In your "ticket to Beijing scenario," the answer is clear. The owner simply cannot afford to exist. He/She shouldn't own a firm. The risk is too high. Maybe that architect should keep his/her projects local until he or she can afford to go after those big projects. Opening up shop doesn't entitle you to success. Many small business in many different industries fail. That's life. And it's even more maddening when small start-up firms who pay their employees fail because the commission goes to the firm down the street who cuts corners and uses slave labor to succeed.
greg, the zumthor example is an an example of an outlier condition. there will always be some independently wealthy young designers with the ambition to do what it takes to work for someone like zumthor and the resources and connections to see it happen. there will also be those who lack the resources and connections but for whom the career takes precedence over all else and they make scratch and claw or schmooze their way in, perhaps taking on some serious hardship for a short duration.
there will always be these people, these outliers, and i have no problem with them or what they do.
but it is problematic if that level of commitment is necessary for any standard opportunity for work in the field. that is, it is not a sustainable industry model. it is not a model for growth and prosperity.
according to the forbes article mentioned above, this is a problem in many professions right now
I agree jmanganelli - a few wacky kids pursuing their dream (which many young folk are doing these days without benefit of working in an established firm at all) keeps our profession with at least one finger in the clouds where it belongs.
And, sorry to go political, but the Repubs are now proposing that by more people becoming unemployed the pressure on wages will go down so more people will then become employed. This failure of logic deserves the fully spelled out: What the Fuck?! Are economists living in a wackier dream world than are us Delueze-quoting architects?!?
Leave it to architects to debate something ad nauseum that pretty much anyone else outside of architecture understands as plain old common sense...if you perform WORK for someone else's benefit, then that person deserves to get paid for that WORK.
Well, it perhaps needs to be debated in some regard because it still exists in some form, as evidenced by the "Featured Job" that sparked the steam geysers in the first place. But it could be an indicator of a number of other insidious problems endemic to the practice.
Yes, indeed, if you perform work for someone, you deserve to be paid for it. But the reason this discussion exists here is because it's an acknowledged aspect of the present architectural culture that there are a multitude of places that expect their employees (or in this case, advertise for new ones) to perform a significant amount of work with no expected return in compensation.
We work in an entrepreneurial/capitalist system. The model of Entrepreneurship is one of high risk (lots of difficult, potentially uncompensated effort and expenditure) for the potential of high reward ($Cha-Ching$ - "I can go buy stuff"). This is the entrepreneur's dilemma. Do I risk it?
What seems to be happening in the architectural model of business is that the entrepreneur (business owner/partner) is happy enough to shuffle the risk off down the ladder onto those who have no stake in the potential of the high reward. Somehow, this is accepted.
And in the crunch of the past few years, the threat has been: if you don't "help us out with this..." we'll have to eliminate you. And many people enter a dynamic of working for free, solely to stay "employed". At some point, this dynamic leads to people working simply to say they have a job.
The issue of working on competitions is an entire 'nother matter. If a bunch of students get together and say, "Let's do this competition." Then they assign roles on the project, and everyone agrees to their functions on the team, and they go on to work together; then the risk/reward is borne by all of them. But that's not the professional model.
In the professional model, in its purest form, it's hierarchical. Hierarchical insofar as there's an entrepreneur or business owner who can't themselves perform all of the functions needed to reap the rewards they hope to for their idea. This is when the hired hands come in. They have no inherent stake in the "Idea Man's" success or failure. So they are compensated to participate.
And yes, profit margins in the architectural game are likely very low. Yes, the issue of assembling proposals and renderings etc. is costly in terms of outlay vs. (only potential) compensation. But is that because architects have developed a culture where they've created an expectation of overservice? Overservice in the proposal proportion of the project?
Additionally, (I'll put this out there) the computer generated nature of architectural work contributes to this negative facet of the economics of architectural practice.
The computer generated effort that goes into proposals and their content (renderings etc) tends to beef up the labor expense of the effort. And there's something of an expectation on the client's part that these things will be presented. Computer labor can be precise and efficient on a long term project. But it's terribly labor intensive on the front end. Sure once everything is plugged in and tweaked, it looks great and can be manipulated efficiently, but getting it to that point is no small task. Clients have not even the remotest of understandings of this.
Clients fail to recognize that architecture is bespoke tailoring. It's not off-the-rack.
Part of this particular issue, I would offer, derives from the cultural saturation of slick marketing perfection. The client pool are inundated with computer-generated and finely-tuned media every instant of their lives from non-architectural sources. So when Architecture wants to speak to them (in the form of the proposal), Architecture then tries to present it in this same format and syntax of graphic computer generated perfection. The problem is that there's a dynamic of inversion that's not acknowledged.
In the day to day world the client pool are part of the masses. Those masses are served by the few (businesses who deliver products and advertise, for example). When the client changes roles, and slips out of their robes as part of the masses and become individuals seeking Architectural services, they want that same level of polish and perfection to advertise to them. Architecture tries to provide that to them.
But when a video game company has 10 people design an environment that goes into the game that is then consumed by a Hundred Thousand consumers (clients), they can turn a profit. When a single client wants (expects) to be served computer generated renderings by 5 architecture firms of 10 individuals, the pyramid is inverted and the architects Lose, lose, and lose again.
Yet, somehow architecture is complicit in perpetuating this dynamic.
I'm rambling and fear I've gone wildly off-topic and/or opened another discussion entirely. But, yes - if you work - get paid. If you work and don't get paid, everyone suffers. If you employ people to do work you can't do yourself - pay them - if you don't pay them, you will suffer.
So many thought provoking posts. I am surprised no one mentioned that the problem that more people want to work in architecture, often based on the unrealistic expectation that work will be just like school, than their are jobs for.
Occasionally an unpaid internship reaps huge rewards. Butler Bulldog men's basketball coach Brad Stevens is an example. After playing point guard on a Division III school, Stevens worked in the Marketing department of Eli Lilly before quitting to pursue his dream...
From Wikipedia....
