John Scarry Engineering - Canterbury Earthquakes Royal ...

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holiday homes, went to the front, and taught the troops how to survive in the ice and
snow. Despite the appalling examples in my Open Letter and since, which normally
involved equally rudimentary failings, I know of no example where a senior engineering
manager in a large firm has ‘rolled up his sleeves,’ rounded up the graduates and
intermediate engineers, and said “Look, this is how you must do it.” That would be
genuine leadership, and it’s just not there.
93. It is not just that structural engineering ranks so far below the likes of medicine and law
as to recognition, influence, control of its own destiny, and income. Even within
structural engineering firms, the actual design and drafting is treated largely as
something that is ‘trivial,’ that anyone can do, and it must be churned out so as to meet
the deadlines and the inadequate fees. The structural engineers are considered a cost, not
an asset. “Why are you taking so long?” “You’re costing too much money?” “Let the
contractor sort it out?”
94. Who’s saying this? The structural engineers who got into ‘management and marketing.’
But who’s going to do the work properly, if this is the fate of senior engineers who stay
being designers? Contrast this with surgeons, who are in the operating theatre until they
retire, or in this Royal Commission, the senior counsel, even the Queen’s Counsels, who
operate ‘at the coal face’ until they retire, and are paid for their expertise and experience,
not their ‘management roles.’
95. In the next section, I deal with the unsustainable constraints that are imposed on
structural engineers by the other ‘professional and trade’ parties involved in construction
industry, but wish here to touch on the perceptions of clients.
96. The effective charge out rates of dentists, doctors and lawyers are, in almost all
instances, considerably in excess of structural engineers. Dentists are usually able to do
quite a lot of good work in half an hour, so the total bill is relatively small, although still
painful for most people. Obviously, people will pay a lot for specialist medical advice,
either directly, or through the public health system, because their life is on the line, the
specialist or surgeon is doing much of the total work, and ‘the system’ recognises the
overall skill levels and years of training of the doctors concerned. Minor legal matters
such as conveyancy can usually be done quickly, and the cost is perceived as a small
percentage of the total sums involved. For more major cases, people are forced, and are
prepared, to pay a lot to ‘fight the fight,’ especially if they can tip a 50:50 outcome more
to their side.
97. But with structural engineering, the attitude is invariably “Buildings are supposed to
stand up, so why should I pay for it?” combined with a misunderstanding that
contractors know what to build anyway. Until things go wrong, of course.
98. Engineers cannot ‘bury their mistakes,’ and they can’t pass off shortcomings as “Well,
that’s litigation.” Also, we are involved in design, which must by its very nature be an
iterative process. We are also involved in what are often highly constrained, one-off
designs, often on difficult ground. Other civil engineers, such as harbour, dam,
geotechnical and roading engineers are often able to design a large value of work in a
relatively small amount of time because they don’t have to deal with all of the detail and
minutiae that structural engineers do. This is not to say the risk involved with their work
is not great, because it is, but they do not usually have to design the myriad of small but
important details structural engineers have to.
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