there's never a point at which you should stop asking for internal review - especially if you think there might be something you missed. In the better offices I've been at even the partners ask each other for feedback to make sure the design has been considered from a wide range of views.

I wouldn't expect someone with two years' experience to have the breadth of judgement to do design or detail work without revisions. If your supervisor seems condescending or snarky about it, he is probably not much good.

Red marks are not always an error or omission on your end they also reflect changes in design that need to be done, a client may want different hardware on a doors, or a site visit came up with an unexpected conflict with a ceiling detail, this is just part of the process when a project is moved from an idea to construction documents and sometimes doesn't conclude until the project is finished.  Add in consultants and there is a lot of bleeding, but this is a process and you should not panic at how much red you see, just make sure you are not seeing the same thing highlighted again and again.

No complex project will be perfect on the first try, like learning a new song on the piano you need to go through it as a practice run before you are ready for prime time.  

The real measure of ability is when you start getting RFI and later change orders from contractors, those are the real indicators of you and your team doing their due diligence and explaining the design intent accurately. 

Over and OUT

Peter N

mike: "at what point will red marks hold you back as you develop through your career"

You will start seeing major difficulties in your career if your supervisors are forced to keep red marking the same omissions or mistakes over and over again.

If you use the red-lining process as a learning experience -- and actually learn from your mistakes and change how you approach your drawings -- then your career should progress at a normal pace.

Red marks are part of the normal QA process and the expectation is that any drawing set completed by anyone at any level will most likely have things to redline.  You should stop looking at the red marks as having the purpose that they had in school and understand that they're just calling out things that a second set of eyes caught that you didn't.  Nobody ever stops getting red marks, unless they stop letting others review them.

I agree that if you tend to commit the same mistakes over and over then that can start to reflect poorly on you.  Even worse is if you have the same mistakes in subsequent sets of redlines because you didn't thoroughly fix them the first time.   

Totally normal. Our stuff goes for internal review to our QA/QC specialists after being checked by the PM and PA extensively, and they always have a ton of red marks on them. 

Given that, if you don't know how something should be detailed, your best course of action is to think through it/ look for precedents and give three different options, then discuss which one is the best.

That way, when you come to your supervisor, instead of saying, "I have a question" or "I have a problem" you can say "I have several solutions, help me pick one."

with 20 years of experience, I still want a second set of eyes on the drawings. 

yes, you need to learn from your mistakes, but you also need the QA/QC process.