The Future of CADD Drafters 12

[bridgebuster]

I'm curious about drafting policies in other firms/offices. Where I work, the department has a little more than three engineers per drafter. We also have two drafting trainees as part of a government contract requirement.

Our department policy is that engineers shouldn't do any drafting. This is primarily a utilization issue, although there are older people like me who are not well-versed in CADD. Our drafters do quality work and they're well paid - about the same as an engineer with 10 years experience. The trainees are paid a little more than half of an entry level engineer.

Over the next 10 years +/- I don't see much of a future for CADD drafters. In another office I worked in, the younger engineers did their own drafting. The one or two drafters we had typically worked with those not fluent in CADD or did the clean-up work on the drawings. As people like me retire there's going to be less of a demand for drafters. The way I see it, either the majority of our higher paid drafters will be let go and/or the entry level CADD drafters will never earn anything close to what the experienced people earn.

 

[ewh]

I have landed a position with a company whose philosophy reflects the comments I posted above... leave the drawings to those who know what a proper drawing is, and free up the engineers for other, more cost effective tasks. Now, if I could only move my house 200 miles.

“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.”
-Dalai Lama XIV

 

[brandonbw]

From what I have seen of Civil 3D the end result is that you won't need drafters for a lot of Civil Engineering work. But you need a very computer literate person to understand how to throw a design into the program.

B+W Engineering and Design
Los Angeles Civil Engineer and Structural Engineer

http://bwengr.com

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http://bwstructuralengineer.com

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http://bwcivilengineer.com

 

[spongebob007]

My career has been nearly evenly split between defense and commercial. At the commercial jobs I always did my own drawings. As ewh pointed out, my drawings probably wouldn't pass an experienced checker but they were good enough to get the job done. Plus we always built protptypes, so if a drawing error led to a bad part it was easy enough for me to sweep it under the rug and fix the drawing.

At every defense company I have worked for there are drafters and designers. Probably the main reason is that unlike the commercial world, drawings are an end product. The government pays for the drawings and they expect them to be done right. We have had drawings sent back on more than one occasion because something doesn't meet ASME Y14.5. It's the government who keeps us in paper. For our machined parts we send CAD models to the shop for use in programming the machines. This was actually a process I instituted when I started here. We used to send 2D drawings to the shop where they would basically charge us to recreate the 3D models for their programs. Going right from CAD to CNC was a money saver.

 

[11echo]

MAN what and interesting Thread! ...Especially if you’re old enough to have seen the original trouble when it started back in mid-80's, and to where it's at today ...and STILL in free fall! Mid 80’s the business trend (due to poor economics) was to dump the mid-level & part of the Sr. level engineering people, hire a bunch of “young guys”, and have just afew senior level people to ride herd over them. Problem was there wasn’t much work so just a “bastardized” way of doing things was generated, and it was different in each company. In owner companies whole design/drafting groups where dumped, because IF any thing was needed it could be farmed out to contract engineering companies. Now add AutoCAD to the confusion and you had the starlings of the mess we are now in. So now flash forward to the present, in my world as a designer you have multiple 3D CAD programs available and they are constantly changing, it has now become more important to maintain your computer skills then develop/hone your designer skills. Engineers now require 3D picture to “see” things because they can’t read technical drawings, and it’s way cheaper to send any “drafting” oversea where they gladly work for $4.25/hr. …they too have no real designers …people that KNOW how thing should be put together, but operate cheap enough that even after multiple checking efforts (that is required) the total cost of design/drafting is cheaper …or so the powers that be think (the young guys that missed the experience of the mid & sr. level people long ago).
My personnel option is the present system is a house of cards and is ready to crumble at any minute. Presently in the U.S. the infrastructure is a mess and desperately needs to be redone. The President has recently indicated that the U.S. is going to increase oil product in the U.S. to out perform the Mideast by 2020. We haven’t built a new refinery in the U.S. in 35 yr.s …we are falling into the steel industry trap of the early 80’s …an industry that didn’t keep up with technology and became over powered by modern foreign steel plants. We have a lot of old ground to re-learn to get where we can become leaders in today’s world. Hopefully we’ll head in that direction, then CADD with be back where it belongs. …Got my fingers crossed anyway!

 

[brandonbw]

I am brought back to this topic after having a conversation between myself, an Architect and his drafting company he subs to. Basically they put their siteplan onto some made up property line, which didn't line up with the actual survey. So the whole thing was skewed every which way. Their were angle and length busts comparing their plan to the survey. I couldn't figure out how to align everything so we had a meeting. I brought out my laptop to show the siteplan overlayed with the original survey to show how everything was off. Immediately I started to get yelled at by the Arch because he couldn't read plans on the computer. Kept saying he had tunnel vision. He wanted me to go and plot everything so we could figure out the problem.

This went wrong very quickly probably because the Arch couldn't oversee the drafter well enough to know what was going on when the initial plan set was created. After 2 weeks we finally figured out what to do, even though they sent me back basically the original plans with wrong PL still!!!!!!!!! I don't see a future in pure drafters after noticing a lot of strange mistakes on many projects that would easily be caught by the design person going straight into CAD. At least the developer who doesn't know CAD, understood why this was an issue.



B+W Engineering and Design
Los Angeles Civil Engineer and Structural Engineer

http://bwengr.com

|

http://bwstructuralengineer.com

|

http://bwcivilengineer.com