How much overtime do you usually do? How is overtime perceived in your office? A necessity? A cruel reality? Unavoidable?
---
I recently became leader in a small design studio (6+pp), and we managed to turn from doing overtime on all project deliveries, to basically no overtime at all. It was one of my goals from the start and it is very satisfying to see it happen. And still receiving good appraisal from upper management.
There's been two types of overtime I've experienced, the first was that overtime results from over promising to the client how fast things can get done therefore it is the only way to meet project delivery goals at my firm, you also can't advertise it, if you do then management thinks you can meet the deadline even earlier when in reality you can still barely meet the original deadline even with an entire weekend of work. I get compensated for overtime in this scenario. The second scenario at a different firm resulted from over promising what you could deliver on a super tiny budget. Thus overtime became a way to meet budgets because those hours were hidden and not compensated. I actually was forced to put in vacation hours for time I was actually at work to meet budgets in this scenario. This was at a mega firm so it wasn't the shenanigans of a small 10 person firm. Extremely cut throat there with everyone stabbing eachother in the back. Essentially overtime seems to be the name of the game in this career, maybe if you are in a booming market where you can negioate better schedules and budgets but it seems to be a constant in my experience of architecture. As long as the "be glad your working and even have a job" mentality remains I don't see it changing.
However, OP I applaud you because I definitely think much of the overtime also could be avoided if firms fought the hoarding of work by a few experienced individuals because they are afraid to use "interns who don't know anything" so I assume your one of the few who actually know how to manage a team in this profession.
5-40 hours and it varies widely. often this is the result of not fully understanding the client's needs, the existing structural constraints, or MEP coordination revealing a major problem and scrabbling at the last minute to fix a design solution. Revit problems also can cause overtime and it comes not as a steady trickle but like an avalanche at the end of the project despite warning signs.
Revit problems also can cause overtime and it comes not as a steady trickle but like an avalanche at the end of the project despite warning signs.
The extent of the above is in direct proportion to the ability of the team with Revit - this has nothing to do with Revit experience - there are plenty of people out there who just leaned the basics and coast in trouble - HOK weeds these folks out with testing
Sometimes I would have to pull all nighters - it comes with the game - just put on some good tunes and roll with it - the pay off is getting something done rather than not - I work on Sundays a lot - doing door schedules in Revit -
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!! Really? Revit causes overtime? Because changing a sheet size, rearranging details, changing a drawing scale and drawing elevations and sections line by line with Ray lines are all soooo much faster in CAD. Just like CAD revit will have some tech issues but the time savings from items listed above more than make up for it. I'm going to just go out on a limb, you are a PM 35-45 years old and are just too lazy to learn something new so whenever the smallest issue such as someone (probably you) moving the central file to a new folder happens, " this new fangled millennial doo-dad is nothing but an irksome piece of junk."
StarchitectA I know you're not saying you are blaming the millennialist but when people do it always surprises me.
In architecture older generations harp on how the young know nothing about how to make a building yet, they are chastised about how they are to blame for so many things that are "wrong." If architecture carries this logic over to other areas of society it just doesn't seem to add up.
switching from autocad to revit probably reduced my time to delivery by 30%.
anyways. I refused to do OT work after year three. probably hindered me in terms of promotions, but I didn't care; i knew very well that i wasn't going to be working for others for more than a couple more years.
My experience with overtime and expectations of working it have come down to the office, and more particularly the project teams/studios.
I've worked in a small office where no one worked overtime except very occasionally (OT was paid at same hourly rate). I've also worked in a small office where 50-60 hours per week was nearly mandatory (OT was paid at 1.5 times hourly rate). In the large office that I work in right now, it depends on the team and sometime even the studio culture (salaried, so OT is not compensated differently).
Personally, I haven't worked more than a couple of hours of overtime per week, very occasionally, for the last two years or so. Part of it is due to studio culture. A larger part of it is due to just getting my work done effectively and efficiently. I think if most people just made themselves a rule to not work overtime, they could probably make it happen.
you are a PM 35-45 years old and are just too lazy to learn something new so whenever the smallest issue such as someone (probably you) moving the central file to a new folder happens, " this new fangled millennial doo-dad is nothing but an irksome piece of junk."
