For structural engineers, 2–15 years in
Be the engineer
everyone brings the hard problem to.
Not the one who runs the model. The one who sees the load path, knows which clause is lying, and can convince a room.
Analysis is cheap now. Judgement is the rare skill — it has only ever come from reps you had to be lucky to receive. The right project, the right supervisor, the right decade. I'm building the place you can get them on purpose.
Nobody gets enough reps anymore.
Judgement was never really taught, it was absorbed from the work and the people around you — from seeing enough of it. It was always a lottery. The right project, the right supervisor and the right few years. Get those and you came out the other side on a fast track to mastery.
Miss them? You’re ten years in with only five years of reps. It’s not your fault you spent two years on condition assessments in a slow market, or three years on a project where nobody has time to explain anything. The hours you would have spent working something out properly went to the program or fee.
You can’t practise a thing you don’t get to do.
You can already design a beam.
You can size it, reinforce it, check it and issue it. This is where you find out whether you understand it.
It's a gym, not a lecture theatre. Every unit is run as the same five moves, in the same order, on progressively less forgiving problems — and you come back to the same movements stronger each time.
The shape of every unit
- 01
Derive it from statics, so you never have to trust a formula you can’t rebuild.
No code, no software. Where does the equation come from, and what assumptions are sitting underneath it?
- 02
Feel the answer before you calculate it.
Sketch the bending moment diagram. Which of these three details is stiffer? Where does this crack? Thirty seconds, then you get told why.
- 03
Calculate it so a reviewer can follow every line.
By hand, spreadsheet or code — uploaded and graded on method and presentation, not just on whether the number came out right.
- 04
Explain it until the room stops arguing.
Three formats rotate: a sketch a detailer could build from, a paragraph a client could follow, a defence of your assumption to a reviewer who disagrees.
- 05
Judge it when the brief has a hole in it.
Scenarios with competing constraints and missing information. What do you do — and what do you tell the client you don’t know?
Five moves. Repeated every unit, on less forgiving problems each pass.
I've spent almost 15 years working on infrastructure. Most of that designing bridges. From mega projects like Sydney Gateway to small bridge condition assessments and design reviews. I got lucky. The right projects, the right people, complex structures early enough to learn on. Most engineers don't get that, and I don't think it should come down to luck.
To become an expert in something — heck, even to become proficient at something — you can't just do it once. You need to do it 50 times. How long does it take you to get 50 reps at anything? In engineering, it can take decades — and you don't find out which side of it you're on until you're ten years in. What if we were able to condense that feedback loop into a few years of deliberate practice instead?
This idea has been brewing for a while. Early in my career, I took a detour: leaving engineering to run a martial arts gym full time. I watched students nod along and ask intelligent questions while I demonstrated a technique and explained its relevance. Then I watched them fumble the same technique the first fifty times. It's one thing to intellectually understand something, but you also need to feel your shoulder turn over and protect your chin as you punch. You need the visceral understanding that can only be obtained through doing. Nobody in a gym believes you can explain a skill into somebody.
Capability is not explained into people.
It is drilled in.
With martial arts, the feedback is immediate. You can get good really quickly. But with engineering, the feedback takes decades. This is an attempt to tighten that feedback loop.
I'm building falsewrk the way you build a gym: reps on real, anonymised details rather than lectures, and somewhere to keep turning up. It's work. That's the whole product.
This subject is too important to be only my view of it. To support this, I'm assembling a panel of experienced practitioners across specialisations to help write and stress-test the material.
Stop running the numbers.
Start making the call.
The engineers everyone brings the hard problem to were not born that way. They got the reps.