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How We Work is an interview and essay series by Contrary dedicated to surfacing insights about important parts of the economy that have gone unnoticed or under-explored by the startup ecosystem. It profiles the people who power the modern world and the tools, systems, and processes they interact with every day.

Fishing is among the most time-honored professions in the world, its roots stretching deep into human history. Today, over 3 billion people globally rely on either wild caught or farmed seafood as a significant part of their diet.

Commercial fishing, as distinct from subsistence fishing, began to emerge in the medieval period, particularly in regions like Europe where fish like herring and cod became highly sought after. Though fish and other seafood had long been consumed in coastal and riverine areas in Europe and globally, demand grew in rapidly growing urban areas. During the late Middle Ages, advancements in fishing gear—including improved nets and fishing lines—and enhanced preservation methods, such as salting, helped catalyze the growth of commercial fishing operations.

From the icy waters of the North Atlantic to the warm currents of the Gulf of Mexico, commercial fishermen in the United States brave the elements, navigating treacherous seas, unpredictable weather, and long hours in pursuit of their catch. Their work is physically demanding, mentally taxing, and fraught with risk. The fatality rate for commercial fishermen is over 40 times the national average.

Over the last few decades, the fishing industry has undergone a significant transformation driven by technological advancements, changing market dynamics, and an increased awareness of sustainability concerns. Enhanced sonar and GPS systems have made it easier to  locate fish schools, while improvements in boat design and equipment have allowed for more efficient harvesting. At the same time, globalization and changing consumer appetites have opened up new markets, shifting demands and influencing the species most lucrative to catch. 

One of America’s most productive fisheries, Bristol Bay in Alaska, consistently produces the largest sockeye salmon harvests in the world. Every summer, millions of wild sockeye salmon return to the rivers of the bay to spawn, supporting both commercial and subsistence fishing in the area. It is also one of the world’s most sustainable fisheries, with local fishery managers successfully ensuring enough salmon successfully spawn to support the next season’s harvest.

To understand the job of commercial fishermen and their place within the broader fishing industry, we spoke to Corey Arnold. Corey is a commercial fisherman who has been based in Alaska for almost three decades. Now largely fishing for sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay, Corey also spent time as a Bering Sea crab fisherman and appeared in the second season of Discovery’s Deadliest Catch. 

Corey is also a renowned and award-winning photographer whose work has been exhibited widely and has appeared in numerous publications. His photographs appear throughout this article.

1. Fishing is still an old-school “wild west”, and the work is hard labor.

Commercial fishing is divided between larger ships equipped with a substantial crew and corporate operators and smaller boats run by small businesses, many of which are family-owned. Corey, who works on a small set net salmon fishing boat, described the industry as one with little oversight or bureaucracy. Hours are long and the work can be physically demanding and monotonous.

Because fishing often occurs in specific seasons – with salmon fishing in Bristol Bay being concentrated in a two-month period with an even shorter peak time – it is often necessary to work long hours. Corey described one 36-hour stint during peak season where he and his crew only found an hour to sleep.

Most fishermen, whether working for independent operations or larger commercial vessels, are compensated through a "crew share" system rather than an hourly wage. Under this system, fishermen receive a percentage of the total value of the catch which ties their earnings directly to the success of the trip.

Corey says there are fewer people coming into the industry than there once were. While it was once common for college students from Seattle and elsewhere in the country to work seasonally in a cannery, this is no longer the case. There are also less people simply showing up and looking for work as a result of jobs advertised in online spaces like Facebook groups.

The fishing industry is highly globalized, and shifts in the world economy can have a profound effect. For example, the bulk of salmon caught in Bristol Bay fisheries prior to the 1980s was sold frozen to Japan, bolstered by huge demand in the Japanese market and a strong yen. However, as Japanese demand for US salmon declined, a new domestic market emerged. American consumers became more inclined to fresh, non-farmed salmon, which has generated demand for Bristol Bay’s product. This has driven technological adoption, such as the wider spread of refrigerated seawater systems to keep fish fresh for a discerning customer.

However, other exogenous factors have driven further “dramatic cycles” in the fishing industry. Increased salmon supply, driven by factors including a major sockeye harvest in Bristol Bay and increased production in Russia amid the war in Ukraine, has helped drive a glut of product to market. In conjunction with global economic headwinds, this has led to commercial fishermen receiving a third of the price for their product than they did a few short years ago.

3. Fisheries are becoming more focused on sustainability.

One key threat to local fishing industries is the risk of overfishing due to unsustainable management of fisheries. 

The population of northern Atlantic cod, once among the world’s most important fish thanks to its wide consumption in Europe and North America, collapsed to 1% of historic levels in the early 1990s due to overfishing. This fishery collapse led to the end of the Canadian cod industry, with tens of thousands of job losses. A significant factor was the technological development of fishing trawlers, which resulted in unsustainably large yields. It is expected that the cod population will recover to sustainable levels by 2030, thanks to the use of quotas and moratoriums. 

In 2022, Bristol Bay saw the largest salmon run in over a century of records. Of  76 million fish that headed upstream, 58 million were caught. Corey believes the sustainable management of local fisheries, which adhere very successfully to the principle of "maximum sustainable yield", is an effective counterexample to the common understanding of commercial overfishing.

Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fishing is particularly focused on sustainability. Fishermen and fishery managers in Alaska have developed a sophisticated understanding of how much of the salmon population in a given season can be caught and how much should be allowed to spawn successfully. They focus on maintaining a healthy, robust population each year.

This careful population management also relies on fish tracking and counting methods, including both sonar counters and people physically counting the number of salmon which head up the river to spawn. The fishermen of Bristol Bay also strictly adhere to fishing seasons, which are carefully planned to coincide with the salmon life cycle.

4. The use of technology varies significantly within the industry.

Technological adoption in commercial fishing varies by fishery, Corey said. In Bristol Bay, which is fished by thousands of smaller, family-owned boats, the use of technology is rudimentary and restricted mostly to simple tools like hydraulic rollers to operate set nets. Because salmon fishing largely takes place in known locations where the fish return to spawn, there is less need for sophisticated equipment.

However, in deep-sea commercial fishing vessels, advanced sonar systems, GPS tracking, and automated net and line handling systems are commonly used. Corey describes the extensive computer, camera, and sonar setups used by captains and crew of larger fishing trawlers, where locating schools of fish is a key part of the process.

Sonar tech is not foolproof. Corey cites the example of Bering Sea crab, which often don’t show up reliably on sonar systems, making identifying their population numbers less precise and prone to error.

Introduce yourself and tell us how you got into commercial fishing.

When I was a little kid, my dad was really into sport fishing. We grew up in Southern California. He had a little boat and would take me offshore ever since I was wearing diapers. All just for fun, with a rod and reel. I got really hooked on it as my main pastime. I was a fisherman for Halloween almost every year, and I’d bring fish and sharks for show-and-tell at school. It became an identity for me. I was the fisherman, you know?

My dad and I started going to Alaska doing fishing trips for fun in the summers. That's when I discovered this giant commercial fishing fleet that's all over Alaska. I started to hear, “Oh, you make pretty good money fishing.” Eventually I went off to college in Flagstaff, Arizona, and that summer a buddy and I decided to drive to Alaska and look for commercial fishing jobs. We didn't really know how to do it or how to get a job, but I was savvy with boats from back in Southern California.

We flew up to Homer, Alaska and started walking the docks. That's just kind of how people said you had to do it. You just show up and you walk the docks and you talk to people at the docks and ask for jobs.

It turned out we went to a place during the wrong time of year, and it wasn't the right fleet. So we were asking all these Russian fishermen for jobs. There was a huge Russian fishing fleet in Homer, and they only hired Russian family. So there's no way that would work.

Anyway, I put my name on a bulletin board in a bathroom and I got a call that night and this person said they were flying to Bristol Bay, Alaska to fish salmon in the morning. They had lost their deckhand at the last minute. I met with them that night and the next morning I was on a flight to Bristol Bay.

That’s how it all started. That was a set net camp fishing for sockeye salmon, and it was a really rustic experience. The grandmother of the operation flew me in a little tiny plane and we landed on a dirt runway on the tundra, in the middle of nowhere, hardly anyone else around. I lived for like a month and a half out there. We lived in these shacks, and we fished in little aluminum boats offshore, delivering our fish to a vessel called a tender boat.

So all your training was essentially on the job, learning from people who had been doing it a while?

Yeah. These set net operations are often family-run, and that's the only kind of fishing they do throughout the year. While you can make a lot of money — and some people make a full living off during this type of fishing — there's also a lot of families that do it for just a little bit of income. It’s an Alaskan lifestyle thing.

So I got in with this family that had been doing it for a while. But then by tapping into the bigger boat fisheries, I eventually started crabbing and working with all these other fisheries in Alaska.

Is there a big difference between the kinds of fishing that is done in large commercial vessels versus smaller operations?

So there's the biggest boats. Those are factory trawlers. Those will have a crew of anywhere from like 30 to a hundred people who are processing fish on the boat. They’ll have a crew on deck, and those boats are working year round. You're working like two months on, two months off all year. Those boats have a big corporate kind of feel — lower paid, factory worker type labor. That's wildly different than the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, where it's 2,000 small boats, each one its own little family business or small business operation, with crews of two to five people per boat.

Then there’s crabbing, which is a 100 to 120 foot boat with a crew of six or seven which is fishing for crab or cod and some other stuff, but is also independent and maybe family-owned too. It's not a big company owning it. There’s different attitudes between the fisheries. The crabbing fleet all kind of think of themselves as the toughest, doing the most dangerous work.

Totally, the Deadliest Catch thing. [Crab fishermen] look at the pollack fishing boats as the easiest jobs. They’re catching tons of fish, they’re making tons of money, but it’s not quite as dangerous. They get to sleep while the net's in the water, and it’s not as physical.

So it's a job that crabbers maybe want to retire to, or they have pooh-poohed because it's not a tough enough fishery.

You’ve spent time crabbing. Is it accurate that it’s the most difficult work?

Yeah. I crabbed for seven years, and I worked for the same boat all the way through. It was a Norwegian-owned family boat. It was definitely the hardest, the scariest.

