I fully understand the weaknesses in the inspection process, most of it is political and the weak links are the contractor building team attitudes concerning quality vs schedule and the due diligence/experience and talents of the Structural Engineers.
No, you didn’t come off as pretentious at all. You sounded like you have knowledge about the subject that most people do not have, and I was curious. And thank you for sharing your experience. I am so used to the medical research world that it is fascinating to run across someone whose expertise is in a completely different area.
I understand how critical certain inspections are, but I have always used those regulations as an example of HOW the government actually creates jobs. I cant tell you how many hours I stood there and watched them pump grout in a block wall and make sure they vibrated every cell. Not complaining, Much preferable to sitting at my desk! Just saying that is how it IS DONE, when people tell you Government DOES NOT create jobs. I was inspecting schools, so in that case, yes, build it into the contract and put me there every time, I am just talking in general.
There is something to be said for keeping them honest and yes we are all human and can make mistakes too, but random inspections would suffice. Once the rebar is coming out of the ground, they usually don’t miss it up the wall and not really a need other than checking some lintels or embeds after that. If they don’t build it right, it will fail and they will be out of a job and possibly in legal trouble too. Code now says ALL masonry must be inspected... now that means even a trash enclosure wall if they go by letter of law.
To simplify, my house was built before 1970 and does not have a stick of reinforcing anywhere in the block walls, been standing for 60 years now, if built today it would have to have reinforcing (which yes I would prefer some anyway, at least corners and a bond beam at top) and ALSO be inspected while it was being grouted. My time was billed at $100/hr including travel time getting there and back and that was 10+ years ago.
Especially when the contract is construction costs plus 10%. I always thought that was the way to go, because it eliminated the benefit of cutting corners by using cheaper materials or leaving out some reinforcing or whatever. Similar to the government budget process, the more you spend the more you make (or in gov. case get to spend next year)
You are most correct from what I have seen, Scheduling dictates the need of cutting corners much of the time today if not to just make things easier for them, like the concrete guys wanting more water so it “flows” better, they know cant go too far or it wont finish right, but ANY over the mix design weakens it and will cause more cracking in the finished product.
I started drawing structural plans by hand, even still a couple bridges back then and the computer generation was a nightmare for our industry. We lost any time to do the jobs... Everybody thought we just pushed a button and it was magically done now. It was always a feast or famine industry and we lost all scheduling time, everything is fast tracked and that causes errors.
Interesting Intel Fab (IV or V cant remember) was one of the first thing I drew details for. Look up Fillmore center in San Francisco, it was biggest project I was ever involved in, about 5 years in, still young in my career, but taught me about concrete structures. We had 3 different national offices of our same A & E firm all working on different phases of it... a bunch of towers and other shorter buildings connected with a plaza level that was a whole block each way. Then the earthquake hit and the other two offices areas did not perform quite as well as what we had done... They transferred engineers from our office to go help tighten things up in the other two after we spent a few months doing repairs to fix cracks. I did my only set of wall elevations showing cracks and where to epoxy inject...