotechnical engineer would have been significantly little than the millions of dollars of direct losses and litigation costs.