"I have something for you! Check this lab report vs the 16,000 line excel spreadsheet and identify errors. Note that the columns and rows are different, as well as many of the chemical names. You may charge 0.25 hours to the project for this."
You gotta set up an access program to flag your errors for you!
I don't actually know how to do this but my last company had a program in access that processed the EDDs from the lab before it was sent to our database.
This is when my boss would say that I should set up some fancy Excel sheet to automate it for me, but not allow me the time to figure out how to do that. Can’t go on overhead because “it’s project-related” but can’t justify charging it the project because I don’t have the budget for that.
And here I am, am environmental engineer gone data scientist and I can't convince any firms to contract with me to automate their shit, even though it's desperately needed. Like, at every firm. Lmao
Yep! And yet my data-driven, overly analytical boss who obsesses over efficiency won’t let me spend more time researching different logging softwares that I brought up with him (TabLogs, RSLog, & BoreDM), even though I have nothing better to do at the moment. Guess we’ll just stay in 2005 using paper logs and gINT… but hey at least I was able to streamline the data entry 🥲
HARD relate. It had me wonder why I studied geology for this crap. Not to mention we also had jobs like "digitising" handwritten field reports for Wells into Excel spreadsheets for the client
Too familiar.
I'm on the naughty list for FY24 for not meeting my direct hours goal.
All my work for all the projects I manage gets done. And I usually have my begging bowl out for more work from other PMs that I know have lots more on their plate.
My team lead told me I needed to "deep dive" into my projects so that I would have more billable time. But the problem with that is I have budgets I have to maintain. I can't just be billing out of scope time.
I actually have steady work, they've just been pushing a bunch of training on me and I've been expected to do marketing while still having a ridiculously high utilization goal. The only way I'd meet it is if I didn't charge for the overhead work, which I refuse to do because I don't work for free.
I've spent the last 3 weeks working on a ton of fiscal year 25 proposals. And none of that time is billable to client.
I got a promotion in February. And generally as you move up in my company your utilization goals go down. But that doesn't reset until the new fiscal year which just started and I don't think we find out our new goals until August.
Its why I left consulting. The last 2-3 months I didnt have any steady work. I would log on send my daily email to 8-9 project managers asking if they had any work anywhere i could assist with and would hear nothing back. Lots of time to twiddle my thumbs and play games at home but knowing that utilization time waa ticking down was a bit stressful.
Put on timesheet "overhead -- looking for work", then start emailing former co-workers, clients, employers, etc to shoot the shit. Reduce everyone's productivity to the level of your own in the process ;)
Ran out of work for the week at my consulting firm. Sitting at home waiting to hear back from others in the firm if they have any work. Time for Netflix 🤷♂️
I work for a consulting firm and I'm salaried never had to keep track of my hours just get the work done and send it out. Sounds like big corpa micromanagement.
I’m also “salaried” but we get paid hourly, because that’s how we have to charge the clients. We’re salaried in the sense that we’re guaranteed 40 hours/week and get full-time benefits. Of course this also means we have to charge overhead hourly and provide comments to justify our time, which puts us in fun positions when us lower-level people have very little billable work. This is a local firm that actually does a pretty good job of avoiding corporate BS.
I’m curious how that works for you, do your managers track your billable hours themselves?
No we asign reports to engineers and geologist and they get them out by the deadline. We pay them regardless of how many hours they work. What matters are results. We have a budget for the project that gets split into its necessary departments. We don't itemize to clients unless requested. Typically they ask us for a report and tell them jow much we can do it for and when they can have it. Some clients are a pain like txdot where we "itemize" but it's not that annoying.
So basically you’re just doing nothing but fixed-price contracts? Sounds nice!!
I don’t think that would fly with most of our clients at all. Our largest client is the state and they absolutely audit our timesheets, billable rates directly affect IDCRs which is what their contracts are built on. They’ve held up hundreds of thousands of dollars for discrepancies that equate to pocket change, literally.
That'd be fantastic ... It has not been my experience at any of the Env firms I've worked at. "Why is your utilization trending low?" followed soon after by "Why are you billing so many hours to Project X & Y"?
I worked at a place that didn’t have billable hours or utilization, you just did a time sheet. That works until you’re losing money on projects and can’t figure out why.
I am like you. My salary isn't as good as the big firms at this point, but making enough to live my life and have plenty of time to do that. Utilization is for suckers!
My company is really pushing utilization right now, they just came out with a new tool to track it and blasted my location with everyone's chargeability in an email. And while it's not really a secret (anybody can look the information up), it does seem like kind of a name and shame that I'm not super excited about.
A friend of mine worked at Anchor QEA and when they logged on their computers in the AM their utilization % for the week would flash up on their screen.
