No it's like someone joining the marines and the general says, hmm the market for marines is saturated we're not going to use any air support, why be efficient with our man power?

archiwutm8 - Got it. By a quick online cost of living query, looks like 70k in London goes about as far as 50k in Oregon.

It's all business model , my old boss paid his employees more than himself and his business was very successful, it is generating millions every year.

If I could use Revit, and be allowed to hire an ITT drafter I would destroy our deadlines, with that extra time lets figure out what other services we can provide, move consultant work back in house. But I'm a dumb college student and this is how everything has always been done so shut up and sit down and go back to my key noting

Tduds - is that good or bad?

Good for both of us I'd say.

Just remarking that 70k on paper seems like so much, but compared to cost of living, you & I are on about the same page. So I'd say we're both doing alright for ourselves.

If you were making 70k Pounds, that would seem uncommonly high.

I hope to get to 70K gbp in two years if everything goes the way I plan.... I'm already earning more than double my architect peers which tbh is pretty sad as I work less hours. Architecture just feels so wrong for people that work so long.

Good luck to you in whatever you're doing!

I feel lucky to have found a company that not only pays me decently, but actually respects my life-balance. More firms need to embrace the fact that healthy happy workers are better for productivity.

I have a cousin in the banking industry and he makes 7 figures or is it 8?

Honestly, beyond another 10-20k, which I'll get once I'm licensed, I don't really care about making that amount of money. I'm content.

Decent pay, food life balance and keeping me interested is good for me. If I'm hating my job I want to be compensated

StarchitectAlpha said

I don't think that even gets you ahead, now that's just mandatory to not get fired. My GF put it perfectly, "the only people I know who work as hard as you do are either going for a promotion or are working on their own company, your expected to work that much just to keep your crappy job." Xenakis proves my point of a culture that thinks working weekends is mandatory just to be accepted. When everyone is working through the weekend  there is something wrong with delegation of tasks and budgeting of time/ billing hours.

No it's like someone joining the marines and the general says, hmm the market for marines is saturated we're not going to use any air support, why be efficient with our man power?

Bingo.

oddly, the ones I know/knew making over 75k before 30 were the ones not working long nights and weekends.  not sure if it was efficiency or learning high billing tasks. also combined with being in well run businesses.

Sure I make a fraction of what my cousin makes - but - Id rather be doing what i'm doing than doing what he does - he lives in NYC, works in wall street and spends most of his time in 777 somehwere

Xenakis said

Sure I make a fraction of what my cousin makes - but - Id rather be doing what i'm doing than doing what he does - he lives in NYC, works in wall street and spends most of his time in 777 somehwere

I like how someone on this forum recently referred to this phenomenon as similar to Stockholm Syndrome.

I'd be very interested to see if the early childhoods of aspiring architects/ architectural school students predisposed them to Stockholm Syndrome within the confines of the profession.

Ought to be researched/ studied.

I'm curious just how awful the average intern work-day really is. The way the chatter around here goes you'd think every architect is pulling 90 hour weeks for 36k a year, but this has never been my experience and currently most of my peers in my city are working pretty typical 9-5 / 8-6 days. I think I was stuck here until 8pm once... I can't remember the last time i had to put in more than 50 hours.

Are you all actually working this much, or just latching onto some isolated horror stories from OMA in 2005 and applying it to the profession?

Tduds, 

Same here,  don't remember last time I worked over 50 hrs in a week. 

It really just depends on the studio my friend was doing 8AM till 11PM in her place.....and got paid minimum wage with no overtime pay....it was dreadful.

I wanna be somebody

now get back to work.

oddly, the ones I know/knew making over 75k before 30 were the ones not working long nights and weekends.  not sure if it was efficiency or learning high billing tasks. also combined with being in well run businesses.

I think it's all of those - plus being capable of asking for what you think you're worth.

All structural engineers do is basically applied, they don't have to figure anything out from scratch and most of them are now over shadowing the architectural field. It's easy to make calculations with pre-existing formulas available for you, but switch the tables and highly doubt a structural engineer would have the patience to execute half the things an architect or architectural technologist has to go through.

They're just a fragment of the process so I understand why it’s questionable. Most of these comments are arrogant but it’s sad because most structural eng won’t have a job without an architect instigation.

My advice it, Architects and Designer should adapt, take a further step to learn structural engineering, we're already used to detailing, just need to understand the mathematical and applied side of it, most of the stuff is standard, with pre-existing datasheets, and its not rocket science.

Better math skills so they can perhaps be better at number stuff like finances and financial management which is crucial for better pay and better and more financially sustainable business operations.

That's my snarky asshole response.