Hardly - at any rate, sooner than later you will be the "PM Dude" that will get get bowled over by Gen Z and Dynamo - because you were too lazy to learn Python
so, i've spent some time learning about these new-fangled millennial tools and found that it's ability to produce a schedule leaves much to be desired (as you probably noticed when working on a sunday trying to put together a door schedule). i said to myself, "self," i said, "how i can force revit to behave in a more appropriate manner." it seems dynamo is little more than scratch, and python? that's not really a thing in revit. wouldn't C# be the thing to learn?
can you pull that fancy parametric database out of the revit model and do something useful with it? maybe use C# or dynamo to crate a simple ordered list or some other kind of incredibly basic task that excel was able to do over a decade ago? if you did want to try something like that, would you have to pull the revit database into iss or apache or something like that first, and do some sort of php/sql/whatever type stuff?
I have no idea what words you just said. But yes I use revit for all my schedules it's actually pretty good at it, but not intuitive so yes on your first time on a Sunday afternoon wanting to go home it's probably terrible searching over blogs to find answers. But again, that stems from not knowing how to use the program which is your own fault.
I find in Revit that sloppy modeling, just like sloppy drafting in CAD, is deferring work to later in the project when it should be dealt with as you go. Nothing against Revit as it is my preferred tool but there are so many more ways things can be messed up early on.
The Cost of Quality grows as the project progresses, you actually save money taking little bits of time to ensure things are as accurate as possible upfront than latter on when you are up on your deadline.
This ideal situation is rare to find but like seeking out a unicorn it would be so awesome if you could find yourself in this position once in a while.
then 3 weeks before 95% CD everyone on the team is in finger pointing mode - "HOW COME THESE WALLS OVERLAP" "YOUR DOOR SCHEDULE IS A MESS ... YADA YADAYADA - and after the deadlines are met, time to lay off the guilty
Revit is today's Autocad - we are right back where we were - Goin Back to Maya
Ok, maybe not, but - - the real problem is too much autocad thinking has backed into and compromised BIM - it's really not Revit(Revit properly used is great) but rather "legacy practices" that have hobbled the promises of BIM efficiency
RE Overtime: I average about 45 per week, which is just slightly over the optimal efficiency level (44 hours). But with wide variance. Some weeks it's a LOT more. And for many weeks it's a straight 40. My general impression after two decades of doing this is that if I see somebody consistently putting in 50+ hour weeks, I need to intervene. Either their project is in trouble, or they are struggling (and possibly not qualified) to do their job. The occasional 60+ week comes with the territory. But sustaining that over a long period of time is a major danger signal.
RE BIM: It's really efficient and great for production phases, but a very poor design tool. I see projects that try to get into BIM (or even ... shudder ... CAD) too early consistently go off the rails and burn lots of hours, including overtime. A major reason for that is, as has been noted above, BIM is a precision tool which is optimized for linear production processes requiring integral coordination and tight tolerances. Using it in the design phase forces way too much precision and way too much over-design in order to get usable output. That makes the project design brittle and change-intolerant, which in turn results in lots of rework, and as a consequence lost profits and lots of overtime spent changing and fixing things, often with the same level of over-precision and over-design.
To get the most benefit out of BIM in the work flow, you have to use it at the appropriate time for the appropriate tasks.
So true - where I currently work, we use sketch-up and autocad for SD - BUT - going from .skp to Revit is messy - so Autodesk has come up with Formit that could be the key
That's very interesting, Xenakis. I hadn't been aware of Formit.
Having taken a cursory look at it, it lacks a lot of the important design-tool functionality of SKP (e.g. no groups/components), but it DOES look like a useful intermediate conversion tool for taking a SKP model into Revit more cleanly.
I'll probably play around with it a bit to see if it has potential. In general though, I am not a big fan of Autodesk products, which tend to be needlessly cumbersome. Even for BIM, I prefer ArchiCAD to Revit.
