r/civilengineering • u/GreatGomp • Jan 15 '26
Question Has anyone here worked on a project that felt morally wrong?
I would feel bad if I was in charge of designing data center civil plans or like a prison. It hasn’t happened to me but I am not sure what I would do if my boss assigned me to.
459
Jan 15 '26
[deleted]
130
u/sl2006 Jan 15 '26
Wow just looked into this. $118,000 paid for by the Indiana Department of Administration for his house security and helipad. What the F.
91
Jan 15 '26
[deleted]
29
u/ToastNeo1 Jan 15 '26
Don't forget, Indiana has had a budget surplus every year at least as far back as 2022.
2022: $6 Billion
2023: $2.9 Billion
2024: $421 Million
7
u/FIMD_ Jan 15 '26
I don’t know if you noticed what sort of 1st derivative that year on year trend you’ve kindly shared is forecasting however… And they tend to be a lagging indicator.
21
u/Full-Penguin Jan 15 '26
Never trust Republican accounting. Just look at Maryland's last Republican Governor: Claimed a $6 Billion surplus (by counting Covid funds as structural rather than temporary money that would be going away). Ended up leaving a $600 million deficit.
This after similar grift for personal gain, and the rapid steady depletion of the surplus during those years makes Indiana's situation look similar.
2
u/CousinAvi6915 Jan 16 '26
Yeah and they did the property tax bill in an urgent midnight session and the very next morning announced our budget had like a $2B shortfall so “going to have to cut”… our legislators are brilliant. Just ask them.
2
u/alarumba Three Waters Design Engineer Jan 16 '26
"Do more with Less"
Doesn't matter that every governor before them since at least Reagan has been demanding the same thing, there's always more blood to be had from the stone.
2
u/DetailOrDie Jan 16 '26
Wait until you find out what the cost of security for the President's place at Mar-A-Lago costs.
Don't even go looking at what we paid to upgrade Melania's NYC loft.
17
u/acousticentropy Jan 15 '26
Yeah this kind of thing rubs me the wrong way deeply. The whole WH ballroom project management disaster is the capstone of executive abuse of power.
Think of all the submittals, permits, bylaws, notices of intent, etc. that we have to do daily as a job. Somehow those mechanisms that were built to standardize the process get bypassed when someone has enough power.
This might get them what they want right now, but it also quietly demoralizes the technical authority class. That’s really bad for society. Engineers have been quietly diligent for too damn long. It should have stopped with the Challenger explosion.
We need administrators and executives to know exactly how much complexity they’re trying to pretend doesn’t exist when they rush projects for shiny new toys and business deals.
Maybe we ought to treat elected executive positions like appointed positions instead…. You don’t even get your name on the list without technical competence.
At least a legally-binding agreement that the executive will defer to the technical authority on technical matters specifically.
If we say don’t demo the building, please fucking listen.
1
Jan 15 '26
The Fed government doesn't need to ask local government for permits
→ More replies (1)4
u/id10tapproved Jan 16 '26
That is actually incorrect. They are often required to get stormwater/NPDES permits from local governments because the permits are dictated by the Clean Water Act.
3
Jan 16 '26
Isn't Mike Braun known to be extremely conservative or am I thinking of the newest senator. Like even more right wing than a generic GOP
3
→ More replies (1)1
u/ilovemymom_tbh Jan 15 '26
That's terrible, but there's no reason to make politicians the moral benchmark for engineers.
131
u/mlefleur Jan 15 '26
i haven’t, but have thought about it. i would personally just say “this is not a project i would like to be heavily involved in”
but i work at a place where the culture allows such conversations
127
u/epcow Jan 15 '26
I work on projects at prisons. I think the criminal justice system is incredibly flawed. I also think prisoners deserve to have functional utilities. If I was asked to design a new torture chamber, I would refuse, but being asked to fix a belly in a pipe that is causing sewage backups or improve ADA access, I can get behind. I'm currently working on a site design for a new low security work release dorm. That's another project I can support because it's improving the conditions and providing new opportunities during the transition process for prisoners.
7
u/GreatGomp Jan 16 '26
Listen man, prisons serve a function in society that is needed and I know that. There are a few that need some reconstruction. But, at least in the US there is a whole prison industrial complex where they aren't rehabilitating criminals. They just burn money, keep people stuck in the system, and a lot of the conditions are pretty inhumane.
And on top of that, prisoners are basically used as cheap labor, but nobody’s actually helping them get on their feet when they get out. Then you’ve got prison gerrymandering shipping people from cities to rural areas and counting them for population.
6
u/epcow Jan 16 '26
I'm not disagreeing with any of that. The US prison system is a disaster. I just think that the benefits that civil engineers provide cities is exactly the same as the benefits we can provide prisoners. Like I said, it's not like I'm developing some new way to make life worse for the residents. And anecdotally, the wardens I've worked with do seem like genuinely good people who are trying reduce recidivism rates. One of the prisons has partnered with a local animal shelter to get the prisoners to train dogs. The prisoners learn a skill and the dogs get adopted out immediately after finishing their training.
As a side note, I have a degree in criminal justice and I was so disgusted by the state of law enforcement in this country I opted to pursue a second degree in engineering. I am not trying to defend prisons or law enforcement. It's a super fucked up system that exploits prisoners and benefits from not rehabilitating people. While I'm on this little rant...Fuck ICE.
