My feelings are mixed. The licensing processing is pretty lenient, and NCEES testing just weeds out the bottom 1/3 of applicants. Keeping a license is basically a matter of paying your dues. Sure, people get disciplined by the board, but it’s almost always for forgetting their PDH credits, which are “listen to this vendor-sponsored webinar during lunch and you’ll get an hour”. Practicing outside one’s competence is very common, and almost nobody gets in trouble for that, unless there is legal trouble.
That said, licensing does create an artificial scarcity and a completely superfluous cottage industry of land-development hacks, typically one-man-show practices, that specialize in being a land owner or speculator’s pseudo-attorney for a permit application process. The construction plans for permit are basically conceptual, rife with flagrant errors, and may have little relevance to actual construction, since a contractor probably won’t use the plans anyway. In my region, maybe 30-60% of the market is like this, with the exceptions being larger commercial projects, like apartments or medical offices. A parking-lot extension for a quadplex, though? That’s going to be a PE who will perjure himself all day to a Planning Commission for $500. They’re just a licensed as the engineer scrutinizing seismic forces on bridge piles.
So is the free market the answer? I don’t know. The land owners are the ones choosing the hucksters. They’re also usually fast-dealers that aren’t concerned with product quality once it’s sold. I don’t think “develop as thou wilt” is a good policy because that used to be how it was done, and it killed enough people to create a demand for government intervention.
The problem is, like software, nobody has any idea how to measure “goodness” of civil engineering, and laymen have no idea of the quality of product they’re getting unless it fails catastrophically.
I just accept that it’s not perfect, the hacks aren’t going anywhere, and I try not to do shitty work.
That said, licensing does create an artificial scarcity and a completely superfluous cottage industry of land-development hacks, typically one-man-show practices, that specialize in being a land owner or speculator’s pseudo-attorney for a permit application process. The construction plans for permit are basically conceptual, rife with flagrant errors, and may have little relevance to actual construction, since a contractor probably won’t use the plans anyway. In my region, maybe 30-60% of the market is like this, with the exceptions being larger commercial projects, like apartments or medical offices. A parking-lot extension for a quadplex, though? That’s going to be a PE who will perjure himself all day to a Planning Commission for $500. They’re just a licensed as the engineer scrutinizing seismic forces on bridge piles.
So is the free market the answer? I don’t know. The land owners are the ones choosing the hucksters. They’re also usually fast-dealers that aren’t concerned with product quality once it’s sold. I don’t think “develop as thou wilt” is a good policy because that used to be how it was done, and it killed enough people to create a demand for government intervention.
The problem is, like software, nobody has any idea how to measure “goodness” of civil engineering, and laymen have no idea of the quality of product they’re getting unless it fails catastrophically.
I just accept that it’s not perfect, the hacks aren’t going anywhere, and I try not to do shitty work.