In your first year as an engineer, almost every request feels like a test. On Monday, your project manager asks whether you can have the drainage calculations done by Friday. You have never run them for a project this size, but you say, “Sure, no problem,” because anything else feels like admitting you are not ready.
By Thursday night, you are still at your desk, and you have learned the same lesson contractors learn when they bid too low, that unrealistic engineering project estimates can put quality at risk.
In technical terms, this outcome is called the winner’s curse. It is a phenomenon in which the winning bidder underestimates the work to win the project, but struggles to deliver it at the bid price.
Researchers have studied this phenomenon and concluded that it can cause several project delivery problems, such as compromises on quality.
My research examines bid tabulation data from state highway agencies to understand this problem. The first lesson is that the obvious numbers, the low bid and the bidder count, rarely tell the whole story.
Therefore, before awarding contracts to the lowest bidder, highway agencies must check whether the low bid is believable, particularly because public funds are involved.
As a young engineer, however, your promises rarely get that kind of review before you make them. People usually accept a quick yes on the spot, so it pays to evaluate your own engineering project estimates before committing. Every deadline you agree to is a bid, and the most optimistic one is the most likely to be accepted and the most likely to be wrong.
Public Highway Procurement Context
In public highway procurement, the contract commonly goes to the lowest responsive bid from a responsible bidder. However, the awarding agency must still judge whether that low bid can fulfill the contract.
The first safeguard many highway agencies use is called prequalification. Before a contractor may bid, the agency reviews the firm’s financial capacity, equipment, experience, and past performance. It then assigns the types of work the firm may bid on and a maximum dollar value of work the firm may hold at one time, often called its bidding capacity. Prequalification therefore screens out firms that lack the resources to deliver the work before the agency considers any price.
The second safeguard is the engineer’s estimate. Before bids are opened, the agency prepares its own estimate of a reasonable price for the contract, usually based on unit prices from recent similar projects. This estimate gives the agency an independent benchmark for evaluating the bids it receives.
The third safeguard is the evaluation of the bids themselves. Reviewers consider the number of bidders, the gap between the low bid and the engineer’s estimate, and the gap between the low bid and the other bids. A large number of bidders do not, by themselves, indicate strong competition. A low bid far below both the estimate and the other bids suggests that the bidder may have misjudged the work.
Suppose the agency estimates that a small bridge repair should cost about $1 million. In the first case, five contractors bid. Four of them bid close to $1 million, but one bids only $700,000 and wins. In the second case, only two contractors bid, at $990,000 and $1,010,000. The first case has more bidders, but the winning price is far below everyone else, so the winner probably missed part of the work. In the second case, both bidders and the agency arrived at nearly the same price, so the low bid is believable.
How Highway Bidding Connects to Young Engineers
Young engineers often act like contractors who bid $700,000 on the $1 million repair. Unlike that contractor, however, they face no prequalification, no engineer’s estimate, and no bid review before people accept their promises.
From a young engineer’s perspective, saying yes can feel like part of doing a good job. You want to appear capable and easy to work with, so “yes” feels like the safest answer.
Published research supports this comparison. In his book The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks, an engineer who managed the development of IBM’s operating system, observes that young engineers tend to be optimists who assume each task will take only as long as it ought to. He illustrates the problem with a chef who promises a customer an omelet in two minutes. The customer’s urgency can set the promised time, but it cannot change the actual cooking time. When the omelet is not ready, the customer must either wait or eat it raw. Brooks calls a schedule set to match the customer’s desired date rather than the real work “gutless estimating.”
Psychologists call this error the planning fallacy, the tendency to underestimate a task’s time and cost, which young engineers often exhibit.
Agencies learned this lesson at considerable expense. For these reasons, agencies now actively support alternative project delivery methods, particularly for complex projects, because these methods look beyond the price a bidder offers. Bidders may go too low, underestimate the scope, deliver lower-quality work, and rely on contract changes that lead to delays and cost overruns.
Lessons for Young Engineers
Your career goes through the same shift, on a smaller scale.
In your first year, it can feel like you are judged on price alone, meaning how fast you turn things around and how often you say yes. In practice, however, the people who decide on your next assignment evaluate best value, which includes the reliability of your engineering project estimates and the quality of your work, not just your speed.
Managers apply this standard for three reasons.
First, one engineer’s work becomes input for other team members, so an error in a single calculation carries into the drawings, specifications, and cost estimates that depend on it.
Second, an error found after submittal costs much more to correct than one found during checking, and the firm pays for it in redesign hours, schedule delays, and lost client confidence.
Third, engineering work affects public safety, and the engineer who seals the drawings is professionally responsible for them. Managers depend on engineers whose work requires few corrections.
Firms also win repeat work from clients largely because of their record of quality, so managers assign important tasks to engineers whose work has proven reliable.
A record of reliable work therefore matters more to career progress than speed, and it is built one request at a time. Just as a careful contractor checks the scope before submitting a price, a young engineer can check each request before committing to a date. The following practices show how to develop realistic engineering project estimates and protect work quality.
- Replace the automatic yes with a considered answer. When you get a task, take a few minutes to review the scope before you give a date. Include time for design, checking, and revisions. A few minutes of thought now can save several days later.
- Ask which task should move to make room. New work usually arrives when you are already busy, so ask your manager which task can wait. This helps your manager set priorities and gives you time to do the work well.
- Treat checking as part of the work. Before you submit anything, set aside time to check it yourself and, if possible, ask a colleague to review it. One deliverable that is right the first time builds more trust than two that come back with comments.
- Prioritize quality over quantity. Early in your career, doing tasks correctly matters more than doing many tasks. Managers remember a drawing set that needed a second round of comments long after they forget how fast it was done.
- Ask questions early. A question at the start of a task takes a few minutes, but a wrong guess found later can take days to fix. Managers expect young engineers to ask questions, and asking does not make you look less capable.
Remember that a career is a long race. An engineering career commonly spans four decades, and professional licensure alone typically requires about four years of qualifying experience after graduation. A reputation is built over that period from many small deliverables, so the goal in the first year is to establish a record of reliable work rather than to accept every request.
The contractor who bids $700,000 on a $1 million repair wins one contract and risks losing money, reputation, and future work. The young engineer faces the same choice with every request, and the advice of this essay is captured by its title. Never low-bid yourself, because a realistic promise that is kept earns more trust, and more responsibility, than an optimistic promise that is broken.
About the Author
Muhammad Ali Moriyani is a Researcher in the Albert School of Construction at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s William States Lee College of Engineering. He is a PhD Candidate in Infrastructure and Environmental Systems with a concentration in Construction Management at UNC Charlotte, and holds a Master’s degree in Construction Management from Mehran University of Engineering and Technology in Pakistan. He serves as a journal reviewer for the prestigious American Society of Civil Engineers journals, including the Journal of Management in Engineering and the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management. Outside of his research, Muhammad Ali loves to volunteer for community service activities such as The BIG Event, a community service initiative at Mehran University, since 2018.
