The hoarding of engineering information between colleagues is a big problem. An intervention must occur as no one benefits to keeping knowledge to themselves. Sure you may be intentionally trying to standout from others by being one of those that has mastered their particular discipline. But that is where your knowledge may dead end. Why not teach another person how to do your discipline, and that person in return can give their point of view in relation to what they know. Not only will you help that person understand your work better, you may be able to improve upon your own work. Now both of you have exponentially become more valuable.

In Civil Engineering a designer will generally take up one discipline such as street design.  The problem with only knowing street design is that the street designer doesn’t always know how to match up to the grading portion.  Then comes the issue matching the grading to the storm drain system to the street.  Suddenly a project can snowball into lots of tiny issues that are very hard to fix.  Now if the three designers used in this example all understood what the other was doing, then a project will run much smoother with a more efficient design.

I have seen issues where the grader does not understand how to match their grading into the street causing lots of potential stormwater flooding issues.  Sometime the person doing this will not ask questions because they will either be chastised or worse the designer thinks they know how to do everything.  Other times this person can’t ask because the other designer wishes to hoard their information.  Can we please can an intervention?