My boss at my first engineering job told me that a PE license and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.  
Now that’s one heck of a saying, and at 22 years old, I didn’t really get it. I eventually put two and two together and realized that since a cup of coffee […]

While we may not often talk about them, we all remember the dark ages. These are the years where work in the architecture, engineering, and construction field fell to levels not seen for, at a minimum, decades. I was not one of the lucky who lived in a castle with a moat, so I was […]

Everybody loves to get hung up in contract language.  On construction projects, contractors, owners, and subs will fire contract language back and forth like missiles in what gets to be an arms race of legalities that negatively affects projects by creating panic and anxiety.  When lawyers get involved, the language starts to get twisted and manipulated […]

I’ve spent the past four years starting a construction company through the public bidding process.  While I have arguably been successful in doing this, it has not come without plenty of headache, heartache, and just plain unimaginable stress.

I’ve probably bid at least 100 public RFPs, but I’ve only been awarded less than 10.  I’ve dealt […]

I will often get asked, “What is Constructonomics?”.

Actually, that’s a lie. I very rarely, if ever, get asked that question. I’m not sure why I lied about that, but most likely because that’s how a post like this would typically start.

Nevertheless, I do think about the question a lot […]

I’ve occasionally danced around the issue of construction labor unions on this site, but of course I have not taken any definitive stance on one side or the other.  While one may think that this lack of commitment resulted from an aversion to being thrown in the Sckuylkill River with two concrete “slippers” on my […]

The construction industry will tend to lag tremendously behind the rest of this country and perhaps even the rest of the free and modern World when it comes to technology.  I’d love to know what percentage of construction organizations even have websites.  I did a back of the envelope survey about ten years ago and […]

Back in the early part of 2008 we were in a very strange crossroads in this country. Everything was going so well, but it was kind of like one of those sunny days where you just barely see the darker clouds forming over the horizon and the temperature drops just enough to notice. Right about […]

Isn’t it kind of weird that labor is spelled labour in the United Kingdom?  I guess this is true for a few other words like organization (organisation) and catalog (catalogue).  But I think it is safe to say that I don’t really care at all which way they are spelled (spelt in the UK) – […]

In keeping with the yearly tradition of the Constructonomics blog I’d like to propose a theme song for 2012…..So if the theme song for 2011 was, “Stayin’ Alive”, I couldn’t help but try to peg 2012 with something like, “Livin’ On A Prayer”.  However, I won’t.  Not because we’re less than halfway there, but […]