A few years ago, I left the confines of my Midwestern upbringing with 10 years of architectural experience under my belt and the bootprint of a layoff on my backside. Feeling burnt and burnt-out, I headed for greener pastures, thinking a cultural shift might improve my lot in life. I was connected by a friend to a firm in what I will call “Wonderland,” to protect myself and avoid any repercussions asking the questions I’m about to ask might have on my (mostly-healed) backside.
Things were all hunky-dory at first, aside from cultural peculiarities here and there that took some adjustment from the norms of 34 years prior lifespan. However, the more responsibility I was given and loaded up to full PM status once again, the more things I started running into that were (wildly) different professionally from my prior 10 years experience. I’ve started asking a lot of questions of a lot of people, and expressing my concern that things aren’t being done within what I once knew as “the professional standard of care,” and been told more than once that either I should adjust to the situation, or gently warned that I’m getting too close to rocking the boat.
So, I’m asking folks on here, if any of these things are “normal” in any other U.S. jurisdictions:
Building permits taking over a year to acquire (which I know is prevalent in a few other large and highly developed urban places, but feels excessive due to the large number of “overreach” review comments and multiple rounds of review)
FBI investigations into permit reviewers and architects for bribery
Architects still offering bribes to permit reviewers despite the local media attention on the FBI investigation
Consulting engineers consistently missing code-required scope items at the beginning of projects
Consulting engineers not knowing how to use their hardcopy-printed code books correctly
Permit review engineers not knowing how to use their hardcopy-printed code books correctly, or reference city ordinances for local code amendments correctly
Permit drawings required to be in a specific numbering format that does not match national CAD standards
Specification writers claiming that air barriers are a “conspiracy”
Consulting engineers saying right in front of the client rep “oh, we don’t know anything about XYZ” (XYZ being the reason they’re on the team as the subject-matter-expert)
State and local government code and other regulatory documents posted online being 10 years out of date, with no clear indication of who to contact for the up-to-date version
Engineers waiting for the client to tell them how to solve a design problem
Three years total to get demolition of two small abandoned historic buildings completed
Two years and counting (not bid out yet) to get a new roof put on an occupied historic building with trees growing out of the third floor
State-mandated current ICC code adoption two years after publication date at state level, and then adoption by local governments mandated by the state to be two years after that
Permit reviewers requesting project titles be changed
Zoning reviews requesting standard information be removed from drawings if not being changed by the project
Zoning reviews requesting Zoning Department disclaimers be put on drawings by Designer of Record before approval
Utility company dictating placement, size, and color of bollards protecting transformers, rather than leaving liability for protecting transformers on property owners
The list above is only partial and constantly expanding, with things that either make me scratch my head or run completely opposite of my prior experience and make my job much harder than it needs to be. I did not expect that liberally defending what little regulation exists in the Midwest would scale to making me sound like an anarchist libertarian here in Wonderland. I also didn’t expect that a bunch of folks only one or two generations removed from life down on the farm and still living adjacent to cattle pastures would be much more professional and expert than people living in a cosmopolitan metropolis with the potential to draw in the cream of the crop from all over the world.
Thoughts welcomed, as I am so fed up some days I am tempted to risk tipping off local journalists to start using Google to make comparisons to elsewhere before they just take local excuses at face value…
I appreciate the satirical literary tools at use here, and have experienced many but not all of these in some fashion during my journey to the coast. Wait till the AI removes what little education was there before. Everyone's going to get less informed and more cocksure.
This fine profession has been under siege for thirty years - the trade organization AIA and their puppet NCARB wanted to restrict the number of architects which they did by requiring a Masters in Architecture from a NCARB list of schools - in the 70's and 80's the only consulting engineer was a structural engineer who often sealed the drawings created by the architect's office - we would do all the other engineering because we knew how - now the plan checkers just want to see a fully-stamped set of drawings - I have associates who have left the field because consulting engineers have raised their rates to 70-80% of the A/E fee - I actually have little sympathy because architect's themselves let it incrementally happen - the old frogs in the boiling pot saga - sad ...
I get the literary humor. You haven't been around long enough to understand the time it all takes.
Unfortunately it doesn't translate well into professional humor. Somethings take time. Honestly this post looks like a young architect trying to hang his employer in Wonderland. My best advise is to get your emotional shit together before carrying on with this profession. Your ideals are not meeting the world. Now there's something to think about.....