As a practical matter, we usually wind up rebuilding the SKP/Rhino design model in Revit when the project goes from SD to DD. It requires some repeated work, but that is also an opportunity to start with a fresh, clean model as the basis for moving forward through DD into CDs. Most designers are not as fastidious about model hygiene as I am, so a manual, blank-slate transfer is often a good thing. :)
Daniel nice work and I found as noted above by many the usual issue was the bosses over promising and not understanding the tools being used for production, which always resulted in everyone involved doing overtime............i work a lot now, more than when i was salary, consulting hourly,my own clients, or contracted... 70 hrs this week,but its all paid and i dont believe anything I do anymore is overtime, its my time, i like most my work, and don't care, although some projects can drain the life out of you.. ......when I manage people I often do not even bother redlining because generally if its software I can fix the issues in a tenth of the time. not joking. ask some 3 year kid to make a set of CD's for some small job, say 40 hrs,same work by me 4 hrs....so what i usually do is at the start of the job let them do say 20-30 hrs of work and then the day before the deadline spend a few hours cleaning up for delivery..........unfortunately I think this strategy won't work well if I want to grow. Not training anyone when I do that. Its kind of like,ok you tried,not worth explaining, I will fix it......so forcing myself to redline and think of ways to get people to think about the assignments, I feel like that may qualify as overtime. it seems highly inefficient but again for purposes of growth i should not be working on 25 projects (which I do now) but simply managine 25 projects ......but my biggest issue on vey high end work where my detailing is the shop drawings and often not achieved when the contractor is on the low end, my renderings are perfection and the entire designed and constructed assembly never been done before, i can not expect someone with less experience to deliver without rounds of review. how do you get staff to do high quality work without having overtime or killing the budget? isnt that why you are the boss because no one really else can do it? how can you be patient and feel like you are not wasting your time? (hint: this is why salaries are often so low out of school, lord knows what you will get for 40 hrs of work)
archi - because the gamut of skills in a firm with more than 10 people won't allow for an integrated workflow. asking designers to work through conceptual work in revit is asking them to get lost in the details. it takes a certain amount of knowledge (fuck experience, just know your shit) to be able to work through conceptual phases in revit without getting lost in the k-hole that is wall-types and parametric fixtures.
But more broadly, as null points out, use the tool that gets you what you want the best, fastest, most fluid way possible. That means the work process must be software agnostic.
overtime in your job
How much overtime do you usually do? How is overtime perceived in your office? A necessity? A cruel reality? Unavoidable?
---
I recently became leader in a small design studio (6+pp), and we managed to turn from doing overtime on all project deliveries, to basically no overtime at all. It was one of my goals from the start and it is very satisfying to see it happen. And still receiving good appraisal from upper management.
how is your experience?
There's been two types of overtime I've experienced, the first was that overtime results from over promising to the client how fast things can get done therefore it is the only way to meet project delivery goals at my firm, you also can't advertise it, if you do then management thinks you can meet the deadline even earlier when in reality you can still barely meet the original deadline even with an entire weekend of work. I get compensated for overtime in this scenario. The second scenario at a different firm resulted from over promising what you could deliver on a super tiny budget. Thus overtime became a way to meet budgets because those hours were hidden and not compensated. I actually was forced to put in vacation hours for time I was actually at work to meet budgets in this scenario. This was at a mega firm so it wasn't the shenanigans of a small 10 person firm. Extremely cut throat there with everyone stabbing eachother in the back. Essentially overtime seems to be the name of the game in this career, maybe if you are in a booming market where you can negioate better schedules and budgets but it seems to be a constant in my experience of architecture. As long as the "be glad your working and even have a job" mentality remains I don't see it changing.
However, OP I applaud you because I definitely think much of the overtime also could be avoided if firms fought the hoarding of work by a few experienced individuals because they are afraid to use "interns who don't know anything" so I assume your one of the few who actually know how to manage a team in this profession.
5-40 hours and it varies widely. often this is the result of not fully understanding the client's needs, the existing structural constraints, or MEP coordination revealing a major problem and scrabbling at the last minute to fix a design solution. Revit problems also can cause overtime and it comes not as a steady trickle but like an avalanche at the end of the project despite warning signs.
Revit problems also can cause overtime and it comes not as a steady trickle but like an avalanche at the end of the project despite warning signs.
The extent of the above is in direct proportion to the ability of the team with Revit - this has nothing to do with Revit experience - there are plenty of people out there who just leaned the basics and coast in trouble - HOK weeds these folks out with testing
Really? My former colleague was a BIM manager at HOK and still had troubles with some stuff...
HOK - SF? I think I worked for that guy once
Sometimes I would have to pull all nighters - it comes with the game - just put on some good tunes and roll with it - the pay off is getting something done rather than not - I work on Sundays a lot - doing door schedules in Revit -
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!! Really? Revit causes overtime? Because changing a sheet size, rearranging details, changing a drawing scale and drawing elevations and sections line by line with Ray lines are all soooo much faster in CAD. Just like CAD revit will have some tech issues but the time savings from items listed above more than make up for it. I'm going to just go out on a limb, you are a PM 35-45 years old and are just too lazy to learn something new so whenever the smallest issue such as someone (probably you) moving the central file to a new folder happens, " this new fangled millennial doo-dad is nothing but an irksome piece of junk."
