Hey now, I have some family who had that arrangement, and the policy was always that the employees get paid first, and the boss eats ramen if necessary.

That definitely does not sound like the case of the OP

Totally.

Listen, this profession is largely thankless, unhealthy, unhelpful, and generally not worth it, put that in context of your situation, and you have a direction you should move on. Of, course this is coming from an architect two cocktails in, 25 plus in the profession, and is only now hitting mid $100k.

Mid 100k is crazy low. Talk to your boss.

I know. When I started in this profession, I was making $20k.

Mid 100k = 150k? Is that too low for 20+ years in the biz? IN that case I need to talk to my boss too..

Ya Im also confused, is mid-100 = 105, or 150 ?

Ya'll freedom dollars and salaries are strange to me. 150k loonies is tech bro range in my area (and I'm in a tech bro hub). 150k USD is over 200k loonies and no arch is making that type of cash unless they are owners in a large firm... Hurray for free things in the dirty communist north!

In mid-large firms in NYC that are PROFITABLE, $150k is a reasonable salary for someone 15+ years experience.

NS, to your point, yeah Canadian salaries may be lower on paper, but probably afford a much better quality of life compared to the US

Tell me about. Good
Poutine ain’t cheap tho.

$130k

Learning and experience are only valuable IN ADDITION TO and not IN LIEU OF monetary compensation. There should be no exceptions to this.

I agree. Find a new firm that you can work WITH.

Even in some fairly large cities, this profession is a pretty small pond - meaning the firm you're at probably has a reputation already well-known among other firms. They probably won't care about your short tenure there and some may even respect you more for it.

wouldn't expect anything less than someone stuck in the year 2000.

Oh hush Rob. 

Your work experience . . . 14 firms in 21 years with half of them being rendering positions, then you had to start your own 'firm'. People shouldn't be taking advice from you on this.

Don’t listen to this top tosser, anyone who types as if they’re having a stroke shouldn’t be listened to.

Even if the pay is higher or the work fancy and interesing I don't think it would be worth it.

All federal and provincial staff salaries above 100k CAD are published annually in my market. Full name + salary + benefits + position. The amount of 100k+ public sector drones is astonishing, if not disturbing. Several in the planning and building services are in that bracket but then again... it's a sole-crushing dreadful place to work since most just do the bare minimum for that sweet sweet pension. I've openly stated that it's career suicide to get into that space.

i fail to see what's wrong with a professional making 125k a year, given the cost of housing, food, medical care, etc etc. making shit in the private sector shouldn't preclude others from trying to make a decent wage with actual benefits.

maybe canada is different; while there are the stereotypical types described who do the bare minimum here in the states, i also personally know many, many public sector works who work incredibly hard and do great work. generalizations like this are intellectually lazy.

but here we are pointing fingers at people who in the grand scheme of things make marginally more instead of the wealthy (many of whom are our clients...) who are truly bankrupting everyone.

I have to agree with square. People are pointing fingers and saying how dare you make so much and just suck it up, work harder, it's the way this industry is. I'm flabbergasted by such comments.

It's pathetic. 

I have yet to see anyone in the public sector worth their 6-figures unless they are super-specialized. More and more, the public sector hires-out to the private sector because very few on staff (even at 100+) are able to handle day to day things in my market (mostly federal) in the construction and building management side of things. Most of them complain because their compensation is published and searchable by anyone. Dude, you make 130k working 30hrs a week pushing paper between other departments. STFU and take my tax dollars.

Yeah but that's in Canadian . . . the public sector people I know don't make six figures. One of my friends (health department, has Phd in chemistry) makes around $65k a year USD.

i know a lot of very competent people here in nyc that work in the public sector and make over six figures. you need to look harder, or make better friends. but like chad i also know lots of equally competent people doing good public service and making shit money.

eod you sound bitter and borderline curmudgeony - this "paper pusher" really isn't the problem, at least the kind that really matter. again i ask why so much ire and punching down within the profession/industry?

misery salaries don't get good people in places where the cost of living is high

square - That's NYC. Even in government jobs you get a cost of living increase based on where you live.  My friend was asked to relocate to Denver.  Her pay would of increased 30% for the move. She wouldn't of made any more money though as the cost if living is about 45% higher in Denver than GJ.  

I live in an area with a population of around 150,000 people.

NYC population is around 8.8 million

I can't imagine what the cost of living increase would be for living in NYC vs GJ.

agreed chad - responding to ns, that was confusing.

