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🌉 The secrets of building the super border bridge

🌉 The secrets of building the super border bridge

Plus: Tackling impostor syndrome as a leader, and how to live well, and more updates

Ata Tanık
January 02, 2024

Happy New Year! We hope you had an amazing set of holidays whatever and however you celebrated! The new year can always be a fun time to reset, look back, and look ahead to what’s next.

With international trade and transportation showing no signs of slowing down, vital border regions must adapt to handle the continuous flow. Enter the Gordie Howe International Bridge: a remarkable infrastructure project connecting Detroit, USA, to Windsor, Canada, spanning the Detroit River. The bridge is scheduled for completion in 2024, read more in today’s Must Read.

👀 In today’s newsletter:

🏗️ Building one of the largest bridges in North America
🙇🏽‍♀️ Facing Impostor Syndrome
⏲️ Making the most of our short lives
🔥💵 Hot Job – Group Head of Enterprise and Application Architecture Manchester, UK

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📚 MUST READ

🌉 Super Bridge Across the USA/Canada Border? You Bet!

International trade and transportation don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon, so hot border areas need to be able to handle that. Enter a stunning new bridge: the Gordie Howe International Bridge! It will connect the US city of Detroit, cross the Detroit River, and go into Windsor, Ontario in Canada, and is scheduled to be completed in 2024.

It’s currently under construction, but making great progress, as it just reached its full height of 220 meters/722 feet. Let’s look at the bridge by the numbers:

💰 Estimated $4.4 billion cost
🌁 2.5 km crossing, making it the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America
🗼 It will have two A-shaped towers, six lanes for automotive traffic, and a 12-foot-wide bicycle/walking path.
🛂 There will be a new Canadian Port of Entry built on a 130-acre site, which will be the largest Canadian port on the border.
🏭 The US Port of Entry will be built on a 167-acre site, making it one of the largest border facilities in North America.

If you’re wondering who Gordie Howe is, he’s a Canadian hockey player who played for a long time for the Detroit Red Wings, so the Detroit-Canadian connection makes sense.

It takes a lot of people to put together a huge project like this on both sides of the border. Over 150 engineers are working on the project. While the project started construction in 2018, planning started back in 2000!

I hope they make sure to double-check their units of measurement, as Canada is on the metric system and the US is on the Imperial system, so that can get tricky.

🏆 CAREER TIPS

Struggle with impostor syndrome as a leader? The solution might be right in front of you…

💵 Many engineers want to be promoted and have the opportunity to lead others. It's an opportunity to grow skills, increase impact, and let's face it - make more money.

But for many, the prospect of having responsibility for others is also one that is full of fear. They will need to own up to the mistakes of people on their teams. They know others will be looking to them for guidance and direction.

A little discomfort can be a good thing. It means you care. Getting out of our comfort zone is how we grow anyway.

We often refer to this type of fear as impostor syndrome. This is a real thing - we can get into situations of responsibility and influence and think we don't belong there. We feel we don't know all the answers or haven't proved ourselves. Some of that may be true, but it doesn't matter. You wouldn't be there if you didn't belong. You won't have all the answers, and that's okay. You can learn.

🧑🏼‍✈️ The key to getting over your own fears and the feeling of impostor syndrome is to focus on serving others. Foster the feeling of "stewardship" to help others grow rather than just growing your own career.

As a leader, you succeed when your team succeeds. You'll grow more yourself, and you'll accelerate the growth of others. And that is a good feeling.

🔔THIS WEEK’S HOTTEST JOBS

In this section you’ll find the latest jobs as featured on:

jobs.interestingengineering.com

	Senior Software Engineer - Full Stack at CoBank Greenwood Village, CO (US) - Hybrid remote $110,000 - $150,000 a year
	Senior Staff Blockchain Security Engineer at Coinbase Remote
	Senior Engineer at Alliance Inspection Management, LLC Farmington Hills, MI - Remote
	Senior Software Engineer at PNC Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology San Francisco, CA (US)

Engineer of the WEEK

1856 - 1915

Engineer - Inventor

Nikola Tesla, born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, Croatia (then part of the Austrian Empire), was a brilliant and enigmatic inventor, engineer, and futurist. He immigrated to the United States in the late 19th century and quickly gained recognition for his innovative work in electrical engineering. Tesla's contributions include the development of alternating current (AC) electrical systems, numerous inventions related to electricity and magnetism, and pioneering work in wireless communication. Despite his incredible accomplishments, he faced financial challenges and spent his later years in relative obscurity, but his legacy as one of history's greatest inventors endures, with his name associated with countless technological advancements and the Tesla electric car company bearing his name in the 21st century.

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"Productivity is a trap… Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7 am.’
Oliver Burkeman

TOOLS OF THE WEEK

DEWALT 20V Max Cordless Drill

$99.00

3 in 1 Charging Station

$19.93

K-Cup Pod Coffee Maker

$79.99

Arc Star Floating Speaker

$89.90

📚 BOOK RECOMMENDATION

⏳ Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Quantifying the length of our lives may be necessary to awaken us to live the life we truly desire. The average human lifespan is absurdly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society ― and that we could do things differently.