Owning my own design service business has opened my eyes even wider than I thought they could be. Back in my heyday of being a "CAD drafter" I took pride in that my projects were done on time, with as few billable hours possible. It was a contest for a few of us old schoolers to see how few hours it would take us to complete a full set of construction drawings. Every now and then, we would have to work in someone else's drawing and 99.9% of the time it would be EXACTLY how I would have drawn it.
It seems that a shift happened in the last several years. Good drafting practices are the exception now. More often, it's up to engineers to "lower" themselves to drafter status and the end result is (usually) shoddy work. Why do Pipeworks when you can just draw it by hand, take 10x longer to do it, and have the data be "dumb", when you can just bill the client for the length of time it takes? Sorry if you don't know what my reference to Pipeworks means, it's a Land Desktop application to draw storm or sanitary pipes in a plan & profile sheet.
That's just one of many examples of what happens when people simply don't care about the work. Pride in having your drawing correct and to standard is gone. CEO's and Presidents have a misconception that a $10/hr employee will either care about his job or produce good work just to avoid paying a more experienced drafter $20/hr+. What they fail to realize is if a $10/hr clock watcher takes 10x longer to do the work, the budget goes out the window.
It seems pretty simple to me sitting over here. Is there something I'm missing?
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