Kyle Chatman

Life/Culture at Degenkolb:

I think the culture at Degenkolb can be characterized by the respect and trust placed in its engineers. They take care to hire good people and then treat them well and give them a lot of flexibility in their work. For examples: I can access any of the company’s or projects’ financial information and see how we’re doing, I can show up and leave whenever I like within reason, and even as en entry-level designer I have some influence on the type of projects I take.

Engineers are rarely pressured to rush or cut corners. It allows us to approach problems with more creativity and thought. The result is a better final product that the owner and we can feel good about.

I became interested in Degenkolb because I knew they were involved with academia and I knew of its reputation as one of the elite earthquake engineering firms. I also liked that it was large enough to enjoy the benefits of scale but small enough to be personal. After interviewing and talking to employees I was excited by the interesting work they were doing and pleased by how friendly and relaxed the engineers were.

Your Career:

Degenkolb is very generous about sending its employees to conferences, workshops, seminars, or anything else you feel would make you a better engineer. Degenkolb has paid my membership for four different professional organizations and every seminar I’ve shown interest in. We also have one or two seminars in-house every month, which is great.

Your Passions:

The best thing about being a structural engineer is the final product. You can see your decisions and creativity alive and large in steel and concrete, massive and real. Further, you have the satisfaction of knowing that your work has made that chunk of the world that much safer.

On the Job:

Two weeks into the job I was in the attic of a hundred-year-old cathedral brainstorming solutions with a Senior Principal