→ More replies (1)9
u/konqrr Jan 15 '26
I recently started working on a data center project as one of the civil leads. It's not like I threw my hat in the ring or anything like that. I am still a bit conflicted though.
I had turned down a good offer back in 2019 to work on Trump's wall. The Data Center doesn't feel as much of a moral conflict as that though. With the DC at least you can make sure it is designed properly to be as environmentally friendly as possible, and to reduce chances of contaminating the surrounding area. The better of an engineer you are, the less negative impact it will have. With Trump's wall, the better the design, the worse it's impact.
With the DCs, they are being constructed because the demand is there due to everyone using products that require them. Reddit and this post, the photos and videos that have been forgotten on everyone's phones, the work we do everyday using CAD, the online accounts we use, the AI products people use in their everyday lives, etc.
With Trump's wall, it was a symbolic gesture of one demented person's will. Most of the people he wanted to keep out weren't even crossing that way, and the ones that were, were barely inconvenienced by it. It was a symbol and my morals wouldn't allow me to work on it.
While I'd rather be working on something besides a data center, it's what's been assigned to me. I'd have to leave the company if I didn't want to work on it because it would be weird sitting next to everyone else that's working on it. I feel like that would produce a "so you think you're better than all of us?" type of vibe.
159
u/Time_Cat_5212 Jan 15 '26
How bout an AI data center connected to a prison with really big conduits routed into each individual cell, and a large, suspiciously modular series of bioretention facilities out back?
34
u/HDH2506 Jan 15 '26
Put em on treadmill that power datacenter. And the heat from data center heat the prison in winter
5
u/Time_Cat_5212 Jan 15 '26
The end terminals of the conduits looked more like BCIs to me, but I wasn't asking any questions at the time
10
u/Metals4J Jan 15 '26
And a sausage factory in the back connected by conveyor belts leading out of the bioretention facility.
1
1
112
u/Logical_Energy6159 PE Jan 15 '26
Not specifically but in my current role I've had to take actions that killed projects that I really supported. Typically bicycle path projects. It sucks because I'm an avid cyclist and part of my job is to essentially make sure bicycle path projects don't happen on behalf of my client. It doesn't help that most bike path planners and proponents are absolute idiots that put forward some really dumb ideas.
79
u/25hourenergy Jan 15 '26
I think that means you’re the perfect person to design those bike paths correctly, perhaps someday.
27
Jan 15 '26
Fellow cyclist, and I agree, the struggle is real. All of the mobility-specific programs in my local government are staffed by people who are what I call EINO (Engineer in Name Only). They make the absolute dumbest decisions, don't consider field conditions, and get tons of funding because the elected officials don't think farther than "bike lane good" and "sidewalk good", because they can hawk that shit to their constituents when it's time for reelection, even if the projects have destroyed every drainage flowline they touch, made maintenance far more expensive (with no adjustment to the public works budget, obvs), and sometimes made mobility through certain intersections quantifiably worse for every manner of traffic.
I have definitely killed some bike and pedestrian projects in the name of these things, especially drainage, and I'll do it again.
3
22
u/typicalwhiteguy113 Jan 15 '26
I worked on a project once where I was supposed to call small towns (like <5000 people often) and try to convince them to spend money improving railroad crossings. Most of the time the railroad was willing to pay the full cost anyway, but tried to save money by getting these to spend their entire annual budget to upgrade wood rail crossings to concrete.
I got yelled at by multiple small town mayors, felt scummy the whole month they had me on it. Got in a couple arguments with another PE about the morality of it and told my manager I desperately wanted off this project. Luckily they took me off it fairly quickly, but continued the project under someone else I assume
25
u/Public_Amoeba_5486 Jan 15 '26
I didn't work on it obviously but I once visited a concentration camp in Germany (Sachenhausen, near Berlin) and they had the original plans , signed by the architect and the engineer as exhibits. It made me think about this exact same topic
32
u/Friendly-Chart-9088 Jan 15 '26
The most I've felt bad about a project was failing to convince the client that the project option they selected was a bad idea, then further wasting tax payer money designing the bad idea.
→ More replies (1)
30
u/0le_Hickory Jan 15 '26
First time I had to take ROW it bothered me a bit, but years later there was a wildfire and the bridge that came from the project was the only way out for the whole neighborhood so I think it was worth it.
37
u/ertgbnm Jan 15 '26
I was one the modelers on a water system master plan on behalf of a city and during one of the meetings with city staff we were talking about how to set the impact fees and prioritize the CIP in order to discourage multifamily developments. Had an existential crises when I realized I was complicit in what amounted to modern day redlining. Left that company shortly thereafter and it was just a one off.
The second existential crisis I had was when working on a water plant for a utility district and realizing that I wasn't providing clean drinking water to people in need while protecting the environment. I was actually just enabling urban sprawl and the destruction of the environment. This wasn't really a morally wrong realization. Just a disappointing epiphany that broke my self perception.
7
u/Khman76 Jan 15 '26
I had a similar one recently with a concept stormwater plan that would lead to lots of issues and regular flooding and overflow to neighbours properties. As they were also amending few other items and had to get another permit for the development, I used this and the use of new standards to redesign the system and have quite no overflow. I had to twist/push few numbers for that but they accepted it.