I remember my boss telling me to reach out to other offices asking for work. After the 2nd or 3rd one I realized I was just applying for jobs and so I started to apply to other jobs all under the supervision of my boss.
I'm with the "take some of mine" crowd. In seven years I haven't had a considerable slowdown with the exception of early 2020. The rest of 2020, via the SRP program, made up for that.
If I didn't have at least 40 hrs of billable time on a regular basis then I'd be changing companies. I have witnessed people wait out droughts and I just will not. There are planes to catch and bills to pay.
This happens with my company and it drives me crazy. And the thing is it's not really my office. It's other offices that have these last minute "oh God this has to be done now" projects and then they come to our office for personnel resources and then we're running around with our heads cut off.
This is a big reason why I didn’t want to stay in env consulting, and instead went to mining. Don’t need to keep track of my hours, don’t need to worry if I’m getting enough work, and I got a big pay bump
I just got laid off after months of mostly unbillable hours. Few reports here & there, but mostly webinars and online training. Shoulda left a while ago but at least i got severance.
I'm a Fed PM for a large(r) firm and our utilization goal is stupid high ... like 85-90%. I think they count it differently than my last firm which was still a federal contractor but my goal was like 60% and the other 60% was supposed to be for proposals.
I've been working for that state of Kansas for the last 5 years and I'm moving to the east coast into my first contractor job and I am really nervous about having this feeling
Im curious how common it is for people to be billing to overhead? I’m new in this industry and I thought it was highly frowned upon, but I met some people from other offices who regularly bill as much as 10 hours a week to it
"I have something for you! Check this lab report vs the 16,000 line excel spreadsheet and identify errors. Note that the columns and rows are different, as well as many of the chemical names. You may charge 0.25 hours to the project for this."
ACCURATE AF. I don’t miss this
You gotta set up an access program to flag your errors for you! I don't actually know how to do this but my last company had a program in access that processed the EDDs from the lab before it was sent to our database.
This is when my boss would say that I should set up some fancy Excel sheet to automate it for me, but not allow me the time to figure out how to do that. Can’t go on overhead because “it’s project-related” but can’t justify charging it the project because I don’t have the budget for that.
And here I am, am environmental engineer gone data scientist and I can't convince any firms to contract with me to automate their shit, even though it's desperately needed. Like, at every firm. Lmao
Yep! And yet my data-driven, overly analytical boss who obsesses over efficiency won’t let me spend more time researching different logging softwares that I brought up with him (TabLogs, RSLog, & BoreDM), even though I have nothing better to do at the moment. Guess we’ll just stay in 2005 using paper logs and gINT… but hey at least I was able to streamline the data entry 🥲
[удалено]
Care to elaborate?
Furry Mechanical Engineering?
What did you call me?
HARD relate. It had me wonder why I studied geology for this crap. Not to mention we also had jobs like "digitising" handwritten field reports for Wells into Excel spreadsheets for the client
Lol, just started in environmental consulting and that was my first few weeks.
This one hit home REAL hard. So glad I moved to government.
Same.
same, 4 hours to review monitoring reports, 4 hours to sit there and stare at the wall
On second thought... You are too expensive and bill at too high of a rate. Please find something else to work on.
Sounds like 2.5 weeks in municipal hours
Too familiar. I'm on the naughty list for FY24 for not meeting my direct hours goal. All my work for all the projects I manage gets done. And I usually have my begging bowl out for more work from other PMs that I know have lots more on their plate. My team lead told me I needed to "deep dive" into my projects so that I would have more billable time. But the problem with that is I have budgets I have to maintain. I can't just be billing out of scope time.
I actually have steady work, they've just been pushing a bunch of training on me and I've been expected to do marketing while still having a ridiculously high utilization goal. The only way I'd meet it is if I didn't charge for the overhead work, which I refuse to do because I don't work for free.
I've spent the last 3 weeks working on a ton of fiscal year 25 proposals. And none of that time is billable to client. I got a promotion in February. And generally as you move up in my company your utilization goals go down. But that doesn't reset until the new fiscal year which just started and I don't think we find out our new goals until August.
Its why I left consulting. The last 2-3 months I didnt have any steady work. I would log on send my daily email to 8-9 project managers asking if they had any work anywhere i could assist with and would hear nothing back. Lots of time to twiddle my thumbs and play games at home but knowing that utilization time waa ticking down was a bit stressful.
In the summer? Impossible.
Yeah if that's happening in the summer it's time to look for a new job because that company is or is about to be struggling.
Saaaaame. Spent the last 6 months being over 90% billable. Lost a large project, been fiddling my thumbs for the last 3ish weeks. Scary.
I went from 90+ billable, took a promotion to run the project, we never got the contract for the project, to 50% in a calendar year and out I went
This is me right now! Except my company didn't lose a large project. Very scary!