To add to my comment(s) above, the main goal of the Canadian public sector is to employ people and since I live in the capital, I find more than 50% of the population works in one way or another for the feds with many households have 2 6-figure fed income. The amount of excess spending on public sector salaries (relative to the importance or expertise required for the job) is absurd, hence the nature of my comment. Just because one sector is overpaid (in my case) does not mean another is underpaid especially since funds are unlimited in the public sector. 

There was a time where I could have got a 50% salary bump easy just by walking into the public sector building department but I'd have only a fraction of the career I have now.

Why exactly is the "paper pusher" not the problem? My said acquaintance, they themselves claim to work from 730 am to 330 pm and not a second more. They walk across to the starbucks 3 times a day with their colleagues, and this is all on my dime. Your friends in NYC may be working much harder square, but these (City of LA) architects do jack and get paid well. During the pandemic they even received "hazard pay" to go to work, which was double their actual rate.  I hope you saw the 50k in benefits, which is astounding, lets not forget the 5 weeks Paid time off.

Also, I would readily publish the Transparent California extracts, but that would be super dickish.

But I do agree with the soul crushing nature of the job and having to put up with said colleagues. And I think its intellectually lazier to say that "we should all be working for said government jobs".

I'm going to heavily side with NS here. Maybe it's a Canadian thing, but I've met a total of one governmental employee whom I'd consider great at their job - and she left for the private sector because she couldn't handle the incompetence of her co-workers. I've worked with one provincial employee for ten years now - and by last count, that person is on their fourth department. How can anything get done - let alone improve - with all that job hopping?

About three years ago, a group of private citizens in my city hired a private investigator to find out why building inspectors were taking so long - or not showing up at all. They didn't have to look far - several were caught having hours-long lunches, going home after clocking in in the morning... One guy was caught shopping at Home Depot, others got caught shoveling snow at their rental properties. In the end, the entire permit department was fired. I'm not exaggerating. Feel free to search.

Sorry, all inspectors were fired. I think all but one permit reviewer was fired, and he quit within six months due to stress.

I do not think it is a Canadian problem at all. I know a fine specimen who worked as a building inspector in Fremont CA (medium sized town I guess). He owned 2 Denny's as well, and would clock-in in the morning, then go around to "manage" his restaurants, show back up around 4pm and clock our. He even implored me to leave private practice and join him (probably so he could buy another Dennys).

Sorry square, do you work in the building department? I have yet to come across anyone who actually thinks those guys put any work at all compared to the vast majority of us.

There's a lot of issues but it's the people making noise at the public meetings or otherwise in person that is heard. If you probably noticed, those people are often retirees, trust fund benefiters or in someone in real estate development or lawyers. These people are often the type that don't want their money spent on these unhoused people because from their perspective, they are lazy worthless drug and alcohol-abusing trashy criminals. The expression basically conveys their thoughts whether expressed or not. They just want them picked up like trash and dumped off somewhere else. They are trash in their eyes. Lack of compassion even though there is a significant part of the chronically homeless that do have a criminal record, known record of drug abuse, drug dealing, alcohol abuse, abusive/violent behavior, trespassing, and so forth. This portion of the unhoused is a significant factor in what gets in the way of these people being compassionate for those that are not them in the unhoused population. I'm conveying the uncomfortable truth even to what may be distasteful candidness. We know their is more to it but this isn't what most people are comfortable even looking into so no one fixes the problems which is messy with no real or clear good guy or bad guy in the narrative.

Rick, I think you're in the wrong thread bud

Perhaps.

no, i work at a private office. the original comment was about gov't employees, and like i said i know many who are involved in the building industry who work hard and are incredibly competent. you all are just depending on your own anecdotes as evidence, when there are plenty of contradictory examples.

i just find this strange because "the problem" being described is just someone complaining about something loosely related to this thread - it's more of an agenda coming through. 

and again, i find this problem to be a very minimal problem compared to actual real crises in our industry..

Thanks for the anecdote, square ;-)

@b_b, NS, SOD... be the change you wish to see in the world :) If government jobs are so cushy, understaffed, and work less competitively than you do in private practice, then it sounds like y'all have a niche to fill. Otherwise you're just complaining about employees who are likely understaffed, overworked, and constantly blocked by the hydra of bureaucracy.

^Why tho? I realize that my pov is mostly a Canadian one given our propensity to subsidize everything, but having fewer expert in the public sector means more work for me. Note that the pov I expressed above is also held by a large % of the public sector too. Why is the bloody fuck would I want to participate in that dead-end corridor?

I really don't understand this conversation. Has anyone here actually worked in a government agency?

lots of boomer vibes here complaining about gov't and nothing else. 

for with it's worth, don't get me started on management in private-sector architecture..

