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From: Tom MacNaughton
Date: 18 Mar 2008
Time: 13:35:23 -0500
Remote Name: 66.252.37.223
This is a good example of how it is easy to miscommunicate. When I say that Rhino is the program that is taking over, I mean in the context of yacht and small craft naval architects. The software used by LARGE ship naval architects is a different story. I had not heard of “monster.com” before and looked at it with some interest. When you type in “naval architect” at least the first page of results is all large ship naval architecture jobs. I didn’t look any further. If you want to know about jobs in the yacht design industry, it works a lot differently. Generally yacht design positions are mostly advertised for jobs in the drafting departments of large series boat building firms. These will be in places like Professional Boatbuilder Magazine or their web site. These normally mention Rhino these days. Independent design firms and custom boat builders, with whom we are primarily concerned here, tend to work differently. This is much more of a networking situation with students who feel ready for an entry level position in design or yacht draftsmen and designers looking for work tending to contact firms that seem to do the type of work they like and set up an interview. Conversely the firms may contact people like us, individuals who’ve worked for them before, or groups to which designers belong and ask who’s available. The yacht and small craft naval architecture world is very small. In the entire history of yachts there are probably around 750 design firms, including ones long gone, that either have an existing body of work that can be drawn on today or contributed something to the industry. There may be no more than about 300 active design firms in the world today. Within this group Rhino is becoming more and more dominant. I don’t say that many of these firms don’t have other programs as well. Most of us had quite an investment in previous programs and in switching over to Rhino naturally there is a period in which legacy software will be maintained. Even today we still have one workstation with the previous software we used on it, though we haven’t called up anything on it in around 6 years. The last time Bruce Johnson at Sparkman and Stephens exchanged emails with me was a long time back and he did mention FastShip and AutoCAD Lite as what they were working with. Of course at that time we were working with an older much harder to use hull design program plus drafting manually. So they may well have changed their software mix to one extent or another with the rise of Rhino, just as we have. However I don’t know that.