It depends on your captain. Our captain was just a grinder. We’d get very little sleep, because if you’re sleeping you’re not making money. You know, are you the type of person that wants to be on a boat that makes a little less money and you actually get a good night's sleep, or do you want to be on a boat that makes a lot of money and you barely sleep? That’s the question.

I noticed that many people who describe themselves as commercial fishermen in Alaska only work seasonally, and actually do something else throughout the year. Is that normal, or are there people who do it all year round?

There are definitely a lot of people that are fishing year round.

So, Bristol Bay where I fish now — it’s a very short season and there’s a lot of boats. It's the biggest sockeye salmon fishery in the world. Like I said, there's almost 2,000 boats or pretty close to that. Your commitment up there can be as little as six weeks. A lot of people do just that, and then they have real jobs the rest of the year. And some people come up and will work just a month — they'll take their vacation time just to go fish that month.

But a lot of the other fisheries with the bigger boats… to pay the bills, they gotta work year round. So you'll have captains rotating to keep the boat fishing all year as much as possible.

This is a basic question, but are there specific seasons for the different kinds of fish you’ll be catching?

Salmon is one of the biggest fisheries in Alaska, and that’s very much a summertime thing. In Bristol Bay, you're catching the fish as they're going up the river to spawn, so it's only June and July when you can catch them. Right after that, there's other rivers in different parts of Alaska where you can catch. That season's peak is like early August. So there's only a four month period for the most part that there's salmon running in all of Alaska — different times in different places.

Then you've got like crabbing, which is very much a winter thing. You've got several different types of king crab. Golden king crab they can fish all year round, though there’s only a handful of boats with the permits to do that. Then you've got red king crab, which happens in October and November. Opilio crab is January through April.

So everything’s divided up. For crab, it’s when the meat in the shell is fullest. Crabs molt and get a bigger shell, but it takes a while for their muscle and their meat to fill it up.

Talk me through a day in the life of a commercial fisherman when you're out on the boat.

Let me give you a day in the life of a salmon set netter, which is what I primarily do right now. Here's a day at the very peak of the season, which might be a two-week period when it's the busiest.

I wake up in the little abandoned cannery that we live in, eat breakfast real quick, put on our rain gear and gloves and everything, take snacks, and plan to be out for maybe 10 hours or so. We walk to our little 23-foot skiff, and it’s usually three of us in the boat. We jump in and pull out through these low-tide mud canyons that go out into the bay, and we'll set nets out on the mud.

Then the tide starts coming in and the fish start hitting, and we'll start picking through the nets and filling up our boat with fish. During the peak we're filling our boat with maybe 5,000 pounds at a time and delivering every two and a half to three hours. Then we're coming back to our nets, filling up again, and delivering it.

If it's the most happening days of the season, we might fish for eight or nine hours, then go in and eat. By the time you get to sleep, you might get two hours of sleep. Then you repeat the process twice a day. Maybe you get a couple of two-and-a-half hour sleeps in a day, if you're lucky. We had one 36-hour stint this season where we got maybe an hour snooze.

You definitely start to go cuckoo. I'm trying not to do that, for our brain health. But when you’re catching the majority of your fish for the whole season in a 10-day period, it's pretty hard to sleep — because for every hour you’re asleep, you’re missing thousands of pounds of fish and thousands of dollars.

When you take the fish in, where are you taking them?

We take them to tender boats that are anchored offshore in front of where we fish. And we put the fish in brailer bags, which are mesh bags with handles. They weigh about 800 pounds each when they're full. There's a crane on the boat that cranes it off and puts it in their giant tank. A tender might hold 100,000 or 200,000 pounds of salmon.

That boat will travel two or three hours back to the main little town, called Naknek, that has a whole bunch of fish processing plants. There's a big vacuum pump that sucks the fish out of the tenders up onto the dock and it goes right into the plant in giant holding tanks.

From there, everything goes onto a conveyor belt and then hits the filet lines. It used to be that a lot of salmon was canned, but that market has mostly died. Fresh or frozen filets is pretty much the main market in Bristol Bay.

There's other companies that do head and gut — it's called H&G — and then they freeze the headed and gutted salmon. Those are often sold cheaper and they get reprocessed.

Is there any technology — hardware or software — that you’re using in your job?

In my Bristol Bay fisheries, we don't. It's a fairly minimalist setup. We just use hydraulic rollers to move our nets, things like that. One thing I'm starting to see at fishing trade shows is that they’re toying around with electric outboard motors. Very curious if that's ever gonna be possible, because those things are pretty big and heavy. It’s a weight issue when it comes to small boats.

I know that with the crabbing fleet and all the offshore fleets the use of technology is pretty insane. You look at a captain's chair for a polar trawler and it's just a wall of screens wrapping around them and another set of screens, and it's radars and multiple sonars that are shooting out, and there's deep water cameras that are filming the fish going into the net and there's sensors everywhere going off at different times. So sonar and camera technology is essential in a lot of fisheries.

You’ve been doing this a while. Has anything changed about the job over the time you’ve been doing it?

There's been a ton of changes, because there's much more focus on quality.