In architecture older generations harp on how the young know nothing about how to make a building yet, they are chastised about how they are to blame for so many things that are "wrong." If architecture carries this logic over to other areas of society it just doesn't seem to add up.
switching from autocad to revit probably reduced my time to delivery by 30%.
anyways. I refused to do OT work after year three. probably hindered me in terms of promotions, but I didn't care; i knew very well that i wasn't going to be working for others for more than a couple more years.
My experience with overtime and expectations of working it have come down to the office, and more particularly the project teams/studios.
I've worked in a small office where no one worked overtime except very occasionally (OT was paid at same hourly rate). I've also worked in a small office where 50-60 hours per week was nearly mandatory (OT was paid at 1.5 times hourly rate). In the large office that I work in right now, it depends on the team and sometime even the studio culture (salaried, so OT is not compensated differently).
Personally, I haven't worked more than a couple of hours of overtime per week, very occasionally, for the last two years or so. Part of it is due to studio culture. A larger part of it is due to just getting my work done effectively and efficiently. I think if most people just made themselves a rule to not work overtime, they could probably make it happen.
StarchitectAlpha
Revit doesn't cause overtime and I'm pretty fast with it - and I'm not a PM - what caused OT is a stack of redlines from PAs/PMs - design issues
you are a PM 35-45 years old and are just too lazy to learn something new so whenever the smallest issue such as someone (probably you) moving the central file to a new folder happens, " this new fangled millennial doo-dad is nothing but an irksome piece of junk."
Hardly - at any rate, sooner than later you will be the "PM Dude" that will get get bowled over by Gen Z and Dynamo - because you were too lazy to learn Python
so, i've spent some time learning about these new-fangled millennial tools and found that it's ability to produce a schedule leaves much to be desired (as you probably noticed when working on a sunday trying to put together a door schedule). i said to myself, "self," i said, "how i can force revit to behave in a more appropriate manner." it seems dynamo is little more than scratch, and python? that's not really a thing in revit. wouldn't C# be the thing to learn?
can you pull that fancy parametric database out of the revit model and do something useful with it? maybe use C# or dynamo to crate a simple ordered list or some other kind of incredibly basic task that excel was able to do over a decade ago? if you did want to try something like that, would you have to pull the revit database into iss or apache or something like that first, and do some sort of php/sql/whatever type stuff?
I have no idea what words you just said. But yes I use revit for all my schedules it's actually pretty good at it, but not intuitive so yes on your first time on a Sunday afternoon wanting to go home it's probably terrible searching over blogs to find answers. But again, that stems from not knowing how to use the program which is your own fault.
I just hijacked this thread, sorry, for the sake of the OP I concede, revit is terrible and useless. Now go back to talking about OT.
StarchitectAlpha
Actually I know Revit pretty well - I just have a large volume of work to do - changes from friday night at 11pm
back to OT, - I average about 8 - 10hrs, I'm salaried now ....after 6.5 years
I find in Revit that sloppy modeling, just like sloppy drafting in CAD, is deferring work to later in the project when it should be dealt with as you go. Nothing against Revit as it is my preferred tool but there are so many more ways things can be messed up early on.
The Cost of Quality grows as the project progresses, you actually save money taking little bits of time to ensure things are as accurate as possible upfront than latter on when you are up on your deadline.
This ideal situation is rare to find but like seeking out a unicorn it would be so awesome if you could find yourself in this position once in a while.
Peter Nomad
then 3 weeks before 95% CD everyone on the team is in finger pointing mode - "HOW COME THESE WALLS OVERLAP" "YOUR DOOR SCHEDULE IS A MESS ... YADA YADAYADA - and after the deadlines are met, time to lay off the guilty
Revit is today's Autocad - we are right back where we were - Goin Back to Maya
Ok, maybe not, but - - the real problem is too much autocad thinking has backed into and compromised BIM - it's really not Revit(Revit properly used is great) but rather "legacy practices" that have hobbled the promises of BIM efficiency
xenakis - the sky is falling!!
back to my wall details
RE Overtime: I average about 45 per week, which is just slightly over the optimal efficiency level (44 hours). But with wide variance. Some weeks it's a LOT more. And for many weeks it's a straight 40. My general impression after two decades of doing this is that if I see somebody consistently putting in 50+ hour weeks, I need to intervene. Either their project is in trouble, or they are struggling (and possibly not qualified) to do their job. The occasional 60+ week comes with the territory. But sustaining that over a long period of time is a major danger signal.