My dad used to work as a supervisor for the city until he retired. From his perspective (and many of my friends who work in city planning and permitting offices), much of the work they do follows strict and heavily bureaucratized checklists, which often hampers their ability to quickly and efficiently respond to architects. Then there's the newer online database systems they use to process permit applications, which is very limited in what they can and cannot accept, how they submit review comments, etc. A lot of the work (and lack thereof with its inefficiencies) done by government agencies in permitting is a direct result of order-of-operations, chain of command, and terrible logistical software.

I worked for the provincial government for a year. I've told this story many times, possibly even here. I would show up at work, do 2 to 3 hours of work, and then sign out to do "research" at the "library" which is what everyone else did (I learned it from my co-workers). I put in a solid 3 months of work over that year. I did enjoy some of it, but the pace is excruciating. In my daily job I work with a lot of developers and I like that pace much better, that's my own comfort zone

I briefly worked for one of the federal offices that NS interacts with (I'm actually 95% certain we may have crossed paths at that time through that role). I came into it with a lot of positivity and eagerness to learn as a fresh graduate. After that experience my opinion shifted pretty closely to what NS describes. I couldn't understand what most of the people actually did; no one was particularly busy in any way from my perspective of it yet everyone on my floor was on the sunshine list. Multiple hour long coffee breaks was the norm, always outside of the office. One person considered their commute time as part of their working hours, on the basis that they sometimes traveled to sites for work, therefore commute times (not just there/back) was part of the job. I left after a few months.

sure. these positions are real, and there are people (including some on this thread) who abuse the system. but they're not entirely representative. and i know plenty of private sector architecture offices that waste loads of time but instead work their employees unnecessarily long and pay them shit (see any number of threads on this....). at least the govt jobs are providing people with good pay, benefits and job security; private sector architecture usually can't say the same. every industry/sector has its issues.

Square, following up on Bench's post above, I can say with a straight face and without exaggeration that 50% of the public service "jobs" serve as nothing more than to employ people. You could can 50% tomorrow and there would be no noticeable decrease in service. In fact, I would bet there would be an increase because then those who remain would have to actually work for their jobs instead of just coasting it until retirement. Private-sector Canadians should be ashamed at the resources wasted on public sector "jobs" just for the sake of jobs.

So your solution to redundant or lacking work roles is to... fire 50% of the people and force the other 50% to pick up their slack, while also shaming the public sector? Yeah that sounds like a reasonable response to late-stage capitalism.

^There is no slack to pick up.

ns my whole problem with your position is the sweeping generalization based on a small sample size.. where's the evidence for this 50% claim? do you do your own research on the side? you've also dogged the criticisms about private practice, which is no utopia, but you clearly have an interest in complaining about one and defending the other.

Our previous governor felt the same as you, Non, and drastically reduced the number of state employees. The result was chaos--nothing getting done, federal grants going unused, I can't even list how disruptive it was. I don't disagree that many government employees are incompetent and unnecessary, but that's true in any big business. (Even most small businesses have at least one employee like that...)

I think ya'll grossly underestimate the glut and unnecessary triplication of "jobs" across the Canadian fed departments Bench and I reference. I very firmly stand by my comment since it comes from frirst hand experience over a decade of working with various groups and living in a city with about 60% employed in one way or another with the feds.

Private sector may not be a utopia but at least there is value and purpose to what I do.  I know many many people who just want the paycheck and go home at 3.  Fine, but I can't work in an environment where people just float aimlessly with nothing important or challenging to work on while they wait for their next "promotion" or their next 6 month "stress leave" or whatever.   

steps down from soapbox.  

it would depend on which 50% you got rid of. if you get rid of the people who can actually do the work, you're not going to have a good time. if you get rid of the 50% who slow down the rest, things might go better but you'll still need some kind of social services to take care of them.

Curt, it's not about social services, it's about all those in the hundreds of random departments in between other departments. 15 people groups and 3 months to do the work one person could with 2hrs type of thing.

the private sector wouldn't be able to absorb the significant job loss of people unable to contribute to their workplace.

Private sector may not be a utopia but at least there is value and purpose to what I do.

this is so laughable man, sorry... i'm glad it's true for you, but there's too many assumption to break down but the first and foremost being that one can only find value in purpose in a specific type of work, let alone allowing work to be the sole definer of purpose in doing in life. other have different approaches..

 if i didn't know better i'd label you a staunch follow of regan (or the canadian equivalent).

^spent 8 minutes in a project meeting with one of these groups and you'll turn 180degrees quickly.

Try spending five minutes with a school board . . . . you'll value how on task and decisive government is.

i've spent plenty of time working with govt agencies.. some are a pain, but most are quite important to the work our office does.