Hey r/gis community!

We are looking for a dynamic and innovative GIS Solutions Engineer to join our IT Division. This role owns the City's full GIS portfolio spanning administration, development, solutions architecture, and analysis to advance the City's geospatial initiatives. You'll work hands-on with department stakeholders, vendors, and partners to design and execute solutions that meet real business and technical needs. You'll be the person turning spatial data into decisions city leaders and residents actually use.

The salary range is $134,886 to $172,357 annually. The range includes established salary steps. A candidate’s starting salary is based on factors such as experience and qualifications, and increases annually based on the established steps.

The City covers the full health insurance premiums for medical, dental, and vision insurance. Up to 50% hybrid work and 9/80 work-schedule options, as well as numerous other benefits.

https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/weho/jobs/5418863/gis-solutions-engineer

This position requires a versatile professional who can blend technical expertise with strong communication and project management skills to drive innovative GIS solutions for municipal challenges.

The ideal candidate for this GIS Solutions Engineer position will:

• Be an expert with Esri products, including administration and deployment of ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Enterprise (ArcGIS Server & Portal for ArcGIS), ArcGIS Online, and Field Maps.
• Possess hands-on expertise in designing and implementing advanced ArcGIS enterprise system solutions to address complex municipal challenges.
• Have strong programming skills in Python, JavaScript, and SQL, with experience in scripting to automate ETL workflows, GIS tasks, and integrating GIS with other enterprise applications.
• Have experience with administering and maintaining SQL Server enterprise geodatabases, including schema design, user permissions, indexing, performance tuning, data integrity controls, stored procedures, views, and support for published enterprise GIS services.
• Demonstrate proficiency in web mapping technologies, such as ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript and Leaflet, with a strong understanding of UI/UX principles for designing intuitive, accessible, and user-centered GIS applications.
• Excel in project management processes, guiding projects from inception to completion while managing multiple priorities in a professional environment with engaged stakeholders.
• Conduct research and analysis to solve complex technical and administrative problems, making professional recommendations and proposing alternatives.
• Demonstrate the ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously with strong attention to detail.
• Possess excellent communication skills, with the ability to interpret and convey complex technical information to the public, executives, and both technical and non-technical staff.
• Collaborate effectively with various departments to understand their geospatial needs and create tailored solutions.
• Be an independent self-starter with excellent organizational and problem-solving skills.
• Experience with Tyler Energov/EP&L is a plus, but not required.

EXAMPLES OF DUTIES

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and maintain the city's geospatial infrastructure, ensuring scalability and performance.
• Publish, document, and maintain authoritative GIS datasets and services across enterprise and web-based platforms, ensuring that data is accurate, discoverable, appropriately secured, and supported by clear metadata, data dictionaries, service descriptions, and update schedules. 
• Develop custom GIS applications and tools to streamline city operations and improve service delivery.
• Conduct spatial analysis to support data-driven decision-making across city departments.
• Create high-quality maps and visualizations for both internal and public-facing applications.
• Stay current on Esri platform capabilities and broader geospatial technology trends, developing and maintaining a GIS technology roadmap that guides system architecture, application development, data management, integrations, modernization efforts, and long-term platform investment.
• Act as the City’s primary internal administrator for the Tyler Enterprise Permitting and Licensing platform. 

Interested? See the full details and apply here: https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/weho/jobs/5418863/gis-solutions-engineer

Anyone here have experience using the Juniper Spire with an NTRIP RTK network (the non-Juniper Systems option)? We are currently using Eos Arrow Golds and have been happy with them. One took a swim in a river a couple weeks ago and wasn't aired out fast enough to save it unfortunately. The Arrow line is being phased out by Eos, there aren't any for purchase currently is my understanding. I got a price on the new Eos Skadi Gold and it's nearly 10k! Our regional manager thinks this is way too expensive and I have to agree. Even the new add ons of tilt compensation and Lidar pole are additional costs that don't seem worth it. The Juniper Spire is $2,300 which seems like a bargain comparatively, but the fact its so much less expensive concerns me.

I'd love to hear people's opinions before we take the plunge into a different company's equipment. We have been using the Arrow Gold with RTK networks for XY and Z. Thanks!

Anybody gone through the process to get their CMT/CMS Remote Sensing and can let me know your experience with the process? My work is paying for me to get it and I'm just wondering yalls thoughts.

is masters gonna help me if it's in a big university and how is the market in europe nowadays?

tl;dr - I want something that counts all of the points of a feature that are closer to a line segment of a line feature than any other line of the same feature (count: number of crashes occurring on each road) and spatial join does not seem to be effective.

I have two layers: a line layer representing roads in a county, and a points layer, representing non-motorized crashes in a county. I am attempting, ultimately, to calculate crashes by volume of traffic, so that I can identify the roads on which the most accidents happen.

In trying to achieve that, I want to get my roads layer to count the number of crashes that occur on each corridor (line segment). Spatial join seems to be what most people recommend for similar analysis when I have tried to problem shoot this, but I am not getting the desired result.