The market has changed, too. The heyday of Bristol Bay was in the '80s when we sold most of our fish to Japan. The yen was very strong back then. You might be getting $2.50 a pound back then. This year we only got 60 cents a pound and it's decades later. So those guys were getting really rich back then. But it's a fast and furious fishery. It's hard to catch a lot of fish while keeping the quality up. So there have been changes to help that. There's been a big movement towards refrigerated seawater (RSW) systems, which keep the fish much fresher. Everything is bled now, where it wasn’t always the case.

The market shifted from canned fish and selling to the Japanese to the domestic market. When the Japanese market started to die, there was a big push to get Americans eating salmon. And they did once farmed salmon hit the shelves and they got used to eating it as a normal seafood.

Then, as people learned that farmed salmon is not so good for you and it's not so good for the environment for a multitude of reasons, they also realized that what we catch in Bristol Bay is pretty much one of the most sustainable, successful fisheries in the world. We've had, in the last decade, three of the largest returns of salmon in history. And that's over 120 years of records.

What are you doing in Bristol Bay that makes it sustainable, in your view?

A lot of it is just the science-based approach. In Alaska, the fishermen respect the fisheries managers. It doesn't work like that in a lot of places, like in Europe. It's a little easier in Alaska because in Europe, for example, the North Sea and all the waters offshore are all divided up, with all these countries fighting for the same fish that are swimming through all these different countries' waters. Alaska is so vast that a lot of the fish are staying in the same area.

In Bristol Bay, it's different from, say, tuna fishing. When you're in the open ocean, if you're trying to guess how many tuna are in the sea, how do you do that? Those fish are just all over. They're swimming deep. They're traveling huge distances. How do you possibly measure how many are out there?

With salmon, every three to five years they're going back to the river to spawn. We've got sonar and sonar counters in all the rivers. There are people physically there with little clickers watching fish go across, counting how many fish are going up to spawn. And the managers are opening and closing us on a daily basis depending on how many fish they're getting up the river. So they always need to guarantee that they got enough fish up the river to spawn and have a similar return. If there's not enough fish coming back, they'll just shut us down and we won't be able to fish until they get enough up the river and they feel comfortable, then they'll open us back up.

Just last year we had the largest run in history. The fishermen caught maybe three quarters of all the fish that returned to the bay. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but there was something like 79 million fish that came back, and I think the catch was over 50 million. You can catch that much of the biomass and there's still plenty of fish spawning to be able to have a productive return years later.

A really odd fact is that if we let all those fish go up the river instead, and we don't catch them, then they will unleash so many eggs that when they all hatch it sucks up all the oxygen and the food and then there's mass die-offs. There's an equilibrium there. After a hundred years of paying attention to this, managers know how many fish you want to head upstream. There’s a base amount you want in, but there’s also a ceiling.

Is there any sort of process, technological or otherwise, you use to track where to fish and how to fish? It sounds like with salmon you are catching them while they’re going upstream. But what about other fish?

In Bering Sea crabbing, for example, there’s traditional grounds where crab all live. (For whatever reason, like the currents or the topography of the sea floor.) They all have their own little territories and they migrate around, but there's still like a main area traditionally that's been discovered by the fishermen.

Every year [the Alaska Department of Fish and Game] releases the quota numbers that the fleet is allowed to catch based on how many crabs they think are out there. They do that by doing a trawl survey, where they take the traditional grounds for the red king crab and every certain number of miles they drop the net, drag it for 10 minutes on the bottom, pull it up and count the crab. It’s very primitive the way they do it. It's not that accurate because the crab travel in these very dense schools sometimes. They’re averaging the whole Bering Sea, but they might have missed a lot of the big balls of crab.

It's not as exact of a science. It's a little more of a guessing game. They did a survey once and said there wasn’t going to be that much, but the fishermen got out there and they’re like, “There’s crab everywhere”.

Figuring out a way to properly measure those crabs with sonar or sending a drone down there and somehow counting them would be amazing. It’s the same for other fish. There's a lot of different ways to do it, like sonar, but using technology for counting fish in general and knowing for real how many fish are in the water in different regions would be just massive for keeping things sustainable.

Before you mentioned that the traditional way to find work was to walk the docks and ask people for jobs. Has that changed? How do fishermen find work now?

It was 28 years ago when I first did that, walking the docks. And back then, that's what everyone was doing. There was no social media and internet. It’s a lot different now. You just don't see people walking around asking for jobs very much anymore. There's a lot of people through Facebook groups connecting.

There’s still a lot of word of mouth. I meet people throughout the year and talk to them about it and they show interest and I'll bring a new person up. I often like to hire people that have done other fisheries before, but if I feel a lot of promise in someone new that has experience doing manual labor and whatnot, then I'll give them a shot.

I get hit up a lot because I have an online presence through my photography — people asking me for a job or how they can get a job, or if I can give them a job. A lot of people wanna do it for the adventure or they think it's like a cool thing. They want to try it once and say that they did it, you know. I want to fish with people that love it and want to do it as a lifestyle. I don't want people that just want to come and dip their toes in it and then bail out.

How a commercial fisherman in Alaska does his job.

Commercial Fishermen: Harvesting the Seas

Fixed income is the world's largest asset class, but the industry runs on infrastructure far behind the state of the art.


