What is an Assistant Public Works Officer?

An Assistant Public Works Officer (or APWO) is a billet in the Civil Engineer Corps of the US Navy. I’m at Public Works and I work with my customers to plan and execute construction to maintain, repair, or replace facilities on the base. While my job requires an engineering degree, my role here is mostly administrative and political. Either my customer or my team identifies a requirement and after we verify the necessity of the requirement, we plan who is going to do it, who is going to pay for it, and when it will get done. The administrative aspect is making sure my team does their work properly and then I attempt to properly prioritize and plan the projects. The political aspect is that there are many opportunities to ruffle feathers and generally annoy people (tell customers they have to pay for things, inform people their projects have been delayed, inform our engineers that the customer wants to change the design, again), I try to minimize the pain associated with that. Part of the fun with this process is that we deal with projects that range from $50 to $20 million, though typically in the $5,000 to $200,000 range. Ironically, the large projects are typically easier to do because the roles of everyone involved are more explicitly defined, there’s better support, and it has high enough visibility to leverage cooperation from people.

As this position covers all aspects of engineering, it has been interesting to increase my breadth and learn a lot of basics about concrete, asphalt, HVAC, and massive pumps. I definitely haven’t learned anymore than what the first few days of an “Intro to… “ class but it is interesting nonetheless. Also, the military aspect allows for interesting experiences. The night I started to write this interview I was on duty and received a phone call at about 2:00 AM in which I had to go down to the military police headquarters and revoke someone’s ID for drunk driving. What this jobs lacks in depth, it more than makes up in breadth.

What does your small business do?

ZQDesigns has flip-flopped between being a very small business (we’ve had three customers and only a handful of projects), doing consultation and design, to being a place where we hide money from our wives for use on our side projects. Frankly, it has not been very active and this is in part due to the fact that I live in Japan and my business partner lives in Idaho. Our intent is that when I move back to the states (next summer, anticipated), we will resume our business activities. I have a little over a year left in my commitment and we’re undecided of whether I’m going to stay in the Navy or going to return to civilian life.

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

For me, engineering has always been about seeing a problem and coming up with a solution. Growing up on a small farm and being the stereotypical lazy teenager, I would see issues and try and think of ways to make my life easier. As I would do some fairly mind numbing tasks, I would think about how this could be done better. My solutions ranged from fairly practical to complete fantasy. In retrospect, I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to apply my more practical ideas into reality nearly as much as I should have. But that desire to mull things over and try and come up with a better solution has stuck with me.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

Without a doubt, my hard hat and vest. Those things are like the keys to the kingdom. Other than classified spaces, a simple hard hat and vest over my uniform will get me anywhere, no questions asked. I really enjoy seeing behind the scenes at stores, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, bowling alleys, etc. It should be noted that my focus is on community support, the fun part of the base.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I wouldn’t say it is my favorite, but Outlook is my most used tool. I receive an average of 80 e-mails a day, send an average of 40, use the calendar so I don’t forget meetings, and have to-do items to make sure that I follow up on items. It crashes all the time, though, which is frustrating. For planning, we use a lot of excel spreadsheets. I detest working in excel.

With ZQ, I enjoy working in Eagle. For me, a board layout is just a puzzle that doesn’t have a single right solution. I’m somewhat iterative in my layouts, though. After I “finish” the first time, I notice a lot of areas for improvement. Depending on the importance of the board, I’ll either shrug my shoulders and say good enough, or I’ll practically restart with a better feel for what is necessary.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

At work, there is rarely a single issue that is difficult to fix, it’s the sheer number that need to be fixed in a single day is overwhelming. But the biggest one I can think of was when a heat exchanger went down in the HVAC of one of our enlisted quarters that house about 400 people. It went down shortly after the Sendai Earthquake and the manufacturer for the heat exchanger was in Sendai. Past tense. Unfortunately, most of Sendai is past tense. Anyway, the quarters were with insufficient A/C for the majority of the summer and we scrambled to come up with an interim fix while also fighting a PR battle as people were accusing us of shutting off the A/C for power conservation, another huge issue after the earthquake. These accusations were especially annoying as the amount of time and money being spent on the problem was very significant, and the interim solutions were actually more energy intensive than if we’d had the central HVAC working properly.