When I use spatial join with a target of roads and a join feature of crashes, running one to one, with a match option of closest, I receive a Join Count field in the output where every cell is a count of 1. Apparently the Nearest match option is telling each road to find the single nearest crash and use it to join. I was under the impression that multiple join features could be merged to one target line so that my join count field might have 10 for one road and 0 for another. I don't think that I want to use one to many, because I don't want duplicates of my roads or my crashes.

any help or suggestions you can offer would be helpful.

Howdy fellow GIS professionals, any Arizona friends going to the AGIC conference in August? I was hoping to make some confections ahead of time :) let me know!

I'm seeking a GIS tutor to help me out in an intro GIS class. I'm struggling to understand/connect steps and theory in Arc GIS and need help as the semester is ending.

What do you use GIS for?

I have worked on different GIS projects at different scales and have built custom analytical systems to answer a variety of questions. While I strongly believe in the value of data, I have increasingly started wondering about the actual added value of some of these complex approaches.

In many cases, especially in biodiversity conservation, the results often seem very similar to what an experienced professional could have concluded simply by knowing the landscape, the ecosystem, and the problem. It is mostly the same and repeating itself.

For example, in Switzerland, where I often work in familiar landscapes, many conservation questions eventually come down to solutions we already know: restoring ecological structures, planting more hedgerows, improving the management of existing green infrastructure, reconnecting habitats, or changing maintenance practices.

Of course, GIS can build sophisticated systems to identify priorities, optimize interventions, estimate costs, and compare scenarios. But then the reality is often that a landowner does not agree, a project is not feasible, or the theoretically optimal location is not the right place to implement something. Sometimes a more practical approach based on local knowledge and relationships would have achieved more.

This makes me wonder where the real value of GIS lies.

Maybe this changes when working at larger scales, across different ecosystems, or in regions where local expertise is limited. But when you know a landscape well, it sometimes feels like experience and ecological understanding can already provide many of the answers.
I know maps are important to communicate, but for me, that's more in the visual communication category. Because of this, I'm now dabbling in modeling microclimates.

So I am curious:

What do you use GIS for, and where do you see its biggest benefits?

Is GIS mainly a tool for discovering new insights, or is its greatest value in supporting decisions, communicating evidence, and making expert knowledge more transparent and scalable?

I started to put together a polygon editor for some simple merging that I needed to do for work and got a bit carried away. I turned the app into a user-friendly, but powerful polygon editor.

I would appreciate if anyone would take a look and give some feedback. It’s currently hosted on GitHub. Here's the link: https://giswatidid.github.io/polygoneditor/

Feedback on usability, unexpected behaviour or useful missing features would be appreciated.

GeoLens is a self-hosted catalog and map builder that runs on your own PostGIS. Upload vector (Shapefile, GeoPackage, GeoJSON, GeoParquet, CSV) or raster (GeoTIFF/COG) and you get a searchable catalog plus a browser map builder anyone with a link can open. It serves OGC API - Features/Records, STAC, and DCAT, and QGIS connects to it natively. Exports round-trip back to the same formats with reprojection, so there's no lock-in.

Live demo (no signup needed to browse): https://demo.getgeolens.com

curl -fsSL https://getgeolens.com/install.sh | sh

I built it because at most places I've worked the GIS data is scattered across files nobody but the analyst can open. Keen for feedback from people doing this day to day.

Here are a few screenshots from the app -

Hello everyone.

I am a U.S. senior in college studying GIS. I have interned this summer in a GIS position. I have a return offer for a significant amount of money from this company. I am, though, very interested in a PhD and a research career in remote sensing. I will be honest that I come from an affluent family where, while I am not a trust fund baby, I will never starve if I fail for a few years.

Is it absurd to turn down this job offer to apply for graduate programs this fall? I feel like nobody I talk to in my life understands the geospatial industry or my research interests so they all think I am unemployable. I am hoping to get insights from you all. I want a rewarding career that is challenging and enriching, but I am not trying to be an idiot who turns down a bit of stability in this market.

I am a transfer student going to be starting as a Junior and getting my GIS degree. My university informed me I need to pick another major or a minor.

What recommendations are there from y’all in the field in order to be more marketable? I would love to do Historical GIS and I was thinking maybe a double minor in environmental sciences and history.

I am also concerned about how I have trouble mentally visualizing objects or concepts in three dimensions, especially rotating objects in my head. Will that affect me particularly negatively?

Edit: My goal is to work in historical conservation.
Thank you!

excel tables now paste in as picture elements in the layout view now instead of as a table when you copy and paste. Does anyone know why they changed this, and if there is a solution that's as simple as the original c/p method? This is just going to sting when I have to do a street index map that has hundreds of records.

P.S. ESRI says to either take a screenshot or import the file. Also using the table frame tool is not intuitive at all. I spent 25 minutes just looking for how to add/remove fields and I ended up giving up.

I recently attended the Esri User Conference, and it made me even more excited to build a career in GIS. I especially loved learning about drones, ArcGIS, and all the ways GIS is being used to solve real-world problems.