"The time it all takes" was two to four weeks to get a building permit in my former jurisdictions. In a similar 3 year period (my time here) I had three projects for renovations on seven different buildings go from drawings to construction complete. And those are just the projects I was directly responsible for, not everything I was working on. So, my question is about comparing project inception to construction complete timelines between the Midwest and elsewhere.
I'm not trying to hang my employer, I'm not sure what gave that impression when most of my points of comparison are about engineering consultants and our dear dysfunctional state and local government. I expect the flow of business to generally run smoother in "red" states vs. "blue" states due to the bureaucratic and regulatory gradient, but the permitting process here is starting to put a crimp in the local economy because nothing can get built, a constant housing shortage is causing the state to lose population, and most smaller projects are being built without permits, all of which means the local media is putting more and more of a focus on the issue. If I'm trying to hang anyone, it's certainly not my employer. We don't want anything to do with unpermitted work, but some of our clients have emergency projects and are not going to wait around, so I'm doing everything I can to pull a permit out of a hat.
As far as my "ideals" go, my ideals right now are simply not having to constantly make up excuses to clients about why it's taking so long to get a building permit when review comments are legitimately about missing code or other regulatory required work/drawings/formatting/information, or why we're charging them more now for code-required scope that should have been included at the beginning. The architects who trained me wouldn't of tolerated much of that, and the engineers we worked with never gave me any reason to doubt their thoroughness.
What I'm trying to determine with this forum thread, dear reader, is if I was trained up in a Midwestern firm and cadre of engineers that was just a fluke of like-attracts-like autistic perfectionism, or if there really are major professional standards differences from one geographic area to another in the USA.
If the former, I'll shut my yap, and if the latter...there's bigger issues going on that I'm not going to solve alone, so I'll also shut up, but be better informed.
When my old firm bought out a small California one, a guy there quit immediately because he'd had a bad cultural experience in the past being taken over by Midwesterners...and working here in "Wonderland" now, puts his issue into perspective.
I'm certainly treated far better culturally and financially here than I was in the Midwest, and there's no unwritten expectation that an effective project manager works a minimum of 50 hours a week, which led to my complete burnout back there. But, as I told one of my coworkers after a particularly difficult episode of various hassles, "there's a difference between laid-back and lax, and a lot of people in this state seem to struggle with that distinction." You can be effective and knowledgeable and not make major QC mistakes, and working a 60+ hour week isn't the requirement to achieve that. Professional excellence and work/life balance is not an either/or, on/off choice.
answering your first post, only #1 applies where I live, which is not where our projects are. County and City have become unsufferable with requirements and are so understaffed that all permits are taking more than a year, no matter what building size or complexity. The town where we have all our projects is adjacent, and since 2020 has started to change in the same direction, but slowly. All the other issues you mention are pretty bad, bordering illegal.
Chronic understaffing, public and private, is definitely an issue here. But, the permit reviewers aren't doing themselves any favors by doing QC on drawings that are rushed to permit to "get it in line" as quickly as possible. I wouldn't of ever expected a Midwestern permit review to call out minor drawing set coordination errors. I would of only had the final stomach-cramping QC check of a contractor taking advantage of such an error.
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory should probably be referenced to understand the intellectual side of my perturbation with suddenly being surrounded by "Box Tickers" and "Duct Tapers" in my professional life who weren't there before, back in the Midwest.
Again, generally to be expected since "Government" is one of Wonderland's remaining two major industries, and the local economy had to come up with something for local people to do when everything else got outsourced abroad.
OP, are you willing to say if Wonderland is in the southern US somewhere? Everything you describe is deeply familiar to me. We have largely given up on hiring consultants the local engineering firm community. We only hire firms in other regions now. We had to in order to maintain our staff's sanity and reliably get a good end product. Sure, it costs more, but calculate your spend for having to constantly check and correct your sub's shitty MEP and structural work. It's one thing we can fix since the government crap is beyond our control.
That list of obstruction for the sake of obstructing is impressive. We have had some taste of that experience with our work in Europe, but nothing so extreme.