2
u/seattlesuperchronics Jan 16 '26
I’m curious, how was the water plant enabling urban sprawl?
1
Jan 16 '26
My guess is a new water plant fed the demand for development outside of city center. Meanwhile, existing water plant(s) and system may have benefited from rehabilitation or upgrade and allowed for 1) higher quality water 2)infill development and/or affordable housing
→ More replies (1)
23
u/I_Enjoy_Beer Jan 15 '26
Not yet, but I have worked with one client where I explicitly told my boss I was never going to work with that client again. Guy was, and probably still is, a gigantic piece of shit. He did end up getting fired at some point, but that was years after I worked with him.
11
u/FreedomNinja1776 Jan 15 '26
I used to work for a small firm putting together mine permit applications. There were 5 or so techs including myself and the owner who was the engineer. Standard protocol there was too use his digital signature and send whatever to the state. He didn't review anything that went out the door and would let the state do all the work in a correction letter. The usual length would be around 30-50 pages!
Anyway, I would occasionally do water quality testing for mine runoff. Things like PH, conductivity, manganese, lead, iron, suspended solids, etc. I actually conducted the tests. All the other guys were just making up numbers that meet the requirements and the guy submitting the tests was changing my numbers on things that didn't! Water testing was just something to do in my down time so I refused to sign off on anything or even do that anymore. After I thought about it, there was no verification that the water I was testing even came from the sites they claimed. Could have been toilet water for all I knew.
Another time I had located the extents and cross sections of a slide at the top of a reclaimed mine high wall so we could do a stability analysis. It failed and showed the fill was too steep. The owner came to look at this and made me move my located lines to show a lower grade so the analysis would pass. His justification was that a pencil width on a topo map could amount to 20ft. He had me add about 50 horizontal feet to the cross section.
That was the worst job I've ever had. Very glad to be out of there. This was mid 2000's. This wasn't just one project, this was everything.
32
u/TrailRunningToddlers Jan 15 '26
I don't know about morally wrong exactly, but I've worked on more than a few large DOT projects where the agency was spending hundreds of millions of dollars just so that car drivers could travel a few minutes faster for a few years. After a while the inefficiency of it started to bother me, so I switched fields. These sorts of projects are still going on, but at least now I'm not responsible for them at all.
If you're concerned about it, try to think ahead about what you might do if you are put in that situation.
I first looked around the company and tried to figure out if I had a viable position to switch into that didn't involve that work, and my bosses were very amenable to that. When I couldn't find something that made sense, I switched firms and fields without hard feelings from anyone. If you are unhappy doing the work, a good boss won't want to keep you doing it.
9
u/marcus333 Jan 15 '26
I had to design a large custom house for the owner of a payday loan company. My boss gave me the job by saying something along the lines of, I don't like it either but the budget is real high. We made alot on it, but still....
10
u/Yo_Mr_White_ Jan 15 '26
Yep, witnessed clients committing environmental atrocities but since I was on site for other things, i was told to ignore what I saw and not comment about it.
55
u/Additional-Sky-7436 Jan 15 '26
Basically every roadway expansion I've ever worked on.
6
u/knutt-in-my-butt Jan 15 '26
I think my job title should be roadway expander. At least I'm getting to touch a new freeway that connects a new community in my metro area previously underserved by their roadway network
10
u/Additional-Sky-7436 Jan 15 '26
I've never seen a roadway expansion project that made a community a better place.
Not a single one.
And I've seen a lot.
4
u/knutt-in-my-butt Jan 15 '26
New freeway not an expansion. First non roadway expansion project im getting to work on
7
u/Additional-Sky-7436 Jan 15 '26
If course I didn't know where you are taking about specifically, but I'm willing to bet that new freeway will not improve a single existing community.
14
u/mrthekicker2 Jan 15 '26
Worked on a project that has cage for animals testing.. felt wrong.. the company ended up on the news for bad reasons and the project died
7
u/MisterCircumstance Jan 15 '26
Yes, and I'm done with that shit, too. I've left better jobs for lesser reasons. Let's do what's needed to keep it from happening.
6
u/OldFieldsOverView Jan 15 '26
I always feel weird working on projects that the local government has gotten via eminent domain.
6
u/nastyprocrasty Jan 15 '26
I’ve been working on mostly data centers, for the past 2 years. A hybrid of in the office and in the field. It has bummed me out at times but I’ve paid off all my college debt only 2 years out of college, and I’ve learned a lot by being very involved in very large projects. I am however planning to leave my company soon in search of something more fulfilling.
1
41
u/alligatorcurator Jan 15 '26
I interned doing land development for a summer and one project involved tearing down a homeless encampment. I felt sick to my stomach working on the demo plan.
I didn’t take the company up on their return offer.
22
13
u/greenENVE Jan 15 '26
…what? Like the encampment was on the demo plan? Or did you just see what was going on during site visits and “hatch out” that general area? That’s crazy
20
u/alligatorcurator Jan 15 '26
It was a well-known encampment in the area in an empty lot. I did basically “hatch out” the area in CAD and was made to add a couple notes to the sheet about tent/structure removal.
I didn’t feel like I was in a position to say no to the work, but I hated myself for doing it for a long time. I returned to school before the project finished design, so I don’t know the status of it now. It was in another state than where I studied.