In the summer of 2000, Stevens was offered the opportunity to volunteer in the Butler basketball office.[6] He ran the idea of quitting his job at Eli Lilly by then-longtime girlfriend Tracy Wilhelmy. She thought about it for two hours before telling him to go for it.[16] "Now, it looks like a great idea," Stevens later remarked. "At the time, I thought it was something I really wanted to try."[6] Tracy went back to school to get a law degree that could support the couple if things did not work out for Brad.[16] "We were 23 and realized this was our chance," Tracy later said. "Five years down the road, we were probably not going to be in a position to do that. The more success you had at Lilly, the harder it would be to leave."[16]
Stevens planned to live in a friend's basement and took a job at Applebee’s to pay the bills.[7][16] Before he started training at Applebee's, he was offered a low-paying administrative position as coordinator of basketball operations under then-coach Thad Matta.[3][6] The position had opened up when assistant coach Jamal Meeks resigned after being arrested on solicitation and drug charges, of which he was later acquitted.[7] Years later, Matta recalled, "[Stevens] was just a hungry young kid that was desperate to get into coaching. He had a great passion and was willing to take a risk to get into the coaching profession."[7]
After Matta left the school following the 2000–01 season, new head coach Todd Lickliter promoted Stevens to a full-time assistant coach.[3] Under Lickliter, Stevens was active in every aspect of the game: skills instruction, game preparation, in-game coaching, and recruiting.[3] Butler was 131–61 during Stevens' time as an assistant coach.[17]
Elinor,
Practice based education may not have been the most ideal for your situation. Does that mean it wouldn't work best for the vast majority of architecture students?
Most companies, especially small companies, cannot afford to have employees on the payroll that result in a net loss for the business.
Even if your opinion is correct it is not going to work for the next 5 years unless you can explain how graduates who have "little/no experience or professional skills" will get a job competing against the 30% of experienced architectural workforce who have been laid off. Who would you hire if for $10,000 more you could get 2.5x the production from an experienced person? (Forget about top performers and artistic visionaries who will almost always succeed. This question is about the majority who are neither gifted nor incompetent)
I just remembered that I had a bad separation from an office years ago. After heaping praise on me in the year end review they insisted I switch to salary. Based on my hours OT worked the previous year, which were not optional, it was a paycut of several thousand dollars. The paycut was likely much higher due to the fact they had a meeting around the same time and were demanding 20 hours OT for the next several months from everyone. No profit sharing, no bonuses. FARQ U!
I had some regrets about the situation, but today I feel good that I didn't bend over for them. What would you think of a small office that has 40% turnover in a year including 3 different directors of the engineering department?
Unpaid internships are a joke. A guy the other week tried to offer me a job for $10/12 an hour with no benefits. And I"ve been out of college for 2 years. What a joke. I'll keep my non-arch fed-contracting job, thank you.
Personally, I prefer getting paid for not working. Example: coming up with an idea or system that you yourself don't actually implement, and then multiplying it by selling it to multiple customers (the game designers someone mentioned above kinda do this). In school this is what we are taught that architecture is, but it is not because that would detract from our geniuses reinventing the wheel model.
I've said it before, I'll say it again, if the unpaid internship isn't pumping CAD and running copies, but is a way to access the inside of a profession that is very hard to crack, in other words something that can accelerate my career instead of maintain it, I would take one.
"In school this is what we are taught that architecture is, but it is not..." If I may correct my statement, this is what we know and understand BEFORE architecture school, not during.
What ever happened to architectural drafters? The drones of the profession of yesteryear that enabled the educated experienced talented architect to do what they do best: sketch out an idea, sell it and then go home at night (and make a decent living)? Oh yeah, they go to architecture school and get Masters degrees and licenses now. Oops.
jbushkey, i don't mean this to sound obnoxious, but your point of view you describe is EXACTLY the one i take issue with.
first off, i don't think my situation is unrepresentative of most recent grads/young architects. with the exception of the few who stick with one job for many years working on very few or very similar projects, we all encounter a learning curve when moving on to different kinds of work. i don't see the point of teaching something like a specific construction technique for a specific kind of building when it will be unlikely the student will ever use it. even if he uses it 10 years later, construction technology does evolve and will probably have changed by then. and that's if he happens to even remember it.
sometimes the learning curve exists within an office, when a project happens to come along that's quite different from previous work and everyone has to scramble a bit to deal with it, or when you strike out on your own and might have to do small local projects even though your experience is in large, mixed-use foreign developments.
anyone who's done this knows it's not the end of the world...we are smart, we have skills, and we figure it out. but assumptions like the one you make, that inexperienced employees 'result in a net loss' are baseless and off the wall (if, shockingly, endemic to this profession). for one employee to result in a net loss to the firm he'd have to be napping half the day and shooting heroin in the restroom for the other half. even if he only answers the phone and never does any architectural work, which is unlikely--in my experience young architectural grads are usually eager and hardworking--he'd still be earning the receptionist's salary he's probably making anyway.
and if your estimation about the next five years is correct, which it probably is for the majority of architects, it's only because that extra 10k you're paying the more experienced guy to work 2.5x as much as the hopeless intern is an egregious underpayment for that guy's skills. (and again, the 2.5x figure is something i would seriously dispute). so the whole situation is based on EVERYONE being severely underpaid.
sad, sad, sad.
the underlying assumption behind everything you say is that the parties involved are either a) completely worthless, b) not worth much
or c) worth way less than their actual labor (2.5x the work for 10k extra). do you see what's wrong with this picture.
...and of course when i say 'you', i don't mean you personally. i know you'd never underpay your interns, or you wouldn't be on this thread. :)
I would say it's 3x the work for more like 25-40k more.
Most fresh graduates are a risky investment to firms because we all understand that what they learned in school, for the most part, can't be transferred into an office environment. Little to no knowledge of the business, practice, technicalities, etc. You're paid what your worth and we pay them very little because quite frankly, they are of very little use.
An architecture degree, what is taught most of the time in school isn't anything practical. You could hire an art student to do the average CAD monkey's work, that monkey will be there for 20 years and never get beyond being a CAD monkey, never pursue a license because they are happy being a monkey. I can't begin to tell how many times I have to check over people's work filled with ridiculous mistakes of those who came from expensive schools. It's like they might as well have hired people without any degrees.