In Japan, where we still do most of our work, the government has created a for-profit third-party code/drawing/etc checking position that certifies projects across the country on behalf of the government (there is only one building code for the entire country). So we usually get a permit a few weeks to a month after submission. The process involves pre-submission checks and discussions, with sometimes quite a lot of negotiation and review. But it is all co-operative. We pay a fee for the certification process and if we find one company is being ridiculous we can go to another. Meaning there is competition for competency.
Laws are still followed and very strictly so, because liability. Architects are ultimately the ones who take responsibility but a mistake on the part of the 3rd-party reviewers would tank their business, so it remains professional. Not without issues, but having seen the alternative I really cant complain.
One thing that makes all of the above more viable is that the building code is parametric and mostly as-of-right. Meaning there is lots of variability within a fixed range, but it must all be proven with drawings and math, and negotiation beyond the normal rules is not common except for very large projects (like a 60 story tower or a complex of buildings). Neighbors have no right to complain unless laws/regulations are demonstrably being broken.
By comparison our experience in Europe (UK and Belgium so far) has shown us the power of NIMBY to slow things down, and revealed a kind of "feelings" driven approach to planning approval that is fascinating because it is so unpredictable. Speaking only for myself I find that approach to be inefficient in the face of a housing crisis, though I understand where the regulations are coming from.
The bureaucratic mess described by the OP is much worse and reads as a pretty good explanation for why housing cant happen in some parts of the USA. Not a good recipe for building the future.
There is a third-party-review system in place here in Paradise, but when they got audited en-masse by the local government (as part of the post-FBI-investigation and prison-sentences clean-ups), over 90% of the electrical drawings were rejected. I heard snippets that Mechanical drawings audit went a similar way. In my conversations with the third-party-reviewers we work with, I get the impression that in my three years here I've read and understood more of the codes and regulations than their PMs do. Sometimes they end up being slower than the government reviews, and so I end up feeling like the whole third-party-system here is just more middlemen inserted into the system as make-work cream-skimming jobs. Some of their reviews end up being conducted by subconsultants in other regions of the country because there's a shortage of local talent.
There's not much competition driving professionalism because 1) locals don't trust people from the rest of the country (for some very legitimate historical reasons), and 2) the nearest professional competition is over 2000 miles away.
The City just dumped $2M into a contract with two of the bigger local third-party-review firms to provide plan reviews to reduce the backlog. That really smells bad, especially since I can only find one painfully brief news story about it.
Ultimately, "lack of talent" is the core problem for the entire state, public and private, as people with only high school diplomas are filling seats in the permit review departments now. Local kids who get college educations in other states typically don't come back. This is also why my constant curmudgeonly attitude about the state of the state isn't going to have any effect on my job security. The "thousand yard stare" I get from locals followed by "we have to work with what we have" is irritatingly fatalist.
Pay enough to offset the obscenely-warped cost of living here and talent might stay. Private business can barely figure that one out to keep its professional workforce housed in rental units and fed, let alone the local government figuring out how to pay enough to attract and retain competent talent from elsewhere. The very high per-capita number of luxury vehicles in town makes my hillbilly-brain tingle with very non-PC thoughts on the cultural roots of the problem.
I just got comments back yesterday with a "plot plan" markup on the site plan from "Prescreen Review" showing that we apparently need to include Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So's house on the property adjacent as part of our commercial client's property. Plans were rejected for not showing the "entire plot plan." A simple GIS parcel map check shows this is erroneous. Will be another month in the system to get to the actual reviewers' desks. Gawd!
I can't say I was surprised when a whole town burned down last year and a whole lot of people died.
Aug 30, 24 5:12 pm ·
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Architecture in "Wonderland"
A Riff on Mark Twain’s “Journalism in Tennessee”
A few years ago, I left the confines of my Midwestern upbringing with 10 years of architectural experience under my belt and the bootprint of a layoff on my backside. Feeling burnt and burnt-out, I headed for greener pastures, thinking a cultural shift might improve my lot in life. I was connected by a friend to a firm in what I will call “Wonderland,” to protect myself and avoid any repercussions asking the questions I’m about to ask might have on my (mostly-healed) backside.
Things were all hunky-dory at first, aside from cultural peculiarities here and there that took some adjustment from the norms of 34 years prior lifespan. However, the more responsibility I was given and loaded up to full PM status once again, the more things I started running into that were (wildly) different professionally from my prior 10 years experience. I’ve started asking a lot of questions of a lot of people, and expressing my concern that things aren’t being done within what I once knew as “the professional standard of care,” and been told more than once that either I should adjust to the situation, or gently warned that I’m getting too close to rocking the boat.