I witnessed this first hand growing up, as my father was a bond portfolio manager. Even a kid at “bring your child to work day” could wonder why stocks were bought in a few clicks online, while bonds were purchased through an opaque and expensive negotiation between traders. And that's not to mention the numerous times my dad dealt with sneaky terms slipped into covenants, unnecessary slippage on trades, and data availability problems plaguing the industry.


Despite a disjointed and archaic set of systems that currently trade fixed income, the need for digital platforms is stronger than ever: in 2011, just 10% of investment-grade corporate bond volume was traded electronically, while today over 40% is.*


Skyrocketing demand for a product paired with infrastructure that grows increasingly ancient with every passing day is a recipe for revolution. This is why we we're so excited to back the Moment team.


Moment has built modern APIs enabling financial firms to deliver a complete fixed income solution to their clients — including automated best execution across every source of liquidity, comprehensive reference and market data, and custom fixed income strategies with automated portfolio construction and management.

They have begun rolling out the Moment platform to over 220 broker-dealer clients with their first client, Apex Fintech Solutions — the global leader in clearing and custody for fintechs, representing over $120 billion in assets under custody. Apex powers award-winning brokerages and investing platforms such as Public and Titan, in total covering more than 24 million investors across the globe.


But most important to us is the Moment team. We first met them years ago as undergrads at Harvard. Being quite impressed by their clarity of mind and ambition from the start, we were delighted when they finally decided to start a company, and quickly moved to invest.


Today, we're announcing that Moment has raised over $20M in funding, including a Seed round led by Contrary and a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Fixed income is what makes the world go round — for companies, governments big and small, and individuals taking on loans — so we're honored to play a small role in building better markets and data products for all.

* https://www.ft.com/content/d07b8753-566d-4cad-98bc-4290e2b92ae5

Investing in Moment

How We Work is an interview and essay series by Contrary dedicated to surfacing insights about important parts of the economy that have gone unnoticed or under-explored by the startup ecosystem. It profiles the people who power the modern world and the tools, systems, and processes they interact with every day.

Beneath the bustling streets and skyscrapers of modern urban landscapes lies a hidden world of complex engineering. Tunnels crisscross beneath today’s cities and beyond, facilitating the flow of water, gas, and sewage; data and telecommunications; public transport and freight. The job of building these underground pathways and ensuring they remain strong and stable long into the future belongs to tunnel engineers.

The concept of tunneling is almost as old as civilization itself, tracing back to the mines, aqueducts, and underground passageways of the ancient world from Mesopotamia and China to Egypt and Rome. Early tunnel builders, lacking the advantages of modern machinery and computational modeling, relied on simple tools, ingenious planning, and sheer force of manpower to build their causeways beneath the earth. 

The Industrial Revolution changed the role of the tunnel engineer dramatically with the advent of railroads, subways, and – later – automobiles. No longer were tunnels merely used to conduct the flow of water, extract resources, or bury the dead; now they had to accommodate the transport of large, heavy machinery, often at high speeds. This necessitated a new breed of engineer, one with both an understanding of urban and civil engineering and a sophisticated knowledge of geology and soil science. 

As urban areas continue to grow, both horizontally and vertically, the demand for efficient transportation and utility systems grows too. New challenges have emerged as subterranean construction becomes ever more complex and our urban landscape grows denser and more populous, requiring tunnels to be more resilient than ever before. Moreover, in the digital age tunnels also serve as conduits for data, helping move information in much the same way as they do cars, subways, and utilities.

The tunneling industry has recently seen major attempts at disruption, with Elon Musk’s Boring Company seeking to establish a reliable method to create low-cost, efficient tunnels that can accommodate various transportation systems such as cars or transit. As we’ve written about in a previous Foundations & Frontiers essay on the Frontier of Boring, it is still the case that most tunnel construction occurs as part of enormous, complex public works projects.

To understand how tunnel engineers do their work in more detail, we spoke with Theodora Vovou. Theodora is a senior tunnel engineer at Hatch, a New York-based consultancy. Theodora, who trained in Greece and the US, has worked in the industry both designing tunnels and managing major infrastructure projects for many years and brings a wealth of experience to bear in illuminating the way that tunnel engineering works today.

1. Tunnel design is a complex discipline that requires a deep understanding of engineering and geology.

Tunnel engineering is a complex field, primarily due to the varying and often unpredictable geological conditions encountered during projects. Unlike structures such as bridges or buildings, tunnels more deeply penetrate Earth’s surface, meaning engineers have to account for a multitude of geological variables including soil types, rock formations, water tables, and seismic activity.

For example, certain soil types are prone to quick settlement, which could lead to tunnel collapse if not properly managed. Similarly, areas with high water tables require specialized waterproofing techniques to prevent tunnels from flooding. Additionally, in seismically active regions, the tunnel must be designed to withstand the forces generated by earthquakes, adding another layer of complexity.

This also makes tunnel engineering a difficult discipline to either teach or learn. Given it touches on both civil engineering and geology, there are only some schools and courses that focus on it. To make matters worse, open jobs in tunnel engineering are scarce and often require many years of experience, further limiting the number of people who can work  in tunnel engineering. According to Theodora, many candidates with the requisite skills to become tunnel engineers often move to other engineering roles in different industries or stay in academia because of the job market.