I have worked with several ivy league monkeys who come out of Harvard- Yale - MIT, 6 of them total. One of them was good, two were really really bad, and the other three were good people-persons but terrible project managers and very bad at understanding the projects they were managing. Of those, 2 lasted more than 3 years with us. Most left school in their late twenties, some in their early thirties. The point is by this age, they are well behind the people with the BArch who have been working there since they were in their early twenties. So for all practical purposes, for those who switch careers or spent all their time in academia pursuing more degrees, it just ends making them fall behind the crowd. We even had a guy with a PhD who barely lasted 2 months. While he looked good on paper, he was a project manager who had no business being there. Just goes to show the value of an "architecture" education.
burningman, every office in every corner of this profession has someone all hard-core who buys into that particular office's way of doing things and can't possibly imagine there are other ways to do something or other things that are worth caring about. the project manager at the high-end interiors firm will think you're a useless idiot for not getting the carpet colors or molding types straight. the local law 11 guy will think you're an idiot when you're probably just bored to tears. et cetera, et cetera.
just because you happened to land somewhere doesn't make you a good fit. and not being a good fit doesn't necessarily make you worthless, no matter what ONE GUY (girl) there happens to think.
it's simple--if they're of so little use, don't hire them. give the extra 30-40k to the guy who, according to you, is doing all the work.
I wouldn't call someone an idiot who is in the learning process. I'm would, however, reserve the term for special occasions. I wouldn't call an intern learning the ropes an idiot but someone who has been in the profession for a couple of decades or someone in their thirties who just came out of a fancy school with little training AND constantly makes rookie mistakes: idiot.
Example: I worked under a very nice person but an idiot of an architect. She would hold meetings to bicker over very little things which is fine I guess, but she would ask us to move minor details- trust me these were very very minor things- but she couldn't understand simple structural issues. Anyways, these very minor visual changes had huge structural implications. The team couldn't understand why it mattered but she insisted on making the change although we tried very politely to explain to her the ramifications. This, in my definition, is an idiot. At this age, she should have "learned" little things like this somewhere along the way. Nice person, good coordinator, but idiot of an architect with an ivy league degree.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against an ivy league degree but my general observation from working with a couple hundred people with different firms, I've come to the conclusion that an architect's time is better spent at work than pursuing a redundant secondary degree under the pretense of having a leg up on everyone by getting a fancier arch degree.
the comment someone made above about draftspeople was interesting. architects used to have underlings with less education to shit all over. now they turn it onto younger versions of themselves.
does anyone here have experience at both canadian and american firms? as far as i know, in canada firms still use people with the job title of 'architectural technologists'. they get a 2-yr degree and do most of the technical detailing, etc. i'd be interested to know what this means for architects there. are the salaries better? does having a specific technical person on hand mean that not every new grad gets herded into the lowly apprentice/cad monkey role or made to feel like a loser because they can't detail that ceiling system the minute they walk in the door?
"What would you think of a small office that has 40% turnover in a year including 3 different directors of the engineering department?"
I would think it sounds just like my old design/ build firm... that chop shop was a never-ending game of musical chairs, including the CEO position... in the GOOD times.
elinor, that model of architectural technician or drafter has largely been replaced with recent grads from what I understand. I'm curious what others say though too.
Straw - I concur with your perspective. While the 'drafter' model may still exist to a very limited degree, most firms today prefer to hire the bulk of their staff with at least a Bachelor degree in Arch. In my part of the country this trend evolved from a desire to build a new pool of qualified architects from which a second, or third, generation of owners could be identified. Many firms that relied on a large pool of drafters for production found ownership transition to be highly problematic.
quizz - I worked at a fairly old fashioned firm that had arch technicians. That's how I learned CAD and how to make good con doc's! I find it curious what you say about that model lacking a pool of potential owners, I don't see it that way. At that firm, I may have had a chance to make partner (although they never asked women to be partners, nevermind). I feel that way because, frankly, there was less competition. I also worked at a firm on the opposite end of the spectrum who didn't hire anyone without an arch degree, we couldn't even have a marketing person or receptionist, we did it all. I felt that created too much incentive to not let too many of the emerging architects make it beyond cad monkey, which was pretty frustrating.
so if people with architecture degrees have for the most part supplanted trained drafters, but only a small subset can advance to full architect or partner/owner/senior manager, what are the personal traits most common among those who are able to advance?
Straw - I think the difference lies primarily with the size of the pool from which future partners might be drawn. Firms with large drafter pools and only 2 or 3 licensed, or potentially licensable, professionals can be subject to severe disruption arising from unexpected departures or deaths. I've actually seen several good firms go out of business when 1 or 2 key lieutenants left or otherwise were not available to carry the firm forward when the founders wanted, or needed, to retire.
it's tough to find people with the drive never mind the ability to run any kind of project. even harder to find someone who can lead an office.
i don't think it is actually only about bringing in clients that is important. it is also the ability to convince clients to choose you from the competition. that is a skill too, in some ways quite different from the networking side of things. not sure how to learn either of those things except through doing it.
the part where an office does a very good job with great construction documents, on time, on budget etc etc goes without saying. for myself i would prefer to do all the above with people who want to be architects rather than a coterie of technicians. i feel it makes for more flexibility. not sure if that is new way of thinking, or old?
well yes, that sounds good, but if only a percentage of those people ever gets to BE architects, then isn't that fundamentally unfair? doesn't it make more sense in principle to set some (not all) of those positions aside as technical positions? then there may not be such a mismatch between the expectations of college grads and the eventual reality that they will meet the end of the line as tech staff....after all, at the typical office, only 5-10% can reasonably hope to make it to a principal position...another 15-20% to management, and the other 70% either gets stuck or is forced to move along.
just a thought...
a grad with a 2-yr degree may be happy with a 40-50k salary....
another unpaid internship listed on the job board! this one's really shady, as it's for a graphic design intern working for two separate entities with two separate names. one is a non-profit, the other is NOT (though the name is suspiciously similar...)
now that's smart--hire your unpaid interns LEGALLY through your non-profit, then use them to also work on your profitable work, undoubtedly in the same office.
note that the email address only specifies the profit-driven venture..............