So, I’m asking folks on here, if any of these things are “normal” in any other U.S. jurisdictions:
Building permits taking over a year to acquire (which I know is prevalent in a few other large and highly developed urban places, but feels excessive due to the large number of “overreach” review comments and multiple rounds of review)
FBI investigations into permit reviewers and architects for bribery
Architects still offering bribes to permit reviewers despite the local media attention on the FBI investigation
Consulting engineers consistently missing code-required scope items at the beginning of projects
Consulting engineers not knowing how to use their hardcopy-printed code books correctly
Permit review engineers not knowing how to use their hardcopy-printed code books correctly, or reference city ordinances for local code amendments correctly
Permit drawings required to be in a specific numbering format that does not match national CAD standards
Specification writers claiming that air barriers are a “conspiracy”
Consulting engineers saying right in front of the client rep “oh, we don’t know anything about XYZ” (XYZ being the reason they’re on the team as the subject-matter-expert)
State and local government code and other regulatory documents posted online being 10 years out of date, with no clear indication of who to contact for the up-to-date version
Engineers waiting for the client to tell them how to solve a design problem
Three years total to get demolition of two small abandoned historic buildings completed
Two years and counting (not bid out yet) to get a new roof put on an occupied historic building with trees growing out of the third floor
State-mandated current ICC code adoption two years after publication date at state level, and then adoption by local governments mandated by the state to be two years after that
Permit reviewers requesting project titles be changed
Zoning reviews requesting standard information be removed from drawings if not being changed by the project
Zoning reviews requesting Zoning Department disclaimers be put on drawings by Designer of Record before approval
Utility company dictating placement, size, and color of bollards protecting transformers, rather than leaving liability for protecting transformers on property owners
The list above is only partial and constantly expanding, with things that either make me scratch my head or run completely opposite of my prior experience and make my job much harder than it needs to be. I did not expect that liberally defending what little regulation exists in the Midwest would scale to making me sound like an anarchist libertarian here in Wonderland. I also didn’t expect that a bunch of folks only one or two generations removed from life down on the farm and still living adjacent to cattle pastures would be much more professional and expert than people living in a cosmopolitan metropolis with the potential to draw in the cream of the crop from all over the world.
Thoughts welcomed, as I am so fed up some days I am tempted to risk tipping off local journalists to start using Google to make comparisons to elsewhere before they just take local excuses at face value…
I appreciate the satirical literary tools at use here, and have experienced many but not all of these in some fashion during my journey to the coast. Wait till the AI removes what little education was there before. Everyone's going to get less informed and more cocksure.
This fine profession has been under siege for thirty years - the trade organization AIA and their puppet NCARB wanted to restrict the number of architects which they did by requiring a Masters in Architecture from a NCARB list of schools - in the 70's and 80's the only consulting engineer was a structural engineer who often sealed the drawings created by the architect's office - we would do all the other engineering because we knew how - now the plan checkers just want to see a fully-stamped set of drawings - I have associates who have left the field because consulting engineers have raised their rates to 70-80% of the A/E fee - I actually have little sympathy because architect's themselves let it incrementally happen - the old frogs in the boiling pot saga - sad ...
I get the literary humor.
You haven't been around long enough to understand the time it all takes.
Unfortunately it doesn't translate well into professional humor.
Somethings take time. Honestly this post looks like a young architect trying to hang his employer in Wonderland.
My best advise is to get your emotional shit together before carrying on with this profession.
Your ideals are not meeting the world. Now there's something to think about.....
"The time it all takes" was two to four weeks to get a building permit in my former jurisdictions. In a similar 3 year period (my time here) I had three projects for renovations on seven different buildings go from drawings to construction complete. And those are just the projects I was directly responsible for, not everything I was working on. So, my question is about comparing project inception to construction complete timelines between the Midwest and elsewhere.
I've had clients on my board for a decade. Grow the F up.
