Any other AEC sysadmins here?
Posted by Ok-Assumption-1270@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 35 comments
Just joined an AEC (engineering) firm and wow..this isn’t your usual “Office Suite and printers” setup. I’m now wrangling render farms, beastly GPUs, dealing with all the Autodesk issues and workstations that I haven’t dealt with my entire career.
It’s way more work, but also kinda awesome.
Any other AEC admins out there? Do you actually enjoy the chaos too?
SimpleSysadmin@reddit
In a previous job. Yes. Trick is to get friendly with the power users and be on their side. Most will be technical enough to do early troubleshooting and understanding when an issue is because of software
Embarrassed-Ear8228@reddit
It used to be like that, but these days I’ve noticed most new hires are completely computer illiterate. Even the BIM manager has no clue when it comes to Autodesk installs, licensing, or anything beyond clicking “next.” As for writing AutoCAD LISP scripts? Forget it. The era of true power users is over — now it’s mostly fresh-out-of-school millennials asking how come we don’t have Macs.
ChadTheLizardKing@reddit
The CAD manager are now retired and have been replaced with BIM managers... the days of AutoLISP are gone. It is a completely different skill-set.
The biggest headache is licensing and patch management these days. At least the SCCM scripts work is all I can say...
Flawless_Nirvana@reddit
"yes of course we still need revit 2020"
smolquestion@reddit
no millennial is fresh out of school :D They are way more up to date than most of the older folks i've met. Gen Z on the other hand is in real trouble.... i encountered way more of them not understanding a folder structure and mindlessly accepting error messages without reading than im comfortable to admint.
Embarrassed-Ear8228@reddit
yes, I meant Zoomers.
Neither-Cup564@reddit
It’s the iPad generation. They didn’t need to spend hours understanding how anything worked, playing with scripts and editing config files to do the most basic things on a PC. Everything’s now one click.
melophat@reddit
Bro, the very youngest millennials are almost 30 now, so pretty much any "fresh-out-of-school" new hires are probably solidly Gen Z.
Embarrassed-Ear8228@reddit
sorry, I meant Zoomers.
AlexisFR@reddit
🤮Weren't they supposed to be unemployable?
mini4x@reddit
Also AEC, luckily we are big enough we have a separate support teams for the engineering group, we support the VDi infrastructure, but not really the apps themselves. But yes it can be a lot!
Rawme9@reddit
Yes, but we don't use render farms we just use beefy computers for those who need them. The tech is nice because they are generally willing to invest so they also get nicer things
hasthisusernamegone@reddit
Buest guess, this is Architecture, Engineering and Construction - for those who were wondering.
Not Associated Equipment Company, America East Conference, Airborne Environmental Consultants, Agència Espacial de Catalunya, or the Australian Electoral Commission
Juiceyboxed@reddit
Been working for an AEC company for the last couple years - hell of a lot better than an MSP thats for sure
I find the most success by ensuring heavy involvment with everyones day to day (business processes). Getting a grasp of the processes of all the engineers or field guys will really help finding methods of creating efficiencies using technology. Love the enviornment im in.
AdhesiveTeflon1@reddit
Yes, not specifically as a sysadmin but generically as IT admin for 9 years for a SMB AEC company (only IT guy here w/consultants l). I came from a T1 helldesk so it's been an interesting learning experience to manage all the vendors, payments, acquisitions, and office moves. I love it though.
smolquestion@reddit
I had a job at an AEC firm and i was the one trying to find/ onboard a sysadmin. It took a long time to find someone who was open and enthusiastic enough to understand our needs. Most of the people who we interviewed really wanted to shoehorn us into a standard office it setup and really failed to understand that we have way more requirements than you standard office worker...
remote, onsite, offsite work, and management. A lot of different and shared equipment, like printers, plotters, 3d-printers, render-nodes, simulation nodes... Figuring out the hw requirements and resources for all the people doing different jobs.... Managing documentation and data in itself is a huge undertaking! I was in neck deep, and i loved it! It was soo challenging, but as other said most of the people are pretty technical and they understand their equipment and know what they want.
Its so refreshing to see someone who is excited about the complexity an engineering firm brings :)
tmikes83@reddit
Depends on the firm. Solo sysadmin at an engineering firm for local petrochemical plants with about 50 users in office. I support everything from AD, 365, servers and desktops, Autocad etc. Most of it is simple upkeep, getting new hires setup, and "I can't log in in the conference room" type stuff.
Also key is more than half of our users are getting older (or even coming back from retirement) so the comments about engineers being computer illiterate are spot on. They know how to do their special programs but if there's a windows update and something looks different they freak out. Fun.
Rigenz@reddit
It gets better!! When I first took over at my current AEC firm it was chaos. You will eventually learn all the different softwares and find the people who know what the hell they actually do. Never a dull moment when you have to troubleshoot some small software an engineer made by himself a decade ago to do one specific kind of water modeling.