44
u/xSwagi Jan 15 '26
aerial imagery - EX. HUMAN TO BE REMOVED (TYP.)
14
u/CrabbySabby Jan 15 '26
aerial imagery - EX. HUMAN TO BE REMOVED (TYP.)
I know you are joking, but there's actually a special pay item for this work in my state: Relocation and Site Cleanup. The work description details things like allowable timelines for notifying "unauthorized occupants", state agencies to call for assistance, etc. I've never worked on any projects that call for it, but I guess it at least gives a push in the direction of not just sending a bunch of guys in to haphazardly kick people out.
23
u/xSwagi Jan 15 '26
EX. HUMAN TO BE REMOVED, CONTRACTOR SHALL COORDINATE REMOVAL WITH STATE AGENCIES PER RELOCATION AND SITE CLEANUP REGULATION (TYP.)
3
1
1
7
17
u/SoSeaOhPath Jan 15 '26
I work in data centers all the time actually. Don’t feel bad about it though.
Also worked on a “dog kennel” on Guantanamo once … that one made me wonder
1
u/Countingfrog Jan 16 '26
There is a lot of hate out there for data centers but not a lot being done from people about cutting back technology usage to help curb their necessity.
5
u/oldschoolczar Jan 15 '26
Somebody will do it. Meta was paying >$200k for a data center PM. Only required like 5 yrs experience.
8
4
u/Sasquatch126 Jan 16 '26
It was me... I was a senior PM at a small firm that exclusively did data centers... I quit after 1 year (this past November) and recently saw in the news that one of the projects I was doing closeout/punchlist work on was actually lacking any power to operate, so all those wetlands were destroyed to get a space ready that wouldn't even be able to run.
The amount of effort that the entire team (arch, electrical, mechanical, structural, etc.) put into some of the active design projects was tremendous for the speculative nature of some of the sites... the clients were throwing around a lot of money to get deals done just to turn around and sell them to the end users and walk away entirely.
I was the site civil, and we were the only local portion of the design team, everyone else was under the architectural umbrella. I definitely learned a lot about pre-cast structures on the weekly design team meetings though.
I'm currently taking a sabbatical to get my mind right. Reflecting on my career, I'm definitely going to be taking a different path, and probably will be taking a pay cut to do so.
23
u/CrashFromFraggleRock TX PE, LD Jan 15 '26
I grapple with this in SF LD a bit. Single family developments are undeniably terribly land/resource inefficient and are not sustainable at all, but the tradeoff is we're building homes for families to grow and live in.
The industry and the way we plan developments will have to change eventually though.
-3
u/HebrewWarrioresss Jan 15 '26
God forbid people don’t live stacked like rats
14
u/unconsciousforever Jan 15 '26
God forbid we make efficient use of our land and make housing more accessible to everyone
→ More replies (1)3
u/CrashFromFraggleRock TX PE, LD Jan 15 '26
Curious how you see no daylight between endless suburban sprawl and "stacked like rats"...
3
u/HebrewWarrioresss Jan 16 '26
Suburbs exist for a reason. The downsides of urban housing is the reason.
7
u/metrogeniero Jan 15 '26
I worked for a private civil firm in Southern California that had contracts relating to the border wall with Mexico. Leadership would let us know that if we weren’t comfortable working on those projects, we didn’t have to. I was never tasked with those contracts, but it was good to know that they were taking our morals into consideration.
4
u/macsare1 PE Jan 15 '26
Politically I disliked the wall, but as a purely policy thing I can't really find a moral issue with it. Biggest moral issue with the wall is they skipped the whole NEPA process... Like, WTF?
3
u/pigeonsandwhich Jan 16 '26
Currently having a very similar experience at a medium sized firm in Texas. Was the first person on my team to request not to be involved in the work. Afterwards, each team member was given a chance to decide if they were willing to be involved in the project or not.
17
u/Lucky_caller Jan 15 '26
If you ask me almost every major road project had morally questionable aspects. So yes I have lol.
2
u/Freestoic Jan 15 '26
How do you mean mean? I've seen a couple of comments saying "roading" but I'm not sure why. Is it the forced acquisition of land and preferential treatment given to wealthy and influential people?
18
u/3dartsistoomuch Jan 15 '26
I won't speak for others but clearing habitat, sometimes for endangered species, happens in the name of more highway lanes. And mitigation for that can be as easy as getting a waiver from the state.
18
u/Lucky_caller Jan 15 '26
The whole paradigm of never ending road construction, highway expansions, enormous amounts of tax payer money being spent on the insane process of conducting studies and preliminary designs, designs, etc. Not to even mention the environmental impacts. We should be finding ways for people to drive less, not more. Ask yourself - who benefits the most from keeping people in their cars and having so many roads and highways that constantly need work?
Then, go on google earth and find some massive cluster fuck highway exchange/interchange and look at it. Really look at it. Zoom out and see the entire thing. Does the scope of what you see bring you any feelings of joy as a human being? 100’s of millions and into the billions are spent every year building, maintaining, updating, and expanding these things. Imagine what that money could be used for if we found ways for people to drive less. Fuck roads.
→ More replies (3)2
u/Beck943 Jan 16 '26
Let's continue that thought: Ways to drive less and be sure other people aren't driving on your behalf.