What is on your bookshelf?

At work, it’s the .20G, an instruction that tells me what type of money can be spent on different things. Money used to renovate a building is different than money used on equipment which is different from money used for demolition, etc. It also defines what is equipment, as well as the difference between repair and construction. I don’t know it as well as I should but it’s key for making sure I don’t go to jail.

With ZQ, it’s The C Programming Language by Kernigan and Ritchie. But I also have nearly every textbook I purchased for my undergraduate, which have also been very helpful, particularly my Java programming book.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

Honesty. This goes to the political part of my job. I’ve found that in my work, things go wrong, and they go wrong all the time. There’s just too much happening for that not to be the case. I’ve found that being honest with customers and my boss when something goes wrong tends to make things much more survivable. So, when it hits the fan, while it’s tempting to spend time blaming people, I try to figure out why, and then break the news as soon as possible.

What has been your favorite project?

As an APWO, I think it would be when we executed a several hundred thousand dollar contract to completely revamp the lights at our baseball/softball field. The contractor finished and did everything to specifications but then we realized that the contract specifications didn’t line up with the requirements from safety. So a couple of us went out there with a light meter, some walky talkies, and a bucket truck and wandered around the field tweaking the lights. Not my idea of fun for a Friday night, but it was nice to get out from behind the computer for a bit.

Personal electronic projects, I’d say the boot alarm. It was fairly unimpressive and took a long time due to varying levels of motivation, but to actually have it work when I was promoted after a last minute rush to complete it… that was fun.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

When I was seven, I got 2nd and 3rd degree electrical burns which gave me a rational, though extremely intense fear of electricity. Oddly enough, I’m still terrified of electricity.

When I was a construction management engineer, one of my contractors was digging in the main street of the base, installing underground communications lines. A backhoe operator lifted some steel plates out of the hole but didn’t calculate the load properly, causing the backhoe to tip into the hole. There was no injuries or even damage, but this happened right before rush hour, so at 5:00 PM, when everyone was leaving base, they got a great view of a tipped over backhoe on my project. I had to do so much paperwork for that accident, it’s ridiculous.

What are you currently working on?

As I mentioned above, the most difficult part of my job is that there are so many things. A few of the larger things: I am trying to get money for a couple million dollar turf project, I am trying to coordinate moving some customers in a building that is starting renovation in two weeks, we’re trying to get the galley ready for a big inspection that is coming up in a couple weeks, trying to figure out how to automate our metrics so that we’re not spending most of our time reporting what we should be doing instead of doing it, trying to get new gas pumps at our on-base gas station, trying to convert our current pizza restaurant to Pizza Hut, trying to bring our animal kennels up to standards, and I’ll stop there.

How did ZQDesigns come about?

ZQ was originally started in response to another small business starting. Sky Detective (now defunct) offered a friend and I a job, which we accepted. After we accepted, they changed their minds and said they wanted to treat us as independent consultants, to which we responded by starting a company. We did some work for them, made some money, learned a lot, and finally got outsourced to China. After that, we had a couple of small other projects with other companies. We also started ECE101.com, hoping to create a repository of easy-to-understand experience and tips as well as earn some revenue via ads. I found that’s not really a passion or specialty of mine and it has remained largely untouched recently.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

My partner and I have been discussing different ideas, basically pondering whether we should move away from doing work for other people’s projects and instead design our own ideas and attempt to market them. That certainly has its appeal due to the feeling of ownership for our own projects, but is definitely a risk, as the cost for design and production could be significant. This is highly dependent on whether or not I stay Navy and if I can convince my wife to move back to Idaho.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Everything is do more with less. We’re seeing budget cuts of almost 50% and expected to increase our services to our customers. I know this is not just in my work but all around the world. While I feel that this squeezing can lead to some fantastic innovations, I also think it snuffs out other innovations due to the risks involved.