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Surveying ain’t work
I was in the field solo working on a small residential job (estimated 2 hours) in the 97?ø heat earlier this week. The heat and humidity were stifling, making every step a struggle. After two hours, I realized I was only half done. It was getting late in the workday so I packed it up for the day and headed to the office. When I left, I noticed a two man survey crew working around the corner from my project. They looked like the heat was about to get the best of them so I stopped and gave them a bottle of water each, which they immediately drank. In the five minutes I talked with them, I learned that they used to be a three man crew until the party chief started laying out and ended up fired. This new chief has a grand total of 2 years in surveying, the first 6-8 months of that as a brush ape. The other young man wasn??t quite as seasoned. They were both clean cut and dressed respectably and were also very polite. The chief seemed to be somewhat knowledgeable but mentioned that he hadn??t had much supervision. My perspective may be a bit different because I grew up in surveying. I love my profession and I can honestly say that I survey five days a week but almost never go to ??work?. I don??t understand why someone would get licensed in this profession if they didn??t love it. To have a crew of intelligent young men, willing to learn and produce?? and not mentor them?? also to leave them unsupervised most of the time? It??s obvious that their boss doesn??t love his profession. They asked me a couple questions about equipment. I told them that when I started, the instruments didn??t have batteries. They both looked at me like I was pranking them and one said ??I don??t see how that??s even possible?. Maybe it sparked enough interest that they??ll want to learn about the history of their ??job?.
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15 Replies
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Well, nobody will ever again experience the changes we did taking surveying from 19th. century techniques into the 21st. century. And I agree the “history” of our task and responsibilities seems to get lost as time goes on.
But one thing I drilled into my young employees was procedure. And therein lies the DNA of our profession. I don’t care if you chained a line, shot it with a TS or derived a horizontal length via GNSS, it still needs to be questioned and checked. Error, our old nemesis, is still out there waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting and vulnerable crew.
But I agree there is still the wonderful history of our work that is obscured from the new guys and gals by all our bells and whistles. Any new hand that is interested and begins to understand this history and our continuing dedication to the maintenance of the ancient fabric of land lines will excel in the industry. I was once young and dumb. You can only rise above that station with experience. I pray these new folks will eventually also get theirs.
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Mentoring is difficult when you have both ends of admin, client relations, board representation and making sure the cad monkeys don’t mess up the drawings. My crew is seasoned but still need oversight.
Then I can survey until the phone rings with someone who desperately needs to talk with me.
When can I survey?
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Sadly I think that’s a position a lot of us are in. The younger guys we have at our firm are good workers, they know how to do what is needed when told exactly what to do but they lack the “why” aspect of what we do. I’m not saying all the younger guys getting into our field are good button pushers but it seems to be the trend I’ve seen. I try to get the survey techs that have quite a bit of field experience to impart their knowledge on the younger guys but hearing and listening are quite different. It’s hard finding time to slow down and mentor when you’re already being pulled in a hundred directions daily.
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finding time to slow down and mentor
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Well, nobody will ever again experience the changes we did taking surveying from 19th. century techniques into the 21st. century. And I agree the “history” of our task and responsibilities seems to get lost as time goes on.
When giving the introductory lecture in the late 1990s to basic surveying classes I made reference to Mount Rushmore. “When I started surveying, early 1970s, three of the men represented there could have understood and worked with the equipment with a fifteen minute introduction. During the next twenty years everything changed and became computerized. The rate of change is increasing to the point you will need to continue learning throughout your career.” I still believe that things will change faster in the future than they have in the past.
Understanding the history and the limitations of the equipment used is primary to retracing old surveys. Without mentoring and exposure the the older equipment and procedures pincushions will become even more common and our professional judgement will more likely be called into question.
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I see a lot of talk about mentoring gravitating to the tools we use. I’ll tell you now that’s a problem. Almost anybody can be trained to measure. What needs to be taught is recognizing, documenting, perpetuating and properly understanding evidence. That’s going to require time working together. Too bad we don’t require something like responsible charge to make that happen…
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And boundary surveying tends to be “taught” in engineering schools, but it should bein law schools.
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They were both clean cut and dressed respectably and were also very polite. The chief seemed to be somewhat knowledgeable but mentioned that he hadn??t had much supervision.