As a result, tunnel engineers are relatively scarce and often geographically dispersed, which can create challenges in team coordination. Theodora describes working at a consultancy where the tunnel engineers were located all over the US because it was implausible to have them all in one office.

2. Software solutions used in tunnel construction are niche and often expensive.

Theodora described a wide suite of software products used by tunnel engineers to do their work, including everything from generalist platforms like AutoCAD to specialist software from providers like Rocscience and Bentley. Rocscience provides a wide suite of software for civil, mining, and geotechnical engineering, whereas Bentley focuses on infrastructure engineering. 

Theodora specifically referenced Rocscience’s RS2 and RS3, which are used for modeling soil, rock, groundwater, and ground support in 2D and 3D respectively, and Plaxis, a geotechnical software solution that also offers finite element modeling, including the analysis of tunnels, dams, and foundations.

This software is often very expensive. For example, many of Rocscience’s software offerings are offered as a one-time license purchase, with RS3 priced at $13,795 per seat. This creates a situation where smaller tunneling projects often do not budget for much pricier 3D modeling solutions, despite the increased complexity and planning demands of the average modern project.

Moreover, this specialized software often requires years of training and hands-on experience, and still requires engineers who are using it to exercise a lot of judgment. As Theodora put it, existing software solutions will “generally not tell you” if its output is correct or likely to cause a problem. It still requires the expertise of the engineer to evaluate if, for example, a tunnel being designed is likely to function properly or collapse.

Theodora also said that many tunnel engineers – who tend to be older – prefer manual drawing processes and can be reticent to follow technological trends, but that this is changing with time.

3. The tunneling industry deals with problems of information transfer and access.

The number one pain point in tunnel engineering, Theodora says, is politics. Projects can be delayed or halted due to funding issues or changing priorities from the client, many of whom are governments or municipalities. This uncertainty often translates into a significant amount of paperwork and administrative tasks, diverting attention from the core design work.

Theodora said has been involved in projects that were paused and later resumed by a different company. These interruptions pose challenges in maintaining project continuity and can result in the loss of valuable expertise and data. Engineers may move on to other projects or even retire, and the new team might not have access to the tacit knowledge acquired during the initial phases of the project.

This issue is compounded by the difficulty of getting the right information in the first place. Many tunnels – like subways, for example – are built in heavily congested urban areas, which often contain extensive pre-existing underground infrastructure like power, water pipes, and sewage lines. Often, knowledge about what exactly is underneath any given patch of urban land is contained in disparate and unreliable sources. Theodora describes being supplied information from clients in the form of decades-old hand-drawn documents, which may not be accurate within the expected tolerances of a modern engineering project.

Source: Washington State Dept of Transportation 

Let’s start by introducing yourself and how you got into becoming a tunnel engineer.

My name is Thedora or Dorina. I'm Greek. I was born there, I studied there and then I continued my studies in the US — and I'm still here. I studied mining engineering, and initially I thought I wanted to go towards the oil and gas industry, but I really liked tunneling because we had a lot of courses related to that.

So I wanted to mix my studies with civil engineering to cover what was missing in terms of a technical background. So I did a masters degree specifically in tunneling. That was again in Greece, and then I came to the US and started civil engineering. It was geotechnical and earthquake [engineering], basically.

And then I found my first job, which was in tunneling. So I've been in this industry since 2016. I design tunnels, and do project management for large infrastructure projects in the water and transit sectors. So basically anything underground, be it a subway, station, water tunnel — you name it. Nothing above grade!

Talk a little about the education side. Is tunneling a specific discipline in civil engineering? If you want to become a tunnel engineer, is it a specific track that you go through in your degree or courses?

It kind of depends where you study, because there aren't many schools that offer this expertise.

You need to know a lot about geology and how the ground behaves. This is what most people lack knowledge of: how the rock interacts when you excavate it and when you want to build in it. There are many courses related to rock mechanics and rock behavior. It touches on civil engineering and also geology. It's not very easy to find a relevant course or graduate program for that.

In the US there are some schools that focus on it. Like the Colorado School of Mines, which offers a lot of laboratory work. But it requires a lot of hands-on experience. When I studied, the professors used to organize a lot of field trips. They’d get very passionate about it — “You have to go out and see the mountains, and you have to touch them!”

But it’s important to get that experience, because the geology in one spot might differ from the geology just ten meters away. All underground projects are different. It's not something that you can copy paste — like a building, where you do it once and you can be very confident that you will be successful again.

You might have done dozens of tunneling projects, but your next one fails because you weren't careful enough to figure out exactly what the ground conditions were.

Let’s talk about building tunnels. Start with the basics: what are the different reasons a tunnel gets built?

Well, it might be for a subway. It might be a road tunnel. For trains, for cars, for water. A lot of sewer tunnels are being built. It’s not only the tunnels themselves — it's also the shafts that are part of underground construction. Many tunnels are connected to shafts.

You might also have an underground facility, like parking, or a part of a building that goes underground. We don’t usually do that kind of work, unless it's a very large development that has something critical where they would need input from a tunneling person. If it’s just a simple building which features an underground part, the usual developers can do that.