Yes, it is pretty silly to expect master's degree holders to be cad techs, yet that is exactly the unintended consequences of that model. Maybe those that aren't ambitious enough to be real architects should go to tech school and support those that actually want to be architects, freeing up the ambitious architects to do just that. I never made it to the point of bringing in clients so I can only guess as to what it takes, however I am certain it has nothing to do with cad.
many associate drafting ie. computer aided drafting programs are out there and they are packed with students. community colleges are thriving. many of these folks are good at the computer. but, they really haven't been trained to think like designers. you must remember there are many drafting positions that are not in architecture.
i don't think that most firms are looking to hire draftsmen. they are looking for people who have been trained to think like architects. of course, if you work in a firm, especially a small firm, you are going to be wearing many hats. the skill that a fresh grad is bringing these days is the knowledge of 3d and rendering. Many firms do not have people on staff who are current with this. that is because there are other things to do like getting a project done and out the door. they are looking for the fresh blood that can sit in the corner and do presentation drawings for them with the latest software (preferably done on the fresh blood's own software and laptop.)
And the person taking my blood pressure and collecting my pee sample should be an MD, dammit! I guess the medical community hasn't heard of this new model yet.
haha, beary...on the surface, i agree that design training sounds like an advantage. but in practice i've found that even design firms prefer their tech staff to not muck things up with any design ideas of their own, which leads to a lot of frustration for everyone involved. i like the idea that there could be people who cultivate and develop a body of technical knowledge over their careers...i've known people like that in the past and they were amazing.
it's tough to find people with the drive never mind the ability to run any kind of project. even harder to find someone who can lead an office.
it's even harder to find an office, where if you do have an aptitude to run projects/the firm, that is able to support you or is able to give you what you need in order to get there. You need to find the right people who can take you under their wing, and if you don't get this you'll get stuck - I know a lot of formerly talented and ambitious people who eventually give up after a string of "incompatible" work environments.
That sounds like me toaster, I "gave up" when I found something outside of architecture that matched my ambitions. Congrats to the firm owners here for getting the support they needed by hiring only arch degree holders, but as a junior project manager I never got the support I needed, I was expected to design, coordinate and document all my own projects with no support except a couple of overconfident recent grad deezignairs who tended to "contribute" by deleting required parking spaces because they wanted more green space?
first off - architects usually don't install nuts and bolts. and the structural engineer is the one who often spec's them, unless you're going for some techno/industrial-look - then I guess you'd get really specific about nuts and bolts... but often they are, in fact, someone else's problem.
although - I know many students who regularly order things from mcmaster carr - so I'm assuming they are pretty knowledgeable about nuts and bolts - even the teeny-tiny ones.
"Nuts and Bolts" was used allegorically. I guess I need to "draw a map" (another allegory)
Too many students live in a fantasy world in school. Their projects never have to deal with the inconvenience of reality. I am not saying they should do the civil engineering, but being aware that a certain number of parking spots are required seems like something you could be made aware of during a college education. I guess flying down off the cloud and asking a junior project manager about it would be looking for the normative answers and not thinking critically about the parking lot.
Pushing the envelope is good. At some point you might want to contribute to a real world project. We can't all be Archigram.
But if they're there working, should they be paid? If their efforts are worth enough to advertise for, is their work worth minimum wage at the very least?
Why architecture internships will remain paid and sometimes unpaid -
This "old school" drafting model def. Seams old school to me and having witnessed a large firm outsource drafting to drafting companies inneffectively just, to watch the PM redline with equal amount of time is just plain stupidity. Give the design to me already and we'll cut costs in half and as member of the design team we won't look like dumbasses when we don't even know what's on the drawings, oh wait let me review the drawings and take 3 days to get back to you with a letter...oh you already built it, well that wasn't on the drawings...the dwgs we didn't do because we don't draft....
I find it humorous that someone would actually think their ideas and knowledge were so advanced in architecture out of school or even a few years that they should assume underrlings that do your thinking for you? Drafting(3d modeling) is writing and thinking by simply dictating your knowledge you may actually grasp the subject is ridiculous. You know how many times in my youth I saw employers eat their words because they weren't the ones that drafted the detail...many many...boss starst talking to the contractor thinking out loud just to realize the contractor is correct and yes me standing there knew this the whole time...
Anyway, with BIM and computers now being a little more capable than providing pictures it is really silly to think with a MArch you don't need to understand these tools or capable of producing..
In short I'd hire a draftsmen out of tech school with a desire to learn about design long before I wasted money on a masters kid who can only talk about design.
And that's why UNPAID internships will continue to exist in the design professions, since most people would prefer you hired them for their ideas nevermind they can't produce anything valuable.
If you want to help OLAF do random ideas, you must work for free, because I have no guarentee your brilliance will make me rich or even pay my bills...I mean dude for all that intelligence you can't even do what a CAD monkey does and you want me to pay you!?!?
CAD monkees are worth something. Designer with "great" ideas - debatable...hence UNPAID
if someone is around, they are almost certainly contributing, and therefore deserving of pay. business is tough. people who are a detriment are not tolerated, free or not. so again, if you are worth having around at all, then you are worth paying.
Unpaid Internship? Really?
oh elinor, law, schmaw... ;)
ok, i'm done being the opposition lawyer - you all may actually start ascribing some of those things to my actual beliefs....
:-) I am generally very appreciate of your comments around these here parts Greg so no worries - we know you're a good egg.
