Just wait until it's a cold wet snowy morning on a construction site and you have to explain to a crew that hasn't had their morning coffee break how to build this unusual wall that got all changed because they found some ledge when they finished digging last night and the concrete truck is due in less than an hour and the forms have to be finished before the pour, and you never
ever want to delay a concrete pour especially on a cold day like today, and you pull out your laptop and while you're all standing around waiting for AutoCAD to boot up so you can make some quick changes that won't be so horrible to the careful design you did back at your warm office and print it out so they can get to work and you say "Excuse me, do you have an outlet for my printer?"
On the other hand, the programming kids were doing some structural homework for an engineering class (build a tower with paper and tape in the cheapest method), instead of doing programming, and they were writing down prices and adding them up on a whiteboard, and I said, do it in Excel! In a couple of minutes they had a spreadsheet to do all their calculations and the grade each tower would give them.
It all depends on what the situation calls for.
I'd rather have someone who can draw on a piece of paper clearly than all the cad products in the world. (Well, maybe...
) And this is from someone who works on AutoCAD all day (and sometimes nights) for a living.
Both cad and paper have their place. If you have to explain to someone how to build something, a piece of paper or a whiteboard is just as good as cad. If you have to fax to someone a field condition, a clear pencil drawing works just fine. If you want to make sure everything is just right, or if you have a lot of duplications, cad is better.
Remember, use the best method, not the one you know best.
Roger.
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"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."-Mark Twain