What are the considerations you need to take into account when building a tunnel?

Usually, these are public projects, and very big ones. So you need to secure the funding first. This usually takes months or years. You can never know — you might be working on a project, and then it might get paused and start again after 10 years.

We get the direction from the client. Let’s say there’s a subway — the client might tell you that they need a new line that will connect downtown to the airport. As a designer, you figure out how you will do that. I would start with the alignment, to figure out how you would start the excavation, because if it's in a congested urban area you need to make sure you get all the permits and there is enough space to bring all the equipment.

Usually underground you follow an existing street. You can’t really go underneath buildings or wherever you want. If there is a street, you can go underneath it and follow its alignment. If you need to turn, then you need to get some sort of permit. Sometimes the client will tell you how deep you can go or how shallow you can go. Deeper is easier. If it's a shallow tunnel, you have to figure out what existing utilities are buried under the street and whether there are buildings you need to avoid.

Sometimes you may need to add some measures to protect the existing buildings, or to relocate utilities. For example, if there’s a water line, you might need to move it a few meters to the left or right depending on how close it comes to the tunnel.

Are you usually building in urban areas like underneath cities, or do you also build in more remote, less congested areas?

Usually all the subways are in very congested areas. The water tunnels can be easier, because you might be underneath a river or somewhere else where you don’t have to deal with buildings.

The constraints are where the tunnel approaches the surface, because you need to have a portion that is kind of an open excavation, because at some point the tunnel comes up and meets the grade elevation. If there is an existing train line, it will connect to that line. This is where it gets complicated.

On the shallow tunnel problem: is there a centralized database or some other way where you can view existing utilities, or assemble information about what might be below ground?

Usually the client provides us that information. If there's a recent project in that area, and they have created boreholes, that would give you an insight too. But it's not like you can just Google and find it.

Sometimes this information is very old, and you might get drawings and blueprints from 50 or 100 years ago. In that case, you're often not exactly sure the pipe is exactly where the document says it is or a few feet away. They’ll often do some local excavations, or they do some surveying, and then you kind of map everything. Nowadays, we do everything in 3D. So you just put everything in the model, and then you know where things are.

Does that information go anywhere afterward?

It’s not public information. But if there’s another project in the area in the future, they’d probably be able to get it.

On the subject of your 3D renders: what are the primary set of tools you use — be it software or hardware?

This industry is kind of afraid to adapt to the latest technological advances, I would say, because many people are very old school and they prefer to do things by hand. I don't know why. It’s also a field that requires a lot of experience. Most of the people working in this field are over 60 years old. If you tell them we're doing everything in 3D now, they don't really like it.

But projects are so demanding nowadays that you can’t really rely on drawings and CAD. If something changes, you need to manually change all these drawings, which is a headache. When I started in 2016, we were working on a proposal for a project, and we had thousands of drawings to deliver. We were working in 2D then, and every day something was changing, and then you have to change all of these drawings. Then at some point, you will inevitably miss something because you remember, “Oh yeah, this changed and it’s now one meter bigger.” It’s a mess.

Another time we won a project and it was a requirement to do everything in BIM (building information modeling). So we were using Revit and all the disciplines were working together. You had the civil engineers, the architects, as well as electrical, mechanical and structural people – everyone had their own model, but they were all linked together. You could see if there is a problem or if something clashed. The contractor also has access, so they can see what is going on and if something is not constructible, or if there is a safety issue.

So, something like that can be really helpful with identifying issues.

So these tools are out there, but there's a little bit of slowness in takeup — is that right?

That's right, at least for the drawing part. There’s also software that we use for the analysis to design the tunnel.

There’s many different types of software for these purposes. There could be one for geotechnical purposes to control the ground and check the stresses and the forces on the structure and then another for the structural engineering part. So if you have an underground station, you would need to design the columns, the beams, and everything else in it. So there is a bunch of different software that apply in these cases.

Many of these software products are from Bentley. For tunnels, we usually prefer the Rocscience platform. They have many different types of software, working in both 2D and 3D.

It starts with the very basics of rock mechanics. You can get information about the properties of the rock, and then you can do settlements, you can design a dam, you can design underground tunnels. Then they have a program called RS2, which is for designing tunnels in 2D, and then there is also an RS3 which is in 3D. Then there is Plaxis — that is also 2D and 3D and was recently bought by Bentley.

And these are all different platforms that you have to learn. There is no single solution here for all your tunneling needs?

No, it's specific software. Usually, you need to work on them for years to understand them.

The problem is that you need to be aware of the results that you will get, because the software will generally not tell you if it's correct or if it's wrong. For example, you might want to design a tunnel, and it tells you it has a settlement of 10 centimeters. Then you have to use your critical thinking to determine if that’s fine or if it’s going to be a problem. The software won’t tell you if it’s going to collapse, for example.

That's why you need to have a lot of experience to figure out what exactly you're doing, because it needs a lot of input. Unfortunately, it needs many years of training and use.

So, you’re involved in the design and surveying of a tunnel. Once that’s out of your hands, are you much involved in the construction process, when there are workers building and excavating the tunnel?