In your "ticket to Beijing scenario," the answer is clear. The owner simply cannot afford to exist. He/She shouldn't own a firm. The risk is too high. Maybe that architect should keep his/her projects local until he or she can afford to go after those big projects. Opening up shop doesn't entitle you to success. Many small business in many different industries fail. That's life. And it's even more maddening when small start-up firms who pay their employees fail because the commission goes to the firm down the street who cuts corners and uses slave labor to succeed.
greg, the zumthor example is an an example of an outlier condition. there will always be some independently wealthy young designers with the ambition to do what it takes to work for someone like zumthor and the resources and connections to see it happen. there will also be those who lack the resources and connections but for whom the career takes precedence over all else and they make scratch and claw or schmooze their way in, perhaps taking on some serious hardship for a short duration.
there will always be these people, these outliers, and i have no problem with them or what they do.
but it is problematic if that level of commitment is necessary for any standard opportunity for work in the field. that is, it is not a sustainable industry model. it is not a model for growth and prosperity.
according to the forbes article mentioned above, this is a problem in many professions right now
I agree jmanganelli - a few wacky kids pursuing their dream (which many young folk are doing these days without benefit of working in an established firm at all) keeps our profession with at least one finger in the clouds where it belongs.
And, sorry to go political, but the Repubs are now proposing that by more people becoming unemployed the pressure on wages will go down so more people will then become employed. This failure of logic deserves the fully spelled out: What the Fuck?! Are economists living in a wackier dream world than are us Delueze-quoting architects?!?
Leave it to architects to debate something ad nauseum that pretty much anyone else outside of architecture understands as plain old common sense...if you perform WORK for someone else's benefit, then that person deserves to get paid for that WORK.
Well, it perhaps needs to be debated in some regard because it still exists in some form, as evidenced by the "Featured Job" that sparked the steam geysers in the first place. But it could be an indicator of a number of other insidious problems endemic to the practice.
Yes, indeed, if you perform work for someone, you deserve to be paid for it. But the reason this discussion exists here is because it's an acknowledged aspect of the present architectural culture that there are a multitude of places that expect their employees (or in this case, advertise for new ones) to perform a significant amount of work with no expected return in compensation.
We work in an entrepreneurial/capitalist system. The model of Entrepreneurship is one of high risk (lots of difficult, potentially uncompensated effort and expenditure) for the potential of high reward ($Cha-Ching$ - "I can go buy stuff"). This is the entrepreneur's dilemma. Do I risk it?
What seems to be happening in the architectural model of business is that the entrepreneur (business owner/partner) is happy enough to shuffle the risk off down the ladder onto those who have no stake in the potential of the high reward. Somehow, this is accepted.
And in the crunch of the past few years, the threat has been: if you don't "help us out with this..." we'll have to eliminate you. And many people enter a dynamic of working for free, solely to stay "employed". At some point, this dynamic leads to people working simply to say they have a job.
The issue of working on competitions is an entire 'nother matter. If a bunch of students get together and say, "Let's do this competition." Then they assign roles on the project, and everyone agrees to their functions on the team, and they go on to work together; then the risk/reward is borne by all of them. But that's not the professional model.
In the professional model, in its purest form, it's hierarchical. Hierarchical insofar as there's an entrepreneur or business owner who can't themselves perform all of the functions needed to reap the rewards they hope to for their idea. This is when the hired hands come in. They have no inherent stake in the "Idea Man's" success or failure. So they are compensated to participate.
And yes, profit margins in the architectural game are likely very low. Yes, the issue of assembling proposals and renderings etc. is costly in terms of outlay vs. (only potential) compensation. But is that because architects have developed a culture where they've created an expectation of overservice? Overservice in the proposal proportion of the project?
Additionally, (I'll put this out there) the computer generated nature of architectural work contributes to this negative facet of the economics of architectural practice.
The computer generated effort that goes into proposals and their content (renderings etc) tends to beef up the labor expense of the effort. And there's something of an expectation on the client's part that these things will be presented. Computer labor can be precise and efficient on a long term project. But it's terribly labor intensive on the front end. Sure once everything is plugged in and tweaked, it looks great and can be manipulated efficiently, but getting it to that point is no small task. Clients have not even the remotest of understandings of this.
Clients fail to recognize that architecture is bespoke tailoring. It's not off-the-rack.
Part of this particular issue, I would offer, derives from the cultural saturation of slick marketing perfection. The client pool are inundated with computer-generated and finely-tuned media every instant of their lives from non-architectural sources. So when Architecture wants to speak to them (in the form of the proposal), Architecture then tries to present it in this same format and syntax of graphic computer generated perfection. The problem is that there's a dynamic of inversion that's not acknowledged.
In the day to day world the client pool are part of the masses. Those masses are served by the few (businesses who deliver products and advertise, for example). When the client changes roles, and slips out of their robes as part of the masses and become individuals seeking Architectural services, they want that same level of polish and perfection to advertise to them. Architecture tries to provide that to them.
But when a video game company has 10 people design an environment that goes into the game that is then consumed by a Hundred Thousand consumers (clients), they can turn a profit. When a single client wants (expects) to be served computer generated renderings by 5 architecture firms of 10 individuals, the pyramid is inverted and the architects Lose, lose, and lose again.
Yet, somehow architecture is complicit in perpetuating this dynamic.
I'm rambling and fear I've gone wildly off-topic and/or opened another discussion entirely. But, yes - if you work - get paid. If you work and don't get paid, everyone suffers. If you employ people to do work you can't do yourself - pay them - if you don't pay them, you will suffer.
Hopefully.
So many thought provoking posts. I am surprised no one mentioned that the problem that more people want to work in architecture, often based on the unrealistic expectation that work will be just like school, than their are jobs for.
Occasionally an unpaid internship reaps huge rewards. Butler Bulldog men's basketball coach Brad Stevens is an example. After playing point guard on a Division III school, Stevens worked in the Marketing department of Eli Lilly before quitting to pursue his dream...
From Wikipedia....
