The Commoditization of the Structural Engineering Profession - The Race to the Bottom and into the Abyss of Irrelevance

Over the past 10–15 years, I have observed an increasing number of building projects that are not merely structurally inefficient from a cost or schedule perspective, but that exhibit fundamental design deficiencies. These are not subtle disagreements over optimization or judgment calls at the margins. They are errors visible at the most basic conceptual level, what might reasonably be called Engineering 101 mistakes.

It is not a coincidence that we are seeing pedestrian bridges collapse days after erection, or buildings that lean to degrees that would make the Tower of Pisa envious. While catastrophic failures are rare and highly visible, they are not the real story. Most structural failures occur quietly during construction, out of public view. Even more common are near-misses, deficiencies caught just in time, often by someone peripherally involved rather than by the design team itself. These instances typically begin with a phrase no Engineer wants to hear: “I’m no an Engineer, but something doesn’t seem right.”

What is perhaps most alarming is not that these issues arise, but that no one seems particularly surprised anymore when they do. The development and construction industry is growing accustomed to discovering serious problems late in the process and reacting with indifference and procedural responses that focus almost entirely on the schedule impact of revising the design, reissuing drawings, and procuring and fabricating the necessary materials. Such situations are often treated not as a warning, but instead as a routine inconvenience, implicitly priced into the process.

These situations are not the result of a sudden decline in Engineering education or intelligence. It is the predictable outcome of the systemic commoditization of the Structural Engineering profession, a process that has been unfolding for nearly two decades and is now revealing its consequences.

Commoditization of Professional Services

“Commodity” is the last word most professionals would use to describe their services. Traditionally, professional services were differentiated by judgment, expertise, and accountability. Yet across nearly every sector, law, medicine, architecture, Engineering, etc., those distinctions have steadily eroded.

Commoditization occurs when a service becomes perceived as interchangeable, standardized, and primarily comparable on price, rather than unique features or quality. Once clients believe that one provider’s work product is effectively indistinguishable from another’s, differentiation collapses, as do fees. The result is a mediocre product delivered for a mediocre fee, reinforced by an industry that begins to expect mediocrity because it all looks the same anyway. In many cases, we even reward the “best” of this mediocrity.

Professional services are particularly vulnerable because clients often evaluate outcomes, not processes. If the outcome appears to be acceptable, justifiably or not, then the path taken to get there, the rigor, the judgment, the foresight , becomes invisible. Over time, perception becomes reality. When work product becomes indecipherable to the client, the work product is forced into conformance, regardless of who is providing it. Innovation itself becomes perceived as a commodity, as something anyone would have discovered eventually.

How Structural Engineering Entered the Race to the Bottom

Structural Engineering is a professional service business, and the overwhelming majority of Engineering firms are compensated for design projects based on lump sum fees. As fee pressure intensified, firms were forced to adapt or perish. Many adapted by quietly lowering standards and the time devoted to the project, not out of malice, but out of economic necessity.

The logic is uncomfortable but straightforward: if a client pays 70 percent of the fee required to deliver a complete and thoughtful design, they should not be surprised to receive only 70 percent of the effort. Engineering is not a charity. No firm can survive indefinitely by delivering uncompensated labor in the name of professional virtue.

Yet rather than confronting this reality honestly with clients and among themselves, many in the profession chose a different path. They leaned into standardization, outsourcing, excessive conservatism, and automation. They promoted the illusion that structural design is largely a push‑button exercise, that everything lives in a computer model, and changes can be evaluated by simply updating an analytical model and pressing run.

Even if that were true, which it is certainly not, it is difficult to imagine a more self-defeating narrative. By portraying our work as uniform, automated, and easily replicated, we trained our clients to see us not as highly skilled professionals exercising experience, judgment, and creativity, but as interchangeable technicians operating software, mere tools.

Act like a commodity, and you will be treated like one.

External Pressure — and a Convenient Ecosystem

Owner/developers and the construction industry have undeniably played a major role in accelerating commoditization. Developers are highly rational actors, seeking predictability in cost, schedule, and risk. Construction managers (CMs) and subcontractors, who possess far more information about means, methods, sequencing, and pricing, are well positioned to provide that predictability, and to suppress anything that threatens it.

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the value of an Engineer’s design is ultimately what the beneficiary believes it to be. For owner/developers, that perception of value is rarely formed independently. It is shaped, and often constrained, by intermediaries. To put it bluntly, many owners/developers only know what the people they surround themselves with want them to know. And even if they eventually come to that realization, it would not be something that they would likely readily admit to themselves, or would be able to do much about anyway.

In Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, attorney Barry Lepatner describes a persistent asymmetry of information between owners on one hand and construction managers and subcontractors on the other. That imbalance of experience and knowledge allows those closest to construction to exert disproportionate influence over outcomes. Differences in engineering approaches are rarely identified, quantified, or communicated in any meaningful way. Instead, contractor pricing is often based on cursory reviews that implicitly treat all engineering designs as equivalent.

This practice is a disservice to the client, the project, and the Engineer. It reinforces the misconception that engineering value is uniform and interchangeable, while simultaneously suppressing incentives for engineers to distinguish themselves through creativity, innovation, alternative solutions, or higher standards of care. To an owner/developer lacking the technical background to challenge these narratives, the “cost” of a design becomes whatever suppliers say it is.

Innovation, alternative structural systems, or even modest departures from familiar solutions can then be killed effortlessly. All it takes is an inflated estimate or a few cautionary words delivered to the right audience. The result is a self-reinforcing ecosystem, a kind of professional swamp, populated by actors who benefit from standardization, predictability, and the quiet elimination of dissent. Attempts to introduce new ideas, higher standards, or uncomfortable questions are met with coordinated resistance. Sunlight, after all, is dangerous to stagnant systems. Yet external pressure alone does not explain where we are today.

The Profession’s Quiet Complicity

The most difficult truth is that Structural Engineers ultimately enabled their own commoditization. Faced with shrinking fees and rising expectations, many chose survival over resistance. The associated decline in profit margins left them vulnerable to the global financial crisis of 2008, which resulted in layoffs, retrenchment, and an intensification of their survival mode. And as expected, many discharged Engineers started their own small firms, increasing competition and undercutting fees even further just to keep the lights on and food on the table.

Standards of care were gradually redefined downward. Spec work became normalized, and change orders became an inevitable consequence of low fees. In doing so, we have abandoned not only quality, but credibility. Abdication of quality is not simply producing flawed work; it is the slow erosion of responsibility and dignity, the belief that excellence no longer matters because it is neither recognized nor rewarded.

This has had predictable downstream effects. Younger engineers entering the profession are increasingly trained to operate tools rather than exercise engineering judgment, intuition, and creativity. Many now lack the ability to estimate, approximate, or intuitively check results. Approximate analysis, once a cornerstone of the Engineering process, is becoming a lost skill. As with manufacturing sectors that outsourced their expertise, the institutional knowledge required to reverse course may already be disappearing.

Where This Path Leads

Commoditization does not reduce risk, it redistributes it. Engineers now face increasing liability exposure while simultaneously possessing less authority, less time, and less control over outcomes. This mirrors trends seen in medicine, where fear of litigation has encouraged defensive practices that add cost without improving results.

If nothing changes, the trajectory is clear, continued erosion of technical competency, increasing structural failures and near-misses, loss of talent to adjacent industries, and a profession that remains legally responsible while functionally marginalized. At some point, there may be no meaningful way back.

Decommoditization: The Only Viable Response

The antidote to commoditization is not nostalgia, nor is it occasional reinvention. It is continuous decommoditization, a deliberate effort to resist the status quo and expectations of the larger development and construction industry, and reassert what makes Professional Engineering services valuable.

For Structural Engineering, this means re-centering judgment over automation, process over output, and integrity over deadlines. It means pricing work honestly, refusing spec work, and clearly communicating the rigor required to produce designs worthy of trust. It means teaching young engineers not just how to model structures, but how to think about them, understand them, and control them. They should be inspired to reach a level of experience and proficiency where their answer to the question, “how does your design work?” should be, “the way I intended it to”, and not, "the way the software says it does".

The question facing the profession is not whether commoditization can occur, it already has. The question is whether change will come from inside-out, motivated by foresight, or from outside-in, driven by failure, hindsight and in the worst case public humiliation.

There is nothing safe about commoditizing a profession entrusted with public safety. The Structural Engineering profession cannot survive as a low-bid, push-button service, while still claiming professional authority and commanding respect. The race to the bottom does not end at efficiency; it ends at irrelevance, or worse. The only path forward for the Structural Engineering profession to retain its relevance, credibility, and dignity is a deliberate reassertion of professional self-respect: valuing judgment, defending rigor and standards, and above all refusing to participate in their own devaluation.

Fortunately, there are still many of us who have managed to resist and survive this steady downward progression and have been voicing our concerns and raising alarms along the way. But those alarms have been largely drowned out by a larger group that has already adapted to this new normal. They are all-in, having tailored their practices and trained their Engineers to win the race to the bottom, and their eventual irrelevance.