Time a simply supported beam from a written brief to a calculation you would put in front of a checker. Not a worked example with the numbers already tidy — a real one, with a UDL somebody has to build up from a slab thickness and a finishes allowance. Half an hour is about right. Some engineers are faster. Nobody is fast.
That half hour is worth taking apart before anybody claims to have removed it, because the four things it is spent on are not equally worth removing.
Where the thirty minutes go
Roughly seven minutes setting out. Reading the brief, scaling the span off the drawing, working out what the beam actually carries. Slab self-weight, finishes, partitions, the imposed load for the occupancy, the tributary width, the load off the beam framing into it. This is arithmetic, and it is arithmetic where a factor of two in the tributary width does not announce itself later.
Roughly eight minutes analysing. Reactions, shear force diagram, bending moment diagram. For one span with a UDL this is a formula you have known since your second year. For two spans with a point load off-centre it is twenty minutes and a sign convention you have to keep straight in your head the whole way through.
Roughly nine minutes designing. Effective depth, K, lever arm, area of steel required, choose bars, check the area provided, check minimum and maximum steel, shear, links, spacing, deflection by span-to-depth ratio with the tension reinforcement modification factor. Every one of these is a clause, and every one of them is a table lookup or a formula you have to fetch.
Roughly six minutes writing it up. Copying all of the above onto a calculation sheet in an order a checker can follow, with a heading, the code you used, and the assumptions you made along the way. Usually done last, usually done in a hurry, usually the part that gets queried.
Three of those four are transcription
Look at what the half hour is made of and the uncomfortable thing is how little of it is judgement. Building up a load is arithmetic. Running a stiffness matrix is arithmetic. Substituting into clause after clause is arithmetic against a lookup. Laying the result out on a sheet is typing.
The judgement is somewhere else entirely: deciding that the support is effectively pinned rather than fixed, deciding that the partition allowance is right for this building, deciding that a 0.94 utilisation in shear is acceptable here and would not be somewhere else. That is the work. It occupies maybe two of the thirty minutes, and it is the part that has your name against it.
So the twenty-eight minutes are the target, and the two are not.
What seconds actually means
You describe the beam in a sentence — span, what it carries, what sits at each end — or you photograph the sketch you drew on site. The load build-up, the analysis, the code checks and the write-up come back as one calculation, in the order you would have written it, with the arithmetic shown rather than hidden.
The honest version of the claim is narrower than the headline. The seconds are the machine's part. Reading the model we built before you accept it takes you another fifteen or twenty, and if you skip that you have not saved half an hour, you have simply moved the risk somewhere you cannot see it.
The other honest caveat: if the description is thin, we ask you a question instead of guessing, and answering it costs you time. A beam with an ambiguous support condition is not a fast beam. It should not be.
The half hour was never the value
Here is the part that surprised us. Engineers who get thirty minutes back rarely spend it on the next beam. They spend it trying the second option — the shallower section, the different grade, the layout the architect asked for and got a no on because there was no time to check it properly.
When a design costs half an hour, you do one and defend it. When it costs a minute, you do four and choose. That is a different quality of engineering, not just a faster one, and it is the actual argument for building any of this.
The arithmetic was never the profession. Checking it, and signing it, still is.