RE BIM: It's really efficient and great for production phases, but a very poor design tool. I see projects that try to get into BIM (or even ... shudder ... CAD) too early consistently go off the rails and burn lots of hours, including overtime. A major reason for that is, as has been noted above, BIM is a precision tool which is optimized for linear production processes requiring integral coordination and tight tolerances. Using it in the design phase forces way too much precision and way too much over-design in order to get usable output. That makes the project design brittle and change-intolerant, which in turn results in lots of rework, and as a consequence lost profits and lots of overtime spent changing and fixing things, often with the same level of over-precision and over-design.
To get the most benefit out of BIM in the work flow, you have to use it at the appropriate time for the appropriate tasks.
gwarton
So true - where I currently work, we use sketch-up and autocad for SD - BUT - going from .skp to Revit is messy - so Autodesk has come up with Formit that could be the key
http://formit360.autodesk.com/?gclid=CLnxpZ_z6sgCFYmrfgodOgABGg&gclsrc=ds
That's very interesting, Xenakis. I hadn't been aware of Formit.
Having taken a cursory look at it, it lacks a lot of the important design-tool functionality of SKP (e.g. no groups/components), but it DOES look like a useful intermediate conversion tool for taking a SKP model into Revit more cleanly.
(http://whatrevitwants.blogspot.com/2015/06/better-sketchup-to-revit-conversion-via.html)
I'll probably play around with it a bit to see if it has potential. In general though, I am not a big fan of Autodesk products, which tend to be needlessly cumbersome. Even for BIM, I prefer ArchiCAD to Revit.
As a practical matter, we usually wind up rebuilding the SKP/Rhino design model in Revit when the project goes from SD to DD. It requires some repeated work, but that is also an opportunity to start with a fresh, clean model as the basis for moving forward through DD into CDs. Most designers are not as fastidious about model hygiene as I am, so a manual, blank-slate transfer is often a good thing. :)
Daniel nice work and I found as noted above by many the usual issue was the bosses over promising and not understanding the tools being used for production, which always resulted in everyone involved doing overtime............i work a lot now, more than when i was salary, consulting hourly,my own clients, or contracted... 70 hrs this week,but its all paid and i dont believe anything I do anymore is overtime, its my time, i like most my work, and don't care, although some projects can drain the life out of you.. ......when I manage people I often do not even bother redlining because generally if its software I can fix the issues in a tenth of the time. not joking. ask some 3 year kid to make a set of CD's for some small job, say 40 hrs,same work by me 4 hrs....so what i usually do is at the start of the job let them do say 20-30 hrs of work and then the day before the deadline spend a few hours cleaning up for delivery..........unfortunately I think this strategy won't work well if I want to grow. Not training anyone when I do that. Its kind of like,ok you tried,not worth explaining, I will fix it......so forcing myself to redline and think of ways to get people to think about the assignments, I feel like that may qualify as overtime. it seems highly inefficient but again for purposes of growth i should not be working on 25 projects (which I do now) but simply managine 25 projects ......but my biggest issue on vey high end work where my detailing is the shop drawings and often not achieved when the contractor is on the low end, my renderings are perfection and the entire designed and constructed assembly never been done before, i can not expect someone with less experience to deliver without rounds of review. how do you get staff to do high quality work without having overtime or killing the budget? isnt that why you are the boss because no one really else can do it? how can you be patient and feel like you are not wasting your time? (hint: this is why salaries are often so low out of school, lord knows what you will get for 40 hrs of work)
Wait...are you guys using Revit to conceptual your designs? .....
Why would you bring SketchUp into Revit normally anyhow? . ..
Xenakis - Sorry should of added London, he was in charge of transitioning all of HOK worldwide into "BIM".
archi - because the gamut of skills in a firm with more than 10 people won't allow for an integrated workflow. asking designers to work through conceptual work in revit is asking them to get lost in the details. it takes a certain amount of knowledge (fuck experience, just know your shit) to be able to work through conceptual phases in revit without getting lost in the k-hole that is wall-types and parametric fixtures.
Revit conceptual tools suck.
But more broadly, as null points out, use the tool that gets you what you want the best, fastest, most fluid way possible. That means the work process must be software agnostic.
lol...k-hole..no shit...revit+architecture= Worst drug on Earth!
Ive seen ppl turn into things that look like Jabba the Hut in ten years of use on revit+architecture...
jabba got leia into a gold bikini, and bubba fett answers to him. so, jabba might not be a bad thing to be....
lets see, I've been using Revit for 10 years (arch school and real world) - And still thin as a Col Erase red pencil
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