Put on timesheet "overhead -- looking for work", then start emailing former co-workers, clients, employers, etc to shoot the shit. Reduce everyone's productivity to the level of your own in the process ;)
This is the way.
Ran out of work for the week at my consulting firm. Sitting at home waiting to hear back from others in the firm if they have any work. Time for Netflix 🤷♂️
Take some of mine.
I haven't been in consulting for several years and am now remembering why I love my state agency job. The pay is less but no billable hours bullshit.
I work for a consulting firm and I'm salaried never had to keep track of my hours just get the work done and send it out. Sounds like big corpa micromanagement.
I’m also “salaried” but we get paid hourly, because that’s how we have to charge the clients. We’re salaried in the sense that we’re guaranteed 40 hours/week and get full-time benefits. Of course this also means we have to charge overhead hourly and provide comments to justify our time, which puts us in fun positions when us lower-level people have very little billable work. This is a local firm that actually does a pretty good job of avoiding corporate BS. I’m curious how that works for you, do your managers track your billable hours themselves?
No we asign reports to engineers and geologist and they get them out by the deadline. We pay them regardless of how many hours they work. What matters are results. We have a budget for the project that gets split into its necessary departments. We don't itemize to clients unless requested. Typically they ask us for a report and tell them jow much we can do it for and when they can have it. Some clients are a pain like txdot where we "itemize" but it's not that annoying.
So basically you’re just doing nothing but fixed-price contracts? Sounds nice!! I don’t think that would fly with most of our clients at all. Our largest client is the state and they absolutely audit our timesheets, billable rates directly affect IDCRs which is what their contracts are built on. They’ve held up hundreds of thousands of dollars for discrepancies that equate to pocket change, literally.
That'd be fantastic ... It has not been my experience at any of the Env firms I've worked at. "Why is your utilization trending low?" followed soon after by "Why are you billing so many hours to Project X & Y"?
I worked at a place that didn’t have billable hours or utilization, you just did a time sheet. That works until you’re losing money on projects and can’t figure out why.
I am like you. My salary isn't as good as the big firms at this point, but making enough to live my life and have plenty of time to do that. Utilization is for suckers!
My company is really pushing utilization right now, they just came out with a new tool to track it and blasted my location with everyone's chargeability in an email. And while it's not really a secret (anybody can look the information up), it does seem like kind of a name and shame that I'm not super excited about.
A friend of mine worked at Anchor QEA and when they logged on their computers in the AM their utilization % for the week would flash up on their screen.
I remember my boss telling me to reach out to other offices asking for work. After the 2nd or 3rd one I realized I was just applying for jobs and so I started to apply to other jobs all under the supervision of my boss.
Take some of mine. It never ends.
Nightmarish consulting days.....we had targets of like 30 hours minimum or you got asked WHY. I only ever had 40 hours like once in my 6 month stint
I'm with the "take some of mine" crowd. In seven years I haven't had a considerable slowdown with the exception of early 2020. The rest of 2020, via the SRP program, made up for that. If I didn't have at least 40 hrs of billable time on a regular basis then I'd be changing companies. I have witnessed people wait out droughts and I just will not. There are planes to catch and bills to pay.
And then when it rains, it pours. Work plans become half-baked and everyone is flying by the seats of their pants
This happens with my company and it drives me crazy. And the thing is it's not really my office. It's other offices that have these last minute "oh God this has to be done now" projects and then they come to our office for personnel resources and then we're running around with our heads cut off.
This is a big reason why I didn’t want to stay in env consulting, and instead went to mining. Don’t need to keep track of my hours, don’t need to worry if I’m getting enough work, and I got a big pay bump
What do you do in mining? I want to get out of consulting as well but I don’t know what fields I can work in with a geology degree.
I just got laid off after months of mostly unbillable hours. Few reports here & there, but mostly webinars and online training. Shoulda left a while ago but at least i got severance.
Things are slow here for me as well. Hopefully things pick up again by the end of the summer
I'm a Fed PM for a large(r) firm and our utilization goal is stupid high ... like 85-90%. I think they count it differently than my last firm which was still a federal contractor but my goal was like 60% and the other 60% was supposed to be for proposals.
lol I literally sent this exact meme to one of my coworkers on Monday while doing the begging rounds. It’s feast or famine out here!!
I've been working for that state of Kansas for the last 5 years and I'm moving to the east coast into my first contractor job and I am really nervous about having this feeling
Im curious how common it is for people to be billing to overhead? I’m new in this industry and I thought it was highly frowned upon, but I met some people from other offices who regularly bill as much as 10 hours a week to it
As someone new as well, it is really tough because it isn't really up to you how many billable hours you get.
Definitely not common. If I billed 10 hours of overhead my rtl would panic and ask what I was doing to get work
Yup, I know that one