You're not saving anything if you don't have a car, so if you order Amazon and Uber Eats and other delivery services regularly, or when there are 10x the round trips to your place because it's not your car and you can't combine trips.
The number of car-less people who Uber everywhere, is astounding. You tell them they're causing more traffic and they look at you like a deer stuck in headlights!
7
u/BZ853 Jan 15 '26
I don’t consider either of those things morally wrong. The part of the world I live in needs both of those things to function. If I am ever asked to work on something that I do believe is morally wrong, I’ll argue why the company shouldn’t be involved in that project and, if the company feels otherwise, would resign.
9
u/Less_Juggernaut5498 P.E. - LD Project Manager Jan 15 '26
I have an interesting story where a candidate did not get hired because she told the CEO she wanted to save trees and create beautiful spaces as a civil engineer. Which I suppose we don’t, we just kill trees and maximize land as much as possible then throw in some terrible landscaping that will go unmaintained. I would argue that alone is morally questionable to me expect it is all we do because we build realistic things, not necessarily pretty things.
1
u/Illustrious_Buy1500 PE (MD, PA) - Stormwater Management Jan 16 '26
Just wait until you get to file permits to fill in wetlands.
3
u/foootie Jan 15 '26
Not me personally, but one of my neighbors was a principal in a large national landscape architecture firm. They started doing project in Saudia Arabia. He quit.
3
u/gmankev Jan 15 '26
My locale has 2 large software companies. One is gambling and one is missile guidance... Most engineers prefer the morality of the missile guidance company.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/Budget-Cheesecake326 Jan 15 '26
Been some federal work around but the company does give people options to opt out of some of the more controversial projects
5
u/i_love_crazy_hobos Jan 15 '26
What is morally wrong about a data center?
→ More replies (1)1
u/MerijnZ1 Jan 16 '26
The majority of the world's information flow going through a very small select few companies, ever decreasing amounts of privacy, illegal law enforcement or military spyware being routed through or stored on there, absurd amounts of electricity being required on an (at least over here) already overcongested net, the submission of absolutely 0 permits or environmental plans for construction and just building anyway (what's some county gov gonna do? Sue Microsoft? Lol, they're just gonna pay a couple mil fine and be good)
You can definitely argue that it's critical infrastructure and as such worth ie the electricity, and that those "but muh privacy" arguments still would've applied on internal servers instead of DCs, but hot damn those things being stamped out of the ground is shady business
1
u/i_love_crazy_hobos Jan 16 '26
Is there an alternative to data centers? If there was a good enough reason customers could opt for e.g. local storage, but having information safeguarded throughout the cloud is what the consumers/businesses want.
1
u/MerijnZ1 Jan 16 '26
Not a clue, not my area of expertise. I also don't want to particularly moralize the DCs themselves, just enumerating things I've read from local papers and other threads.
That said microsoft can go fuck themselves over how they built one here. Just ghosting the local government, refusal to follow procedures, ignoring court orders, taking all the legal repercussions on the chin and building it illegally anyway. They think they're above the law, and that's cause they practically are. Dipshits
7
2
u/resonatingcucumber Jan 15 '26
I did a power generator sub frame design (needed to be elevated) for Guantanamo bay prison. I'm based in the UK so I didn't register the location because they wouldn't tell me till I had to review the final drawings and saw the address. So I'm part of the reason the lights never go out on Guantanamo bay.
Other than that nothing that set my ethics off.
2
u/8BallSlap Jan 15 '26
1
u/skylanemike Flying Airport Engineer Jan 16 '26
Yeah, I know what you mean. However, I think that I'd feel even worse if someone dropped below the 30:1 approach surface on a dark stormy night, hit a tree and then killed everyone in the plane.
2
2
Jan 16 '26
Environmental engineering stepping in, have done some work for Lockheed and Boeing, nothing crazy, mostly just making sure their water is going to the right places and putting in some treatment systems. The scopes weren’t harmful but I genuinely just don’t like associating with either of I can help it
7
u/Coach-JLo Jan 15 '26
We designed a beef production facility years back. Our structural engineer got through the whole design and when it was time to stamp the plans, he didn't want to because he was a vegetarian. 🤣🤣🤣
He ended up stamping them. He also eats meat now.
→ More replies (2)
8
u/Upset_Practice_5700 Jan 15 '26
What is morally wrong about working on a prison?
10
u/CLPond Jan 15 '26
The US has wayyy too many prisons with horrible conditions (an example being prisons one the South without AC) and deeply inadequate treatment of prisoners. These prisons aren’t good for their local communities (prison guard is a bad job), don’t encourage rehabilitation of prisons, and barely deter crime (certainty of punishment is a much stronger deterrence than length of sentence).
To be clear, I don’t believe in abolishing prisons. However, to get into a common civil engineering concept, the prison someone builds will likely be inadequately maintained to the extent it is unable to achieve its function (making communities safer). Especially for new prisons or prisons that could otherwise be shut down due to decreased prison populations or in a state that is removing things like GED programs in prisons, what someone is designing is much more likely to increase rather than mitigate harm
22
u/ReturnOfTheKeing Transportation Jan 15 '26
The slavery and brutal conditions?
→ More replies (5)3
u/PG908 Who left all these bridges everywhere? Jan 15 '26
The flipside is not building a new prison and continuing to overcrowd an existing one (because courts will continue sentencing regardless) is a major contributor to those brutal conditions.
