This paper presents an overview of the evolution in structural and geotechnical design practice over the past half a decade or so in relation to how uncertainties are dealt with. For the general reader who is encountering reliability-based design (RBD) for the first time, this would provide a valuable historical perspective of our present status and important outstanding issues that remain to be resolved. The key elements of RBD are briefly discussed and the availability of statistics to provide empirical support for the development of simplified RBD equations is highlighted. Several important implementation issues are presented with reference to an EPRI study for reliability-based design of transmission line structure foundations. Reliability-based design, simplified or otherwise, provides a more consistent means of managing uncertainties, but it is by no means a perfect solution. Engineering judgment still is indispensable in many aspects of geotechnical engineering – reliability analysis merely removes the need for guesswork on how uncertainties affect performance and is comparable to the use of elasto-plastic theory to remove the guesswork on how loads induce stresses and deformations