In the summer of 2000, Stevens was offered the opportunity to volunteer in the Butler basketball office.[6] He ran the idea of quitting his job at Eli Lilly by then-longtime girlfriend Tracy Wilhelmy. She thought about it for two hours before telling him to go for it.[16] "Now, it looks like a great idea," Stevens later remarked. "At the time, I thought it was something I really wanted to try."[6] Tracy went back to school to get a law degree that could support the couple if things did not work out for Brad.[16] "We were 23 and realized this was our chance," Tracy later said. "Five years down the road, we were probably not going to be in a position to do that. The more success you had at Lilly, the harder it would be to leave."[16]
Stevens planned to live in a friend's basement and took a job at Applebee’s to pay the bills.[7][16] Before he started training at Applebee's, he was offered a low-paying administrative position as coordinator of basketball operations under then-coach Thad Matta.[3][6] The position had opened up when assistant coach Jamal Meeks resigned after being arrested on solicitation and drug charges, of which he was later acquitted.[7] Years later, Matta recalled, "[Stevens] was just a hungry young kid that was desperate to get into coaching. He had a great passion and was willing to take a risk to get into the coaching profession."[7]
After Matta left the school following the 2000–01 season, new head coach Todd Lickliter promoted Stevens to a full-time assistant coach.[3] Under Lickliter, Stevens was active in every aspect of the game: skills instruction, game preparation, in-game coaching, and recruiting.[3] Butler was 131–61 during Stevens' time as an assistant coach.[17]
Now he's making a cool million a year.
Elinor,
Practice based education may not have been the most ideal for your situation. Does that mean it wouldn't work best for the vast majority of architecture students?
Most companies, especially small companies, cannot afford to have employees on the payroll that result in a net loss for the business.
Even if your opinion is correct it is not going to work for the next 5 years unless you can explain how graduates who have "little/no experience or professional skills" will get a job competing against the 30% of experienced architectural workforce who have been laid off. Who would you hire if for $10,000 more you could get 2.5x the production from an experienced person? (Forget about top performers and artistic visionaries who will almost always succeed. This question is about the majority who are neither gifted nor incompetent)
Vado,
I think you have posted an extremely rare, and therefore unsuitable, example.
Compare college basketball coaching positions vs the 50,000(?) positions that were available in architecture.
How many people ever go on to make $1M salary?
Unpaid Internship? Really? is the name of thread. Therefore, my example, although rare, is quite suitable.
Sorry Vado I guess it was a bad choice of words.
I just wanted to point out that one guy who "hit the lottery" shouldn't be considered when making an informed decision about working for free.
I just remembered that I had a bad separation from an office years ago. After heaping praise on me in the year end review they insisted I switch to salary. Based on my hours OT worked the previous year, which were not optional, it was a paycut of several thousand dollars. The paycut was likely much higher due to the fact they had a meeting around the same time and were demanding 20 hours OT for the next several months from everyone. No profit sharing, no bonuses. FARQ U!
I had some regrets about the situation, but today I feel good that I didn't bend over for them. What would you think of a small office that has 40% turnover in a year including 3 different directors of the engineering department?
I just saw this on Architect magazine website.
http://www.architectmagazine.com/architects/riba-takes-a-stand-against-unpaid-labor.aspx
Unpaid internships are a joke. A guy the other week tried to offer me a job for $10/12 an hour with no benefits. And I"ve been out of college for 2 years. What a joke. I'll keep my non-arch fed-contracting job, thank you.
Personally, I prefer getting paid for not working. Example: coming up with an idea or system that you yourself don't actually implement, and then multiplying it by selling it to multiple customers (the game designers someone mentioned above kinda do this). In school this is what we are taught that architecture is, but it is not because that would detract from our geniuses reinventing the wheel model.
I've said it before, I'll say it again, if the unpaid internship isn't pumping CAD and running copies, but is a way to access the inside of a profession that is very hard to crack, in other words something that can accelerate my career instead of maintain it, I would take one.
"In school this is what we are taught that architecture is, but it is not..." If I may correct my statement, this is what we know and understand BEFORE architecture school, not during.
What ever happened to architectural drafters? The drones of the profession of yesteryear that enabled the educated experienced talented architect to do what they do best: sketch out an idea, sell it and then go home at night (and make a decent living)? Oh yeah, they go to architecture school and get Masters degrees and licenses now. Oops.
jbushkey, i don't mean this to sound obnoxious, but your point of view you describe is EXACTLY the one i take issue with.
first off, i don't think my situation is unrepresentative of most recent grads/young architects. with the exception of the few who stick with one job for many years working on very few or very similar projects, we all encounter a learning curve when moving on to different kinds of work. i don't see the point of teaching something like a specific construction technique for a specific kind of building when it will be unlikely the student will ever use it. even if he uses it 10 years later, construction technology does evolve and will probably have changed by then. and that's if he happens to even remember it.
sometimes the learning curve exists within an office, when a project happens to come along that's quite different from previous work and everyone has to scramble a bit to deal with it, or when you strike out on your own and might have to do small local projects even though your experience is in large, mixed-use foreign developments.
anyone who's done this knows it's not the end of the world...we are smart, we have skills, and we figure it out. but assumptions like the one you make, that inexperienced employees 'result in a net loss' are baseless and off the wall (if, shockingly, endemic to this profession). for one employee to result in a net loss to the firm he'd have to be napping half the day and shooting heroin in the restroom for the other half. even if he only answers the phone and never does any architectural work, which is unlikely--in my experience young architectural grads are usually eager and hardworking--he'd still be earning the receptionist's salary he's probably making anyway.
and if your estimation about the next five years is correct, which it probably is for the majority of architects, it's only because that extra 10k you're paying the more experienced guy to work 2.5x as much as the hopeless intern is an egregious underpayment for that guy's skills. (and again, the 2.5x figure is something i would seriously dispute). so the whole situation is based on EVERYONE being severely underpaid.
sad, sad, sad.
the underlying assumption behind everything you say is that the parties involved are either a) completely worthless, b) not worth much
or c) worth way less than their actual labor (2.5x the work for 10k extra). do you see what's wrong with this picture.
...and of course when i say 'you', i don't mean you personally. i know you'd never underpay your interns, or you wouldn't be on this thread. :)
I would say it's 3x the work for more like 25-40k more.
Most fresh graduates are a risky investment to firms because we all understand that what they learned in school, for the most part, can't be transferred into an office environment. Little to no knowledge of the business, practice, technicalities, etc. You're paid what your worth and we pay them very little because quite frankly, they are of very little use.
