In this episode of the WGI Unleashed Podcast, hosts Dan and Katie are back in our Fort Lauderdale office to sit back down with David Gerber, Project Manager on our transportation team!
David is a two-time guest, a “two-peat” he happily likens to Steve Martin’s SNL record. Last time around, he got a little feedback for being too tight-lipped about his coworkers, so this time he came prepared to fix that, handing out shout-outs across thirteen years and five offices…
From Miami to Lakeland
David was born in Miami and lived there until he was about five, when Hurricane Andrew came through and cost his parents their jobs. The family moved north to Lakeland, the Central Florida town tucked between Tampa and Orlando, where he grew up. By his own account, the third-best restaurant in town back then was Publix.
He was a classic-rock kid who played the drums and, at a high school too small to have a band, tried to start a drum line of his own. His path toward engineering began somewhere less obvious: a pile of Legos on the living room floor. David says he was drawn to the field partly because he assumed it would involve as little writing as possible, a theory that every report, invoice, and email since has cheerfully disproven.
Two Business Cards
David headed to the University of Miami in 2005, but when the tuition math stopped working, he transferred across town to Florida International University and finished his degree while working in the school’s structures lab. His summers went to roadway construction, first on a bridge job down in the Keys, then on a turnpike widening up in Orlando.
Here’s the full-circle part. At his very first college career fair, David walked away with two business cards: one from a construction company, one from WGI. He went with the construction company. Years later, when that firm pulled out of Florida during the 2010 slowdown, he ran into Brett Fuller at a wedding and heard that Fuller’s company was interviewing for a position. David wasn’t sure about the role, but he thought, “Why not?”.
A full day of round-robin interviews with the entire West Palm Roadway group later, he finally cashed in that second business card.
The Work: Interchanges, Depositions, and Five Offices
David started as a project engineer back when WGI’s roadway team was small enough to count the PE’s on one hand. The jump to project manager came with a line he still quotes: “I will never pay you more to do less.” Get the design down cold, the thinking goes, and you earn the tracking, invoicing, staff-hour estimates, and resource planning that come with running projects. He compares it to learning guitar, where nobody masters it after one song. Design, he’s quick to add, is still his favorite part of the job.
Over thirteen years he’s worked out of five WGI offices, a run almost no one at the company can match. Right now he’s wrapping up a brand-new interchange up in Orlando, laying out ramps on ground where nothing exists yet. The project comes with heavy right-of-way work and eminent domain, and property owners entitled to a real appraisal, which means David has answered for his designs under deposition. Ask him what keeps him at WGI and the answer is simple. Dump out a bowl of alphabet soup and you can spell every engineering firm in the country, all chasing the same projects for the same clients. What’s different, he says, is the people.
Life Outside the Office
Off the clock, David is a self-described foodie who books the hard-to-get tables months in advance and plans trips around them. He married his wife, Kristen, in Jupiter this past December, then the two Floridians spent their honeymoon ice fishing over New Year’s in Kennebunk, Maine, huddled in a heated tent, drinking champagne, and photographing the bucket that passed for a restroom. Napa and Chicago are next on the list.
Home is a townhouse they share with Bruno, the world’s most outgoing miniature dachshund, and two gray cats, including a Nebelung named Charcoal who once relocated to Austin with him. A second doxy, Gus, is on the way.
As for hidden talents, David is ambidextrous, which he insists just means he’s equally bad with both hands. He also does a John Madden impression that only surfaces after four beers, and in 2018 he talked a group of West Palm interns into learning to juggle, on the theory that sharper hand-eye coordination makes for better drafting.
Tune In
For a guy who once got flagged for being too tight-lipped, David more than made up for it this time around…. His episode runs on career advice, road-trip stories, and shout-outs to just about everyone he’s worked with. Tune into this episode of WGI Unleashed on your favorite podcast platform and stay tuned for more conversations with the people, projects, and culture that define WGI!
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