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Having just passed my P.E. in Civil (April exam, Washinton State), I must agree with your statements. I worked my way from low man on the survey crew through being an engineering assistant, civil designer (while finishing up the last 2 yrs at O.I.T. full time and designing and building airports the other 30 hours left in the week)to now being able to hang a PE shingle at my desk. All told this has taken me 12 years.

I actually graduated this past June and was notifed 1 week later that I had passed the PE. Now I am considering going into private practice myself. I have worked both public (city employee) and private, and have yet to get a decent design or project from any consultant. A typical consultant will take the least amount of time to design and deliver a project, so they can maximize their profit, and deliver the sorriest work I have ever seen. It never fails that I end up reworking the project after construction has started. Yet the powers that be continue to throw gobs of money at the "Suits". The have a mentality that because they are in the Consulting Engineering business, that they know more then their own people.

The cutting and pasting might greatly increase the ease of producing a deliverable for a particular contract, but such is not the foundation of professional engineering.

I'm up to my armpits in projects where mediocre engineers without ethic or ownership seek to churn out a deliverable without even making field verifications or to the contrary, hone a professional skill to evade cyclical review processes in hopes for milking a dry cow for modifications.

Good money won't turn a bad AE good.

Unfortunately for the profession, too many people with access to PCs, a spreadsheet, AutoCAD, and a handful of past drawings believe they have the acumen to design as professionals. Concurrently, every tradesman and his brother now believes they have the ability to design because they can afford a spreadsheet, copier, ACAD, and can knock out a plot plan or elevation or detail.

In the last 10 years, I've seen the profession slip considerably. Construction projects get knocked out today with about 10-20 cents on the dollar of actual value as compared to 20 years ago.

One advantage to this situation is that the lack of professionalism inherant in many designs today, insure job security for engineers in the future.

A disadvantage is that so much of the professions have become codified, that innovative unique productive design improvements are difficult to find today, simply because the bulk of financial obligations are directed to off-the-shelf, codified methods installed by tradesmen.