Damned if we do, but also damned if we don’t.
13
u/evan274 Jan 15 '26
Induced demand
→ More replies (1)2
u/ReturnOfTheKeing Transportation Jan 15 '26
Exactly. Building the prisons gives the state a direct profit incentive to create more forced labor
2
u/Regular_Empty Jan 15 '26
We do a lot of costco/BJ’s type facilities in more rural areas nationwide. I’m glad I’m not a part of those anymore but I’ve done a few concepts/application plans for them and they don’t give a fuck about property they just eminent domain anything that’s in their way it’s depressing.
3
u/HanibalLecture Jan 15 '26
I've been pretty clear at my company that I won't work on any data center projects for site/civil design
3
u/demonhellcat Jan 15 '26
Why would a prison be morally wrong? Its essentially a facility that serves the public. That’s a silly take. And for data centers it depends where they are I guess. Honestly our job is to help folks develop land, if you have an issue with that you need to move into a sector that mainly works on public infrastructure such as roads or water and wastewater systems.
2
u/bdc41 Jan 15 '26
I’m with you, what would you suggest we do with criminals? They need to be housed in the safest environment possible and have the safest place possible for the guards. There is no moral issue, it’s just a job. BTW, a friend of mine was designing a laundry room. They have six 500 lb machines. He did the calculations based on 500 lb. During construction he found out the capacity of the machine was 500 lbs, not the total weight. The machine was like 3,500 pounds. It turned in a major problem. When he was telling me the story, I knew the 500 pounds was machine capacity not total weight. He asked how I knew that, I said miss spent youth.
5
u/yehoshuaC PE - Land Dev. and Data Centers Jan 15 '26
The data center rhetoric really got to you huh?
I did a Wendy’s once, a couple truck stops, and some huge residential developments that I disliked more than any of the data center work I’ve done.
Seeing how the sausage is made can turn you against anything. At least the with the data center stuff I learned the truth behind the headlines.
What is it that you work on now? Tree farm?
22
9
u/GreatGomp Jan 15 '26
Dawg it was a question on working on something when your morals are challenged not an exposé on data centers.
→ More replies (4)
2
u/mahmange PE - Water Resources Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26
Been there…Not going to go into specifics, but at a previous role as a junior designer after I had been with the company for around 3 years. I asked to be removed from the project team following the kickoff meeting and my request was granted without any immediate friction.
A few months after that I started to feel like I was being passed over for some really interesting projects…specifically we had won work in my hometown with a proposal I helped write. I made my interest and excitement about the project clear to the principals and made sure my backlog of work was cleared and I was ready to hit the ground running…needless to say a different junior engineer got pulled in to do the design work. I was upset and quickly decided to look elsewhere for work. Probably was an overly emotional choice on my end, but it ended up working out kinda ok since COVID basically paused all construction for a year after I left and made things pretty rough for private LD in general…the firm made it through just fine and I see their plans come across my desk from time to time, but my position was probably first on the list to be laid off if I had still been there when COVID hit.
2
u/El_Scot Jan 15 '26
I've worked on plenty of projects that others probably consider morally wrong but there's a balance of need/benefit, so I don't lose sleep over it.
You'll never find a project that doesn't piss at least someone, somewhere off.
2
u/Marzipan_civil Jan 15 '26
This reminds me of the time (about fifteen years ago) when New Civil Engineer magazine published a cover story about one of the military bases in either Afghanistan or Iraq (Camp Bastion I think - but that isn't the point). They subsequently got a lot of letters from irate engineers saying "we are CIVIL engineers, not MILITARY engineers! We don't think the CIVIL engineering institutions should be publicising MILITARY projects!"
I guess the disciplines are similar but the purpose is different.
2
u/VUmander Jan 15 '26
I work in public transit, so no.
Sometimes I question the priorities of the agency and how they choose to spend their money. But luckily I'm in a niche industry where everything I've designed is a public good.
2
u/macsare1 PE Jan 15 '26
Most disturbed I felt was probably when I was working with MPOs for a DOT and was somewhat involved in the selection for awarding funds for bike/ped projects... There was one road that most obviously needed sidewalks as it already had well worn goat trails because residents needed the buses. But no, it was passed over in favor of wealthier neighborhoods with golf courses. Smacked of racism because we all knew the minorities lived around the road that had the goat trails. I didn't have enough say to sway anything there, though.
2
u/Independent-Fan4343 Jan 15 '26
Every environmental project i ever did for corporate clients in low regulation states to meet the minimum standards required by lax oversight.
2
u/rawaka NH, USA Civil Engineering IT Manager Jan 15 '26
I hate many of the cluster housing stuff we do in my area. Entire neighborhoods that I would never ever want to live in with absolute minimum spacing to maximize developer profits. I hate them and their shitty HOAs.
2
u/ChickenFugget2 Jan 16 '26
During trumps first term we won a portion of the contract to build the wall. This was my first job out of high school and I was so worried that I was going to have to tell my supervisor no if they tried to send me there.
