Monte, post: 408896, member: 11913 wrote: I don't know all of ya'lls feelings on the state of surveying, but I feel we are loosing the ART of surveying, we barely have old surveyors mentor young guys any longer, and so many skills, tips, tricks, and other old ways are being lost, replaced by words in a classroom and a timed test.
I'm going to say that in Texas surveying, different forces have shaped the profession at different times. 1945 was an important date because that was the year that cities for the first time held more than half of the Texas population. I'd guess that about 90% of Texans live in cities now.
Urbanization brought several phenomena with it, including:
- the rise of consulting civil engineering firms with staffs mostly making land-developement-related surveys and
- surveying offices providing surveys of postage-stamp-sized parcels as a mainstay of business,
This resulted in many surveyors having experience mostly centered around either doing surveys related to the engineering of land developments or churning out small lot surveys.
Both tended to produce a style of practice that was more interested in workflow (i.e. kicking a product out the door) more than actually unraveling mysteries.
I speculated years ago that the proliferation of technology as the dominant focus of surveying practice, i.e. the amount of energy that would be spent just running continually changing software and ever-changing devices, would tend to produce a much different style of surveyor than had previously been required. You can describe it in terms of personality type, but basically land surveyors are becoming managers of technology rather than investigators and historians.
If you want to dip into the past, the first major change in Texas surveying was the organization of the County and District surveyor system after 1837 and the demand for lands across very different regions of the Republic and, later, State of Texas to which practices were adapted.
The next phase was the result of the arrival of the railroads and the great piles of land scrip that the largesse of Texas legislatures bestowed upon the companies building them. The boom occurred after about 1871 and lasted for less than twenty years. Most of the surveys made during that period of time were made for the purposes of obtaining patents on the lands to which the railroad companies were entitled. Since nearly all of the lands were located far from the settled populations.
Since nearly all of the lands were located far from settled populations, the activity became one of essentially mapping, i.e. doing just enough surveying to be able to plot the large blocks of 640 acre surveys, mostly square, upon the County or District map. Most of those surveys were made of lands for which a section was, as a practical matter, an unusable quantity. It took tens or hundreds of sections to make a viable ranch. Those tended to produce a standard of practice that was more concerned with doing the least amount of work on the ground to be able to plot it all up than with a careful delineation of all boundaries.
The epoch that followed that was the Era of Figuring Things Out, where surveyors who were regarded by the Commissioner of the General Land Office as being particularly skillful at whatever it was that surveyors did were sent out to figure out by some means where the great blocks of surveys that existed as entities upon the county maps actually were located upon the ground.
Kent McMillan, post: 409510, member: 3 wrote: Era of Figuring Things Out,
Ahhh yes, the EFTO.
The next major epoch of Texas surveying was probably that following Capt. Lucas's gusher of oil from his well drilled at Spindletop, completed in 1901. For at least the next fifty years, as oil fields emerged in previously minimally surveyed areas, the Era of Figuring Things Out shifted into high gear as most of the major oil companies had surveyors and attorneys on staff to secure what they believed to be their rights to land in particular locations with respect to excellent oil wells.
Oil-related litigation is responsible for a very significant fraction of cases that have shaped Texas case law on the subject of boundaries and surveying.
I'm not sure at what point in time exactly the products of a land survey became a commodity to be purchased for the least price from a far-flung field of practitioners, but that is definitely one of the forces shaping Texas surveying today. In a scenario in which the object of the exercise is to cater to that market, are we really, really unhappy that there may not be a continuity in that tradition? I'm more concerned by the profession being populated by technologists rather than practitioners who are able to continue the Era of Figuring Things Out.
Kent McMillan, post: 409504, member: 3 wrote:
- the rise of consulting civil engineering firms with staffs mostly making land-developement-related surveys and
- surveying offices providing surveys of postage-stamp-sized parcels as a mainstay of business,This resulted in many surveyors having experience mostly centered around either doing surveys related to the engineering of land developments or churning out small lot surveys.
Both tended to produce a style of practice that was more interested in workflow (i.e. kicking a product out the door) more than actually unraveling mysteries.
I speculated years ago that the proliferation of technology as the dominant focus of surveying practice, i.e. the amount of energy that would be spent just running continually changing software and ever-changing devices, would tend to produce a much different style of surveyor than had previously been required. You can describe it in terms of personality type, but basically land surveyors are becoming managers of technology rather than investigators and historians.
i've been at this for 20 years now, and aside from a short spell doing research and analysis for highway corridor, i've worked in either of your two above-listed fields exclusively- with the civil consulting side paying the checks since 2003. funny enough that starting out, and being trained, under a guy who still pays his bills on a roughly 90% house-lot model, i got lucky in that guy being a natural EFTOlogist. which is to say, he took those gigs whenever they came along and he could reasonably put a hold on the rest of the assembly line to do things properly and thoroughly. but that was the rub (and continues to be): how to eat as an EFTOlogist. i spent 10 years in a big civil firm, over the course of that decade i became THE guy on staff who handled the messes- the problem boundaries, the title quagmires, the history projects. i cost that firm a good bit of money here and there in getting things done correctly, in finding issues and problems that i KNOW the other guys on staff would have either never found or else never thought to look for. in fact- and all credit to my direct boss at the time (i can't imagine how much pressure he must have gotten to ditch me)- during the 2007-9... culling (65% layoffs)- this kept me employed while the other four RPLS were let go. but the burnout of that "client-focused" (what a pernicious marketing aphorism) model had me quit in '12, and i swore i was never coming back. because that's all i knew. fast forward a year and i hooked up with another, much smaller civil firm. it was guys i knew and whose work i knew, and i somehow convinced myself it'd be better and different, so long as i drew the parameters of how work got done. and for a while it worked- but we got too good (and the partners are aces at getting work), and after a couple years it became apparent that again- just to keep up with keeping up- that i was becoming prostrate to that business model again. so i bailed. again.
Kent McMillan, post: 409520, member: 3 wrote: I'm more concerned by the profession being populated by technologists rather than practitioners who are able to continue the Era of Figuring Things Out.
and that's where i sit now- here in this title company doing reviews and, at least by this point, getting a workload that is very high percentage FTO-type work. which makes me happy. but i'm at a desk. all day. in a high-rise. with co-workers for whom rotting away for 10 hours every day talking about lunch and football and nothing else is a perfectly satisfying experience. point being: i'm already looking at a couple years down the road. i'll go nuts if i have to sit here longer than that.
but the road out isn't apparent. i can go out right now and get probably any of several really well paying gigs. i can run a survey department for just about whoever. but i don't want to. i want to FTO. problem i see, again, is the lack of a market for FTO, and/or my ignorance in how to tap into it in any sort of sustainable way.
flyin solo, post: 409564, member: 8089 wrote: problem i see, again, is the lack of a market for FTO, and/or my ignorance in how to tap into it in any sort of sustainable way.
Yes, once enough counterfeit money is in circulation, paper money becomes generally understood to be of no value. There is a market for surveys that actually do extend the Era of Figuring Things Out, but that market doesn't call asking for "bids" on a survey that needs to be completed next week, if not yesterday.