Do them and yourself (and the profession) a favor and hire them!
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What needs to be taught is recognizing, documenting, perpetuating and properly understanding evidence.
Excellent point! I’m all for the documenting. When I got back to surveying in 2012 after an eleven year hiatus, I was happy that the company I was working for was photographing property corners and giving their depths below ground. Nowadays when we verify or write new Certified Corner Records, I think they should include a picture of the section corner and a zoomed-out picture for perspective. We’re still thinking paper. I’m sure the LABINS website could accommodate pictures.
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We baby boomers have lived our entire lives in a state of change. A computer science teacher I once worked with told me that my generation worked out the processes and his generation is codifying them. An oversimplification, but not too far from the truth.
So, I guess, future procedures will be an extension of coded processes, hopefully understood by the coders, but doomed to be relearned by future coders. Current code becomes legacy code which becomes a problem.
I hope they’re leaving good notes!
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Legacy computer code (1970s Cobol probably) saved my paycheck a few times. The Governor wanted to do something or other because of a budget dispute with the Legislature which involved cutting worker pay to the Federal Minimum but the few State Employee computer programmers who actually knew Cobol asked, “just who are you going to get to do that?” Their boss, the State Controller, backed them up and said, “good luck with that, Governor.”
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If the Surveying Engineering programs could actually teach the future Engineers how to correctly setup a tripod, that would be great!
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There’s a ton of legacy code out there and we’re generating future legacy code every day. I have two friends who came out of retirement to write assembler code for a big financial services company with a legacy system that dates back to the 70s. The money was just too good to pass up.
In your case, the legacy code was a problem for the governor, one that he couldn’t overcome. His processes were locked in by the legacy code, so he couldn’t change them. Of course, he never should have contemplated the change in the first place.
Consider PDF page 20 of this document from Wyoming DOT:
It says that the DAF (datum adjustment factor) is the combined factor and that state plane coordinates are multiplied by the reciprocal of the DAF. Now that’s identical to dividing the state plane coordinate by the DAF except for rounding differences, and it might be coded either way in different software. However, the DAF will rarely be equal to its reciprocal, so it’s essential that a coder understand what he’s dealing with. It’s conceivable that the reciprocal use is a legacy item itself, left over from the days when it was much more difficult to divide than to multiply.
In any event, the written procedure was the source for the computer code. and my young friend was right. The next iteration, though, may rely on the written code instead of the source document, and that’s where we might encounter problems.
Parsing old code is different from reading source documents.
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I was just talking about this sort of thing with a coworker a few days ago. The whole time I was in school I kept hearing how there’s not enough people coming into the profession. I thought great, this should make finding work and being shown the right way to do things a bit easier. I was right about the finding work part, the mentoring part not so much (at least at first). Over the course of my first couple years of working the attitude seemed to shift from “there’s not enough new people” to “what I really need is another licensed guy with about 20 years of experience who can already do everything”.
Anyway, I think there are people who are willing to learn but the licensed guys are either more interested in making money or simply don’t care to mentor anyone. -
Anyway, I think there are people who are willing to learn but the licensed guys are either more interested in making money or simply don’t care to mentor anyone.
@BStrand The licensed guys are probably interested in mentoring (well some may not have the interest) as most want to mentor but they have priced themselves into a corner by not charging near enough money to allow for mentoring. It is simply hurry hurry and get it done and move to the next where it is hurry hurry and get it down and lather rinse and repeat the next day.
Surveying is very labor intensive and overhead expensive and by golly I may sound like a broken record and I don’t give a flip, but we have screwed ourselves by not charging enough money to be able to hire, train, retain and pay people to want to do this work. You could probably double or triple your standard fees before you get to where you need to be. I am pushing that price envelope as hard as I can and will not stop.
A lot of surveyors think their field crews and drafters are 100% efficient and billable. Probably more like 65%
A lot of surveyors don’t bill full freight for travel time. How bloody stupid is that.
Heck, many don’t even charge for travel at all.
A lot of surveyors treat their field crews as useless when it rains and send them home with no pay. Why not send them to do research or learn to draft or deliver finished plats or have them go look at a possible job with you.
Oh don’t even get me started on benefits.
Amazingly I have a whole thread that discusses this very subject and it seems many are dismissive of my premise.
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