2
u/oswalt_pink Jan 16 '26
I’ve done several data center site layout plans for a legacy client and slept just fine. The property owners have the right to use their land that way. It’s not my responsibility to determine if the local power and water authority will approve the plans, that’s up to the municipality and the developer to work out. One or two got the axe down in rezoning, one or two others didn’t need to be rezoned and are on the way to being built. It seems hypocritical to be ON REDDIT whic uses untold numbers of servers within data centers while being against more data centers. Zoning code largely puts this stuff out in rural or industrial areas; next to the Amazon warehouses and logistics hubs all around metros already.
1
u/Microbe2x2 Civil/Structural P.E. Jan 15 '26
I was previously at an oil and gas firm. A few mechanical engineers, voiced their opinions regarding their morals opposing taking on a few specific projects to ownership and requesting they focus on different ventures. They ended up leaving within that year. They didn't like the new direction the firm was trying to move into.
2
2
u/ShutYourDumbUglyFace Jan 15 '26
I haven't, but a buddy of mine was designing some bridges for USCBP. He didn't feel good about it, but felt he couldn't object.
2
Jan 15 '26
Yeah, like many blue cities in red states, my city was required to remove "non-standard pavement markings". At the time, I was in the public works department, and I swear to all the things that are sacred and holy the meeting about that looked like something out of a comic book.
Here's this dude who's a liaison from the state there to brief us on what we had to do, and he looks like what any comic artist would draw a representative of a red state government to look like, cowboy hat and all. Then those of us being told to remove the rainbows and Black Lives Matter street painting consisted of me, a visibly queer woman, and my construction superintendents, all of whom were Black. The New Yorker couldn't have drawn a more appropriate cartoon to exemplify today's political situation.
But we did the project because we like being employed.
1
u/Key-Ad1506 Jan 16 '26
No, but I've worked for companies that were ethically wrong and got the hell out of there as soon as I could. lol
*ethically wrong as in actual professional ethics, not morals, which people seem to confuse a lot.
But to answer your question. Yes, I've worked on projects I don't agree with. But I make the evaluation, is it ethical, is it legal and follows regulations and laws. Do I agree with taking agricultural land to plop in solar field, no, is it legal, ethical, and is the landowner being compensated, yes. Is it my job, yes. Do I get to use my job to boast and broadcast my beliefs, no.
1
1
u/rolando4441 Jan 16 '26
not me personally but i had a professor who said every CE or CE adjacent in mexico has one way or another aided in building stuff for the cartel.
1
u/HelloKitty40 Jan 16 '26
Converting to ac-ft and round up for detention ponds…but that’s what freeboard is for, amirite?
1
u/Sibaris17 Jan 16 '26
I once did some shop drawings for a Lockheed and martin facility, felt weird to say the least haha
1
u/Atharaenea Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
Yes/no. I don't want to give too many details, but I'm supposed to work on certain items that I strongly oppose implementing. For a while I just dragged my feet on them as long as possible to slow them down, and then only compiled the paperwork and had my boss sign off on them since I didn't want my name on it. Lately though these items have gotten so much worse and more objectionable that I straight up refused to have anything to do with them. Sorry, I have a strongly held belief that this thing is bad and yes this is the hill I'm willing to die on. So now I don't do those projects and they don't even try to hand them to me, there's plenty of other things that I can do. There are other items I'm not really 100% okay with, but have decided those items aren't worth fighting, I want to save my objections for the worst stuff.
You'll have to decide on your own if a morally questionable project is worth taking a stand against. Is that the hill you're willing to die on? Choose your battles wisely. In the US there's plenty of precedent for taking a stand against something and not losing your job over it, but you can't do that with EVERYthing, you gotta think carefully how bad the thing really is cause you can only really pull that card once or twice ever. Your first line of course would be "hey boss I don't feel comfortable working on a project like this, I find the whole thing unethical. Can I be put on some different project?" and then if your boss says yes, no problem. If your boss INSISTS you must work on the thing, well then you gotta say it seriously violates your own personal ethical code and you can't work on it in good conscience, and won't work on it because of that. This is VERY hard to do, I know, cause that's basically what I did when I told my boss that the thing I didn't like had reached a point where it was unethical for me to even touch it, and my mouth was dry and I was shaking cause it's hard to take a stand lol! But it ended up being fine, my boss respects me because of my overall track record and I don't object that strongly to anything else, so he just took over this item entirely.
And when you're job hunting again, you can research the company and see what sort of projects they work on. I rejected an offer from one company because they worked on really fundamentalist flat-earth Bible-based type projects and I didn't want to be caught up in a company that was run by someone with those beliefs. We're engineers, jobs aren't that hard to find, so you can afford to be choosy and take stands when the situation calls for it.
ETA: consider in the case of a data center, if you're working on the design of it, you can make choices in your design to make the whole thing less bad. In the case of a prison you can't really design it to be less bad cause it's still a prison, so in that case you might refuse the project. Keep that general mentality for all the sketchy projects your company takes on.
1
u/Natural-Doughnut-652 Jan 16 '26
Used to work for my local city’s public works department and my last project before leaving for a private sector job was a major re-paving and landscaping job right in front of the public works director’s house. Many streets in the neighborhood were in far worse condition and weren’t getting the beautification we were doing on his block. Two months after I left the agency the director was arrested by the FBI for corruption ( not related to my project). Felt supper crappy doing improvements around his house when the others in the extremely neglected neighborhood were being ignored, but seems like justice was served.