I work in a consulting firm, and when you take on the design, you also provide support during construction. So you get to visit the site and to see what exactly they're doing. Depending on the contract, sometimes the contractor needs to follow exactly the designers work — so you need to be there to make sure that they're doing what they’re supposed to do.

Are there any problems that come up at this time that you need to address?

Yes, sometimes there's water that you haven't accounted for, and you need to think on the spot and provide a solution. Sometimes it's a lot of water, so you might need to demolish and rebuild.

Other times you might not have evaluated the ground properly. If you have made a mistakelike, the boring machine might get stuck. If it gets stuck, you can't really take it out, and you lose millions of dollars.

In the time you have spent in the industry, have you observed any changes?

In terms of design, nothing is different. In terms of software: everyone wants 3D product now. Whether or not you do depends on the size of the project. If it’s a large project, they will provide the budget for it. If it’s a smaller local project — like an excavation for a shaft — then maybe not.

Software is expensive. For example, we were using software that can map alignment in a tunnel, and it gives you a 3D view of it. It’s very specific software and very expensive — they give you a license for only one person. But you don’t really need to train 50 people to do it. On the other hand, something like Revit or AutoCAD — which we use to produce drawings — is usually provided by companies for free.

Have you observed any hardware changes with regard to drilling tunnels, and do you take that into account? Anything that might change the economics of tunnel construction?

They make larger machines now. Every year these companies make some presentations, and they show you what they have fixed or improved. Now they have very large diameter machines, and they can also make them operate at very deep and sharp angles, whereas previously you could only go horizontally — maybe at a maximum of 4 or 5% grade.

Usually, these are used in remote areas, if you're excavating a mountain or something like that. If you don't have any restrictions, then these are very beneficial. You wouldn’t use it for a train tunnel, for example, which has a maximum slope which is quite specific. But if it’s for water or a diversion tunnel or something like that, you can use these machines.

The other advances I see are in materials being improved to reduce the carbon footprint. So we see moves to replace concrete and steel with newer materials, like carbon fiber and polymers. That’s where the industry is heading.

Are there any major pain points in your job beyond what you’ve already described?

A lot of politics, especially when it involves public projects. It’s always uncertain if you start working on a project whether it's going to be stopped because of funding issues or because the client changes their mind. Unfortunately, instead of doing design, you do a lot of paperwork and bureaucratic, administrative stuff.

It's also not very easy to find people. There aren't many people who do this work. And we're usually scattered around the world. In my previous company, we had people all over the US. We were not in the same office. We had people in California, we had people in Boston, we had people in New York. It’s rare you can find 50 people and have them all in one office.

In this field, you will either see entry-level roles or ones for someone who has 20+ years of experience, there is usually nothing in between. Many people choose to stay in academia. You also lose a large percentage of people who have the technical background and who might join as a tunnel person, but then go and do something else when there are no tunnel jobs and end up pursuing a different path.

In cases where a job does stop and start as you described — sometimes for years — how do you keep track of all the information? Where does that information live in the meantime, regarding all the things in progress when the project was paused?

The thing is that it may start again and it may be a different company that gets to work on it. Usually, we'll stop when it's in the design phase or if it's in a preliminary design phase. At that point, it’s usually about 30% of the work which is not very detailed and then subject to complete change.

I'll give you an example. I'm working on a project now that I used to work with my previous company when I joined in 2016.

So we did the 30%, and then the client decided that they didn't want to proceed, which was fine. And then it started again now, and my current company got the job. They got all the information from a previous company, basically. You get all the deliverables and whatever data they had before. You're not going to get anything people were working on that they didn't release. And then you continue based on that. 

Whatever is needed — like the utilities or information about existing buildings and previous work, you’ll get either from the client or some other public entity.

From our conversation with Theodora, there are several plausible opportunities for founders to explore within tunnel engineering specifically, as well as other large infrastructure and engineering projects:

Verticalized design and planning software in infrastructure engineering is dominated by long-standing firms and is heavily task-specific. Rocscience, for example, lists 20 different software applications on its website, each for specifically defined tasks. There could be an opportunity for a modern, collaborative platform that is more suited for a new generation of engineers. Intuitive, easy-to-learn software could also help bridge the generational gap in this field.

As Theodora described it, necessary information for subterranean construction is often outdated and unreliable. There could be scope for a new kind of information repository for major urban infrastructure in the US and beyond, drawing upon publicly available information in conjunction with sensor and survey data, predictive models, or some other solution. Additionally, information continuity in large, complex public infrastructure projects is often severely lacking. Piecing together these disparate information sources could create immense value for underground construction in particular and public works in general. 

One of the common issues we’ve surfaced across the interviews we’ve conducted so far is that of knowledge transfer in the real-world economy. The full range of skills needed for cross-disciplinary trades such as tunnel engineering, commercial piloting, or lineworking are rarely taught in schools and are often acquired on the job. With many of these professions facing an aging workforce, the problem of knowledge loss when older generations retire becomes increasingly pressing. A tech-enabled way to more easily capture, retain, and transfer that professional knowledge would likely create a great deal of value. 

An interview with a tunnel engineer about how she does her job.

Tunnel Engineers: Building Connections

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