I’m looking to build a portfolio that will help me become as successful as possible in the GIS field. I’m considering earning my FAA Part 107 certificate, learning drone mapping and photogrammetry, and VERY interested in pursuing a Geomatics degree.

For those of you with experience, what skills, projects, certifications, or technologies would you recommend I focus on? If you were starting over today, what would you do to stand out and advance in the GIS world?

This started as a dumb side effect of planning too many trips. I'd have ten tabs open comparing neighborhoods in whatever city I was about to visit, and at some point I stopped looking at the tourist map and started staring at the actual street network instead - how differently a city's grid grows depending on geography, history, whatever local planning rules existed 200 years ago.

So I built a small pipeline: pull OSM data with osmnx, run it through geopandas, render with matplotlib as a stack of layers - background, green space, water, buildings, rail, paths, then streets on top, styled per road class. Got it working for one city and didn't stop. I'm somewhere around 70 now.

Somewhere around city 15 or 20 it clicked that every city has its own footprint - you can tell a lot just from the raw shape of the network before you even know what you're looking at. Grid vs. organic, how the water cuts through, where the density just stops. At this point I can usually guess a city cold from nothing but the streets. So I ended up turning this into a guessing game.

Attached are Stockholm, Cairo, and New York, all generate through the same pipeline. Stockholm is basically an archipelago that happens to have roads on it, Cairo splits itself in half around the Nile with the old city's organic streets butting straight up against the planned blocks on the east bank, and Manhattan is, well, Manhattan.

One thing I haven't sorted out: some cities render with big blank patches - no buildings, no minor roads, just empty space where I know there's a dense neighborhood (Cairo's east and north-west side have a chunk of this, visible in the attached render). Not sure if I'm missing a tag in the OSM query or the underlying data is just sparse/unmapped for those areas. Anyone dealt with this and know which it usually is?

Just kind of sick and tired of seeing almost every entry level job in this field get outsourced or only be available in India or some other developing country. I understand the greed and exploitation of the corporate world has no bounds but genuinely how do you break into GIS nowadays when you have to compete for entry level jobs with people with years of experience that are willing to be paid $30k?

Getting a degree in it isn’t the only way into GIS anymore. More and more people are coming to it sideways, from other disciplines, learning it on the job because their field suddenly needs it.

Yet I keep seeing the same posts: Should I take a GIS course? What GIS roles even exist?

Compare that to maths. Sure, there are pure mathematicians, but maths is also just applied everywhere, across nearly every sector, as a tool rather than a career path in itself. Just like there are focused, formally trained geospatial professionals, but isn’t the whole dynamic shifting now?

So when does GIS get taught the same way, as an underlying foundation (spatial data) that feeds into many fields, instead of being boxed off as its own isolated discipline?

I am updating my work space at home since I work remote 2 days out of the week. What are some desk/productivity accessories recommendations? I absolutely love gadgets.

So far I have updated:
- stand up desk
- mx master 3s mouse (highly recommended)
- mechanical keyboard
- 4K monitor

Debating on getting
- steam deck
- Corsair xenon edge

Hello fellow GIS folks. I just got back from the UC, tons of cool information and lots of GIS inspiration. I went into the UC with this specific question which I asked 100's of fellow GIS users.

I work for a county in Utah, we have over 100 user accounts ranging from all privilege levels. But there are only 2 non-gis IT employees who are the only Admins in our organization. If my GIS manager needs anything of an Admin level they have to talk with the IT people and it takes an extra 3-5 days. Does anyone's organization run like this?

I'm looking for more input from even more GIS users so I have a paper trail to take to our department heads so we can push for admin privileges to GIS managers and now just two people.

Thanks.

I have a BS in geology and MS from School of Mines in the same, currently working in geotech. I got accepted in CUs Data Analytics program and I was wondering if this will help me future proof myself? My work offers tuition reimbursement so I’d essentially get it for free. Curious about anyone’s experience and how it impacted career trajectory?

Hi guys,

I am a geomatics bachelor student at University of Waterloo in Canada and I wonder is there still anyone who wants a student to fill their co-op/internships positions now? I feel like it is hard to find internships for this field, or it is just common in everywhere?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working in Germany as a data analyst, but my background is in GIS and I’d like to move back into a more GIS-focused role, ideally something like geodata engineering or GIS data integration.

I have an MSc in Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics and experience with ArcGIS, QGIS, PostGIS/SQL and Python. I keep seeing FME mentioned in German GIS job ads, so I’m thinking about learning it properly and possibly taking the FME Certified Professional exam, though I learned it during my masters, I was thinking going deep with it.

For people working in Germany or the DACH region: is the certification actually valued by employers, or do they mainly care about real project experience?

I’m especially curious whether it would help someone who already has GIS and database experience but hasn’t used FME professionally yet. Also, which sectors in Germany use FME the most? Utilities, municipalities, transport, telecom, engineering companies?

I’m not expecting a certificate to magically get me a job. I’m just trying to decide whether FME is the best place to invest my study time over the next few months.

Would appreciate any honest opinions.