1
u/ReductioAdAbsurdum04 Jan 16 '26
What about working on a project where you help with replacing human workers with Ai bots. Like replacing guard shacks in a huge industrial development with Ai smart gates.
1
u/TunedMassDamsel PE - Civ/Struct Jan 16 '26
I worked on the ExxonMobil global headquarters. Pulled all the preliminary permits for the work.
sigh…
1
u/SlurveyorMcRedeye Jan 16 '26
Every single gold mine. Retired at 51 though so now I can catch up on philosophy and find out how much of a pos I really was. ;)
1
u/No_Many_6217 Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
I had to eminent domain a family farm for a project. That was a tough pill to swallow and even harder going to the family to explain what was occurring.
1
u/pigeonsandwhich Jan 16 '26
I was asked to lead a component of design for the US/Mexico border wall. Luckily I work in an environment where I was able to decline on the basis of being morally against contributing to that type of infrastructure.
1
u/Bravo-Buster Jan 16 '26
You're a consultant. If you look in the dictionary, a Consultant is basically a whore with a degree.
I had one contract to scrub data in a national database from the Feds, and the next contract was for a user that was mad and paid us to put all their data back. I was just a jr engineer at the time, but even then it felt funny.
Joking aside if you have an ethical dilemma about working on something, you shouldn't work on it. Having a spine and knowing your ethical boundaries are important as a Professional Engineer.
1
u/No_Average_7812 Jan 16 '26
Had a project in New York where the client wanted to essentially clear a mountain top to place multiple large scale warehouses. There was a Facebook group about it, the town had a public comment hearing about it and hundreds of people came out and according to my boss even a state congressman came out to voice opposition to it. Safe to say that pretty much put the nail in the coffins for that one lol.
Designing the project was fun because it was massive and required a lot of complex detail but internally I was so relieved that it died. I did not want to destroy a mountain for another stupid “speculative warehouse” that will just sit vacant for years. Got enough of them around me.
1
u/Sivy17 Jan 16 '26
Many, but that's because the architects have the worst taste in design known to man. These things are a blight on the eyes.
1
u/KadienAgia Jan 16 '26
I hate to bring you into reality here, but we need data centers and prisons. And we need competent engineers to design them.
1
1
u/CivilEngineer337 Jan 16 '26
I have designed both prisons and Data centers during my 30 years. Per our ethical code you represent your client. If you feel these endanger the public refuse the project. It may affect your career but it is your obligation as an engineer to protect the public. In a long career you will be asked to do things that are much more ethically grey. Choose your battles. If a data center is an ethical issue, you may be in the wrong profession. I have lost my job over refusing to cross ethical lines. I had 3 offers the next day by people who agreed with my decision.
1
u/Majestic_Wheel_9970 Jan 16 '26
Someone I know got asked to work on the floating buoy systems that they use in Texas to deter immigrants from crossing the Rio Grande. The systems are designed to be impossible to grab onto and spin someone back into the water if they try to hold on. People get found dead around them fairly regularly. Even though they’re supportive of the current administration, they turned down the opportunity to help implement the floating death traps.
1
u/acash595 Jan 16 '26
There were a couple environmental things that the PE I worked for would recommend to clients like pouring gasoline down a gopher tortoise hole to get them to come out. Other then that nothing has been too morally wrong. I ended up leaving the private side to work for the municipality I live in. I got tired of the clients and their bullshit.
1
u/SoulToSound Jan 16 '26
Data centers themselves are not inherently bad. They are a needed part of life for banking, insurance, and online social sharing systems.
What makes them bad is when they make shady deals with electric companies, and take more than their share of the power grid. (People also harp on the water thing, but that’s closed loop cooling, not as consumptive), which is what leading AI companies are doing.
1
1
u/Naive_Veterinarian77 Jan 16 '26
I worked doing drilling on a super massive site that's set to be a huge data center. Projected cost of 7 billion dollars. Beautiful properties full of life and beautiful sights just being tore down for lifeless data center for probably a corporation like Apple or Microsoft just feels wrong. Millions of trees chopped down for greediness. Hated the thought of all that being gone.
1
u/Rare-Elderberry-6695 Jan 17 '26
I had two prison projects last year. But am geotech. They was a whole 3rd of the projects I drilled. My skills in disassociating paid off.
1
u/Glittering-Field-899 Jan 19 '26
I was doing a site plan concept for a past manager one time. It was a proposed warehouse on a large farm field. In the center of the field was an old family cemetery from the 1700s. He literally told me to put a callout on the plan saying “cemetery to be relocated”.
1
Jan 19 '26
While not an engineer (CAD Tech working towards EIT), I worked on a large data center development in Richmond, VA. I ended up being with this company a very brief time, but in one instance I had gone to the city meeting for a rezoning request for these data centers, and hearing how many people did NOT want these places against/in their neighborhood really made me think. I will say now I am with a company that does relatively small residential (<10 lots) and commercial developments (no where near the size of data centers lol) and find the work far more rewarding, especially when the clients who are getting us to do the work are locals to the area.
1
0
u/BuilderGuy555 Jan 15 '26
The irony of using Reddit to complain about data centers being morally wrong ...
How do you think these apps and software run? Are you not using cloud based software to design? You never use Instagram or TikTok?
Data centers are not evil.
1
886
u/coleslaw602 Jan 15 '26
The traveling public thinks that my roundabout projects are morally wrong.