Pablo Dominguez, Geomaticist

In this episode of the WGI Unleashed Podcast, hosts Dan and Katie head down to our Miami office to sit down with Pablo Dominguez, a geomaticist in our Geospatial group!

If you ask Pablo what he'd be doing if he weren't surveying, he'll tell you archeology without hesitating. He's stood at the Colosseum and at the pyramids in Giza, and the History Channel runs on a loop at his house, much to his wife's dismay. Spend an hour with him, and you'll start to notice that Land Surveying and Archeology are two jobs that are closer than they sound.

Salt Life: Growing Up in Miami

Pablo was born in Guatemala and moved to Miami at five. He draws a distinction most Floridians will recognize right away. Inland kids grow up on lakes and ponds. Miami kids grow up on boats and piers. Pablo is firmly the second kind.

He and his friends would ride from the inner city out toward Miami Beach, ducking into hotel pools along the way until security ran them off. Then they'd keep going to the bridges and jump in. Swim, climb out, ride back, repeat.

He remembers a version of the neighborhood that's mostly gone now. You always knew where everybody was, because every bike on the block was dumped in the same front yard....

Second-Generation Surveyor

The career came from his father, a licensed surveyor with his own firm. Pablo went out to the field with him as a kid and held the other end of the chain. As Pablo tells it, his dad had just started a business, needed free labor, and there he was.

Everything got written down by hand back then, page after page of field books. Then Pablo started picking up work with bigger firms and saw transits wired to data collectors, recording every measurement as the crew took it. That was the hook. He enrolled at Miami Dade College without much of a plan, but work kept getting in the way. Run the crew. Here's a promotion. Here's a raise. Eventually he let the degree go and took weekend courses in surveying and AutoCAD instead.

A Year of Phone Calls

WGI found him through Alvin Santiago in our Orlando office, a friend and former coworker who wouldn't stop talking about the place. Alvin put him in touch with Roberto Montecon here in Miami. WGI made an offer. Pablo said no...

They kept calling. For a year. What got him in the end wasn't the pitch; it was the conversations around it, the ones where people asked about his kids and how his family was doing. He finally said yes. Almost three years later, he's still here.

The Work: Drones, Crews, and Whatever Comes Up

Pablo doesn't know what he'll be working on when he walks into the office each day. Geospatial is his home base. He also helps run WGI's UAV program out of Miami with Alvin, alongside Javaro Hampton, Carlos Sotolongo, and Eric Pryor. Drone work comes in from all over Florida, and the team sorts it by who's closest and who's the right fit for the site.

The rest of his week goes to people. He oversees the field and office technicians, trains and mentors both, and works alongside Eduardo Asavache, who recently got licensed under Roberto's mentorship. His peers like to tell him he's a jack of many trades and a master of nothing. Pablo repeats the first half and lets the second half go....

His favorite WGI project so far took him to Puerto Rico, collecting data for project manager Randy Ortega. He'd never been to the island and pictured it flat. It is not flat... The terrain turned the flights into a real problem to solve, which is exactly why bringing back clean data felt so good.

Dan and Pablo first met at WGI's management training out in Austin. What stuck with Pablo is that you never ask someone to do a job you wouldn't do yourself. Treat a crew well, and they'll stay the extra hour to finish the job.

The Closest Thing to Archeology

Back to the archeology, because it shows up in the work more than you'd expect.

At one of the firms he worked for, crews would pull the old field books for an area before heading back out to a site. One of them stopped Pablo cold. A crew chief had gone out to survey acres of land and never finished, because the locals ran him off the property. He wrote it down, closed the book, and it sat there for decades waiting for someone to read it.

The everyday version is quieter. Pablo takes a reference book out to a site, hunts for a monument someone set fifty years ago, and digs until he finds it. Proving that old work still holds is about as close to archeology as a Tuesday gets.

Life Outside the Office

Pablo has been married 20 years and has four kids, ages 28, 26, 15, and 13. His daughter shares his birthday. All four still live at home, which he pins on the housing market and doesn't seem too bothered by. Being a devout family man, having everyone close is the ideal circumstance.

He had two miniature dachshunds for 16 years and hasn't been ready to replace them, though he thinks a rescue dog is getting close. In the meantime, a stray kitten wandered onto his porch three years ago and never left. She's a Dominguez now. A second stray recently had a kitten in his backyard, and Pablo is looking for a home for her, so consider this the announcement.

Tune In

Pablo brought the energy to this one. He also beat both hosts at Two Truths and a Lie, which almost never happens, and closed things out with an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression that Katie hasn't stopped talking about since.

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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