Wonder_Weenis@reddit
It's even more fun when upper management thinks they run the equivalent of an insurance agency, and doesn't seem to understand how, if their engineers can work faster, their business moves faster.
TheErrorIsNoError@reddit
I'd say the biggest issue we struggle with is working on data that isn't local. If you have smaller offices that don't have a server in them, working in cadd can be a struggle. A lot of hte programs Bentley puts out are very chatty, and no matter how much bandwidth you throw at them the latency between a client and the data source if it's a traditional smb share can kill productivity
Vendor specific solutions like ProjectWise from bentley help with this, and vendor agnostic solutions such as panzura or even going to VDI can be solutions too but it's a constant struggle
Embarrassed-Ear8228@reddit
I love it — it’s definitely more fun, and way better than working at some financial firm where everyone’s obsessed with “meeting their numbers.” These AEC users put in a ton of overtime, and with the workforce now so spread out — remote staff, ad-hoc offices popping up everywhere — you just have to let go of on-prem systems and move everything to the cloud.
As for AutoCAD and Revit, you really don’t need a high-end GPU. Any decent mid-range card will do just fine, unless you’re doing serious 3D rendering. Do you guys use render farms, or are you running Autodesk’s cloud rendering?
The workstation challenge never ends. Management keeps pushing for a “laptop-only” setup, but the power users hate the bulk of those heavy, Revit-ready machines. So I got them lighter 14″ ZBooks — and now they complain they’re not powerful enough for big Revit models. can't win with these people. It’s a never-ending battle.
aCLTeng@reddit
We just bought our second rendering desktop machine with an RTX ADA 6000 in it. Lol, $8k graphics cards are definitely faster than the RTX 1000's we get in our laptops. Takes a render job from an hour down to about ten minutes.
Ok-Assumption-1270@reddit (OP)
We use them for 3dsMax and Unity for visual designing, and these guys are absolute power-hungry beasts. Meanwhile, the structural engineers mostly run CPU-heavy analysis, not much help from the GPU there. Thankfully, our VDIs are doing the heavy lifting to keep everyone happy (and the machines from melting).
WoTpro@reddit
AEC admin here (almost 15 years) can be chaotic at times, but love the variability of the challenges, also nice to actually have more technical users.
Acceptable-Wind-7332@reddit
Admin at an AEC firm here
I've been here for \~17 years now and don't mind it at all. I think perhaps the most refreshing thing here is that most of the users are engineers, designers and scientists which means they are pretty well educated. While there are a few dumb questions that pop up on our help desk, it feels like there's a lot less here than I have had at other firms I've worked at.
And yeah, I've got render farms, Autodesk and Bentley licensing and more. We have project sites all over the place too. We've got lots of issues but deal with them as we come.
I really do enjoy it.
Awkward-Candle-4977@reddit
Maybe you can use remote desktop.
Then only remote desktop serves need beefy workstation gpu. And only need to ensure patches and apps works on the remote desktop servers
TheJesusGuy@reddit
Yes, but our most beastly GPU is an A1000 8GB.
Chaucer85@reddit
Work in the industry, got promoted out of sysadmin this year. It's a special kind of hell but you get opportunities for all kinds of crazy stuff. Architects and engineers can get crazy with their hardware demands.
goingslowfast@reddit
Used to be.
Had a blast, got to try some neat things. Cut my teeth on Azure VDI in that space. First time I’d done shared hosts with massive GPU power.
It worked great. We could give employees thin and light notebooks, but when they needed GPU compute it was there in spades.
All the machines we bought had 5G WWAN cards and we had portable Starlink units for onsite work that was offgrid.
hostname_killah@reddit
Wasn't a sysadmin, but did work for one of these places in a support role. More sophisticated issues as you've highlighted, but the benefit is that end users are way more cluey with the technical side of things, so you'll find you aren't bothered with as much brain numbing "issues".
Ok-Assumption-1270@reddit (OP)
I noticed this as well. the users are easy to work with and quite tech-savvy, even the older ones, which is definitely an advantage.
hostname_killah@reddit
The flip is that when something goes wrong, and they understand it, they're a lot sharper with criticism lol. Depends on the person, some get that shit just breaks sometimes, sometimes they have incredibly high expectations. Engineers are a unique type of end user lol.
Spicy-Blue-Whale@reddit
I've brushed up against it while doing IT for mining companies and engineering consultancies. The budgets these guys have are eye watering. Then add in a company with sites all over Western Australia. It's fun.
jhstroebel87@reddit
AEC IT Director here, but also sysadmin… have the advantage of coming from Architecture, and love the chaos. Happy to connect if you want to send a DM
merkat106@reddit
Admin at an AEC firm here
Our chaos is due to our firm buying and integrating smaller firms so its dealing with multiple M365 tenants, licensing for AutoDesk, ESRI amongst others, cybersecurity and infrastructure (VMs, Active Directories, cloud).
So very complicated and yet we do have separation of duties.