An architecture degree, what is taught most of the time in school isn't anything practical. You could hire an art student to do the average CAD monkey's work, that monkey will be there for 20 years and never get beyond being a CAD monkey, never pursue a license because they are happy being a monkey. I can't begin to tell how many times I have to check over people's work filled with ridiculous mistakes of those who came from expensive schools. It's like they might as well have hired people without any degrees.
I have worked with several ivy league monkeys who come out of Harvard- Yale - MIT, 6 of them total. One of them was good, two were really really bad, and the other three were good people-persons but terrible project managers and very bad at understanding the projects they were managing. Of those, 2 lasted more than 3 years with us. Most left school in their late twenties, some in their early thirties. The point is by this age, they are well behind the people with the BArch who have been working there since they were in their early twenties. So for all practical purposes, for those who switch careers or spent all their time in academia pursuing more degrees, it just ends making them fall behind the crowd. We even had a guy with a PhD who barely lasted 2 months. While he looked good on paper, he was a project manager who had no business being there. Just goes to show the value of an "architecture" education.
burningman, every office in every corner of this profession has someone all hard-core who buys into that particular office's way of doing things and can't possibly imagine there are other ways to do something or other things that are worth caring about. the project manager at the high-end interiors firm will think you're a useless idiot for not getting the carpet colors or molding types straight. the local law 11 guy will think you're an idiot when you're probably just bored to tears. et cetera, et cetera.
just because you happened to land somewhere doesn't make you a good fit. and not being a good fit doesn't necessarily make you worthless, no matter what ONE GUY (girl) there happens to think.
it's simple--if they're of so little use, don't hire them. give the extra 30-40k to the guy who, according to you, is doing all the work.
I wouldn't call someone an idiot who is in the learning process. I'm would, however, reserve the term for special occasions. I wouldn't call an intern learning the ropes an idiot but someone who has been in the profession for a couple of decades or someone in their thirties who just came out of a fancy school with little training AND constantly makes rookie mistakes: idiot.
Example: I worked under a very nice person but an idiot of an architect. She would hold meetings to bicker over very little things which is fine I guess, but she would ask us to move minor details- trust me these were very very minor things- but she couldn't understand simple structural issues. Anyways, these very minor visual changes had huge structural implications. The team couldn't understand why it mattered but she insisted on making the change although we tried very politely to explain to her the ramifications. This, in my definition, is an idiot. At this age, she should have "learned" little things like this somewhere along the way. Nice person, good coordinator, but idiot of an architect with an ivy league degree.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against an ivy league degree but my general observation from working with a couple hundred people with different firms, I've come to the conclusion that an architect's time is better spent at work than pursuing a redundant secondary degree under the pretense of having a leg up on everyone by getting a fancier arch degree.
the comment someone made above about draftspeople was interesting. architects used to have underlings with less education to shit all over. now they turn it onto younger versions of themselves.
Elinor,
You failed at obnoxious, maybe Rusty! could tutor you ;)
does anyone here have experience at both canadian and american firms? as far as i know, in canada firms still use people with the job title of 'architectural technologists'. they get a 2-yr degree and do most of the technical detailing, etc. i'd be interested to know what this means for architects there. are the salaries better? does having a specific technical person on hand mean that not every new grad gets herded into the lowly apprentice/cad monkey role or made to feel like a loser because they can't detail that ceiling system the minute they walk in the door?
"What would you think of a small office that has 40% turnover in a year including 3 different directors of the engineering department?"
I would think it sounds just like my old design/ build firm... that chop shop was a never-ending game of musical chairs, including the CEO position... in the GOOD times.
elinor, that model of architectural technician or drafter has largely been replaced with recent grads from what I understand. I'm curious what others say though too.
Straw - I concur with your perspective. While the 'drafter' model may still exist to a very limited degree, most firms today prefer to hire the bulk of their staff with at least a Bachelor degree in Arch. In my part of the country this trend evolved from a desire to build a new pool of qualified architects from which a second, or third, generation of owners could be identified. Many firms that relied on a large pool of drafters for production found ownership transition to be highly problematic.
quizz - I worked at a fairly old fashioned firm that had arch technicians. That's how I learned CAD and how to make good con doc's! I find it curious what you say about that model lacking a pool of potential owners, I don't see it that way. At that firm, I may have had a chance to make partner (although they never asked women to be partners, nevermind). I feel that way because, frankly, there was less competition. I also worked at a firm on the opposite end of the spectrum who didn't hire anyone without an arch degree, we couldn't even have a marketing person or receptionist, we did it all. I felt that created too much incentive to not let too many of the emerging architects make it beyond cad monkey, which was pretty frustrating.
so if people with architecture degrees have for the most part supplanted trained drafters, but only a small subset can advance to full architect or partner/owner/senior manager, what are the personal traits most common among those who are able to advance?
The ability to bring in clients, of course.
assuming one has good personal skills, is this a matter of honing them, trial and error, just going at it til you get it right?
or is there actual mentorship for developing the skill of bringing in work?
Straw - I think the difference lies primarily with the size of the pool from which future partners might be drawn. Firms with large drafter pools and only 2 or 3 licensed, or potentially licensable, professionals can be subject to severe disruption arising from unexpected departures or deaths. I've actually seen several good firms go out of business when 1 or 2 key lieutenants left or otherwise were not available to carry the firm forward when the founders wanted, or needed, to retire.
I've seen the same thing quizzical.
it's tough to find people with the drive never mind the ability to run any kind of project. even harder to find someone who can lead an office.
i don't think it is actually only about bringing in clients that is important. it is also the ability to convince clients to choose you from the competition. that is a skill too, in some ways quite different from the networking side of things. not sure how to learn either of those things except through doing it.
the part where an office does a very good job with great construction documents, on time, on budget etc etc goes without saying. for myself i would prefer to do all the above with people who want to be architects rather than a coterie of technicians. i feel it makes for more flexibility. not sure if that is new way of thinking, or old?
well yes, that sounds good, but if only a percentage of those people ever gets to BE architects, then isn't that fundamentally unfair? doesn't it make more sense in principle to set some (not all) of those positions aside as technical positions? then there may not be such a mismatch between the expectations of college grads and the eventual reality that they will meet the end of the line as tech staff....after all, at the typical office, only 5-10% can reasonably hope to make it to a principal position...another 15-20% to management, and the other 70% either gets stuck or is forced to move along.
just a thought...
a grad with a 2-yr degree may be happy with a 40-50k salary....
