I had a similar situation where my employer was dictating how I performed work under the umbrella of my license.
How did you go about handling that?
The first time the issue disappeared, the second time I quit.
Tangential question relating to the licensing system you're using in the US, is the licence per individual or can it per company too?
In Australia, some states are individual only, which means that anything you sign will always be your liability, as long as you're alive, which is why quite a few surveyors work until they drop dead, because you still have to pay for the insurance or else potentially lose everything after being sued. As a side note, I know of at least one surveyor that has put his assets in a trust, presumably as a way to protect them in case anything like that should happen. That's the state that I'm in and hoping to get licenced. After typing all that out, it doesn't seem like a very rewarding system.
Another state allows the licence to be held by a company, with the provision that a specific number of their employees are individually licenced at any one time. This means that the liability is passed onto the company and the surveyor can sleep better at night and look forward to a more relaxing retirement.
On topic, if I was a licenced surveyor, I would never work under a surveyor that wasn't licenced, no matter how much experience they have. They have no skin in the game and it would be my neck on the line if something went wrong.
Surveyors are individually licensed here and I've never heard of a company being licensed so I'm pretty sure that's not a thing. As far as liability there are ways to avoid being personally bankrupted like registering your business as a limited liability company. I remember reading something about liability insurance that you can carry into retirement at one point as well, but I don't remember the details on that.
It's called Tail Coverage or an Extended Reporting Period. About 3 time the yearly cost of the policy I was told, can't be sure on the cost.
I find it interesting that the question is one of working under a non-licensed surveyor when many of us work under a licensed engineer. One is bad as the other in my never to be humble opinion. Jp
The engineers that I worked the closest with never tried to argue with me which was great. Part of the reason I was comfortable putting a foot down was because this level of professionalism existed between the PMs and myself. When you're dealing with people that have long relationships with the people that run the company though then that's all that ends up mattering in the end.
