TheEngiNerdLife in Review
Every new endeavor we attempt to tackle comes with a lesson, but that lesson rarely reveals itself up front. No, instead it tends to sneak up on you and slap you across the face.
So, after a year of TheEngiNerdLife, I got smacked by a lesson in clarity. A lesson about how all this work educating others has actually been teaching me all along.
Teaching me what exactly? Well, in a true end-of-the-year reflective fashion, here are the seven things 2025 taught me.
Enough is Enough: Construction Needs Leaders Who Are Real
I’ll never forget that sunny vacation morning, sipping my coffee out on the deck and enjoying the view. Then my phone rang.
“We need you to do this meeting today.”
Day in and day out, we preach “core values”, but when the rubber hit the road, feeling valued is an afterthought. And that’s the nature of construction, isn’t it? This constant gap between what we say and how we actually behave.
The truth is, construction has a culture problem, one we created ourselves. So, how do we fix it?
In Construction, Overload Sounds Like “This is Stupid”
There was a moment about a decade ago, one of those moments where it clicked. In the midst of a massive tech overhaul, a superintendent stopped me with, “I’ve got eight different logins, five different interfaces and dozens of manual workarounds.”
That’s when it hit me: it wasn’t that these folks hated technology. They hated drowning in technology.
At the time, I didn’t have a word for it. But now I know it was my first real-life encounter with cognitive load. And in construction, we’ve been quietly letting it chew away at productivity, safety and morale for years.
Construction’s Mental Health Crisis Isn’t What You Think
We've all seen it.
The veteran foreman who just doesn't show up on Tuesday. No call. No text. Gone. The superintendent whose work suddenly goes to hell after 15 years of rock-solid performance. The crew lead who starts showing up late, snapping at questions, making rookie mistakes.
Everyone whispers, "What's wrong with them?"
Wrong question.