...and as a lot of people on here seem to agree, your standard cad job really does not require a 6-yr. master's level education.
another unpaid internship listed on the job board! this one's really shady, as it's for a graphic design intern working for two separate entities with two separate names. one is a non-profit, the other is NOT (though the name is suspiciously similar...)
now that's smart--hire your unpaid interns LEGALLY through your non-profit, then use them to also work on your profitable work, undoubtedly in the same office.
note that the email address only specifies the profit-driven venture..............
Yes, it is pretty silly to expect master's degree holders to be cad techs, yet that is exactly the unintended consequences of that model. Maybe those that aren't ambitious enough to be real architects should go to tech school and support those that actually want to be architects, freeing up the ambitious architects to do just that. I never made it to the point of bringing in clients so I can only guess as to what it takes, however I am certain it has nothing to do with cad.
many associate drafting ie. computer aided drafting programs are out there and they are packed with students. community colleges are thriving. many of these folks are good at the computer. but, they really haven't been trained to think like designers. you must remember there are many drafting positions that are not in architecture.
i don't think that most firms are looking to hire draftsmen. they are looking for people who have been trained to think like architects. of course, if you work in a firm, especially a small firm, you are going to be wearing many hats. the skill that a fresh grad is bringing these days is the knowledge of 3d and rendering. Many firms do not have people on staff who are current with this. that is because there are other things to do like getting a project done and out the door. they are looking for the fresh blood that can sit in the corner and do presentation drawings for them with the latest software (preferably done on the fresh blood's own software and laptop.)
And the person taking my blood pressure and collecting my pee sample should be an MD, dammit! I guess the medical community hasn't heard of this new model yet.
haha, beary...on the surface, i agree that design training sounds like an advantage. but in practice i've found that even design firms prefer their tech staff to not muck things up with any design ideas of their own, which leads to a lot of frustration for everyone involved. i like the idea that there could be people who cultivate and develop a body of technical knowledge over their careers...i've known people like that in the past and they were amazing.
it's even harder to find an office, where if you do have an aptitude to run projects/the firm, that is able to support you or is able to give you what you need in order to get there. You need to find the right people who can take you under their wing, and if you don't get this you'll get stuck - I know a lot of formerly talented and ambitious people who eventually give up after a string of "incompatible" work environments.
That sounds like me toaster, I "gave up" when I found something outside of architecture that matched my ambitions. Congrats to the firm owners here for getting the support they needed by hiring only arch degree holders, but as a junior project manager I never got the support I needed, I was expected to design, coordinate and document all my own projects with no support except a couple of overconfident recent grad deezignairs who tended to "contribute" by deleting required parking spaces because they wanted more green space?
That's what happens Ms Beary when schools teach Deezign and pretend that nuts and bolts are some one else's problem.
first off - architects usually don't install nuts and bolts. and the structural engineer is the one who often spec's them, unless you're going for some techno/industrial-look - then I guess you'd get really specific about nuts and bolts... but often they are, in fact, someone else's problem.
although - I know many students who regularly order things from mcmaster carr - so I'm assuming they are pretty knowledgeable about nuts and bolts - even the teeny-tiny ones.
"Nuts and Bolts" was used allegorically. I guess I need to "draw a map" (another allegory)
Too many students live in a fantasy world in school. Their projects never have to deal with the inconvenience of reality. I am not saying they should do the civil engineering, but being aware that a certain number of parking spots are required seems like something you could be made aware of during a college education. I guess flying down off the cloud and asking a junior project manager about it would be looking for the normative answers and not thinking critically about the parking lot.
Pushing the envelope is good. At some point you might want to contribute to a real world project. We can't all be Archigram.
arch students are into Sci-fi - not "fantasy." there's a HUGE difference. fantasy people are freaks.
But if they're there working, should they be paid? If their efforts are worth enough to advertise for, is their work worth minimum wage at the very least?
Why architecture internships will remain paid and sometimes unpaid -
This "old school" drafting model def. Seams old school to me and having witnessed a large firm outsource drafting to drafting companies inneffectively just, to watch the PM redline with equal amount of time is just plain stupidity. Give the design to me already and we'll cut costs in half and as member of the design team we won't look like dumbasses when we don't even know what's on the drawings, oh wait let me review the drawings and take 3 days to get back to you with a letter...oh you already built it, well that wasn't on the drawings...the dwgs we didn't do because we don't draft....
I find it humorous that someone would actually think their ideas and knowledge were so advanced in architecture out of school or even a few years that they should assume underrlings that do your thinking for you? Drafting(3d modeling) is writing and thinking by simply dictating your knowledge you may actually grasp the subject is ridiculous. You know how many times in my youth I saw employers eat their words because they weren't the ones that drafted the detail...many many...boss starst talking to the contractor thinking out loud just to realize the contractor is correct and yes me standing there knew this the whole time...
Anyway, with BIM and computers now being a little more capable than providing pictures it is really silly to think with a MArch you don't need to understand these tools or capable of producing..
In short I'd hire a draftsmen out of tech school with a desire to learn about design long before I wasted money on a masters kid who can only talk about design.
And that's why UNPAID internships will continue to exist in the design professions, since most people would prefer you hired them for their ideas nevermind they can't produce anything valuable.
If you want to help OLAF do random ideas, you must work for free, because I have no guarentee your brilliance will make me rich or even pay my bills...I mean dude for all that intelligence you can't even do what a CAD monkey does and you want me to pay you!?!?
CAD monkees are worth something. Designer with "great" ideas - debatable...hence UNPAID
if someone is around, they are almost certainly contributing, and therefore deserving of pay. business is tough. people who are a detriment are not tolerated, free or not. so again, if you are worth having around at all, then you are worth paying.
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