I'm not trying to hang my employer, I'm not sure what gave that impression when most of my points of comparison are about engineering consultants and our dear dysfunctional state and local government. I expect the flow of business to generally run smoother in "red" states vs. "blue" states due to the bureaucratic and regulatory gradient, but the permitting process here is starting to put a crimp in the local economy because nothing can get built, a constant housing shortage is causing the state to lose population, and most smaller projects are being built without permits, all of which means the local media is putting more and more of a focus on the issue. If I'm trying to hang anyone, it's certainly not my employer. We don't want anything to do with unpermitted work, but some of our clients have emergency projects and are not going to wait around, so I'm doing everything I can to pull a permit out of a hat.
As far as my "ideals" go, my ideals right now are simply not having to constantly make up excuses to clients about why it's taking so long to get a building permit when review comments are legitimately about missing code or other regulatory required work/drawings/formatting/information, or why we're charging them more now for code-required scope that should have been included at the beginning. The architects who trained me wouldn't of tolerated much of that, and the engineers we worked with never gave me any reason to doubt their thoroughness.
What I'm trying to determine with this forum thread, dear reader, is if I was trained up in a Midwestern firm and cadre of engineers that was just a fluke of like-attracts-like autistic perfectionism, or if there really are major professional standards differences from one geographic area to another in the USA.
If the former, I'll shut my yap, and if the latter...there's bigger issues going on that I'm not going to solve alone, so I'll also shut up, but be better informed.
When my old firm bought out a small California one, a guy there quit immediately because he'd had a bad cultural experience in the past being taken over by Midwesterners...and working here in "Wonderland" now, puts his issue into perspective.
I'm certainly treated far better culturally and financially here than I was in the Midwest, and there's no unwritten expectation that an effective project manager works a minimum of 50 hours a week, which led to my complete burnout back there. But, as I told one of my coworkers after a particularly difficult episode of various hassles, "there's a difference between laid-back and lax, and a lot of people in this state seem to struggle with that distinction." You can be effective and knowledgeable and not make major QC mistakes, and working a 60+ hour week isn't the requirement to achieve that. Professional excellence and work/life balance is not an either/or, on/off choice.
answering your first post, only #1 applies where I live, which is not where our projects are. County and City have become unsufferable with requirements and are so understaffed that all permits are taking more than a year, no matter what building size or complexity. The town where we have all our projects is adjacent, and since 2020 has started to change in the same direction, but slowly. All the other issues you mention are pretty bad, bordering illegal.
Chronic understaffing, public and private, is definitely an issue here. But, the permit reviewers aren't doing themselves any favors by doing QC on drawings that are rushed to permit to "get it in line" as quickly as possible. I wouldn't of ever expected a Midwestern permit review to call out minor drawing set coordination errors. I would of only had the final stomach-cramping QC check of a contractor taking advantage of such an error.
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory should probably be referenced to understand the intellectual side of my perturbation with suddenly being surrounded by "Box Tickers" and "Duct Tapers" in my professional life who weren't there before, back in the Midwest.
Again, generally to be expected since "Government" is one of Wonderland's remaining two major industries, and the local economy had to come up with something for local people to do when everything else got outsourced abroad.
OP, are you willing to say if Wonderland is in the southern US somewhere? Everything you describe is deeply familiar to me. We have largely given up on hiring consultants the local engineering firm community. We only hire firms in other regions now. We had to in order to maintain our staff's sanity and reliably get a good end product. Sure, it costs more, but calculate your spend for having to constantly check and correct your sub's shitty MEP and structural work. It's one thing we can fix since the government crap is beyond our control.
I'm in the "southern US," but also as far south and west as one can go in this country.
"Paradise" is what Wonderland is better-known as in its globally-known marketing. :)
That list of obstruction for the sake of obstructing is impressive. We have had some taste of that experience with our work in Europe, but nothing so extreme.
In Japan, where we still do most of our work, the government has created a for-profit third-party code/drawing/etc checking position that certifies projects across the country on behalf of the government (there is only one building code for the entire country). So we usually get a permit a few weeks to a month after submission. The process involves pre-submission checks and discussions, with sometimes quite a lot of negotiation and review. But it is all co-operative. We pay a fee for the certification process and if we find one company is being ridiculous we can go to another. Meaning there is competition for competency.
Laws are still followed and very strictly so, because liability. Architects are ultimately the ones who take responsibility but a mistake on the part of the 3rd-party reviewers would tank their business, so it remains professional. Not without issues, but having seen the alternative I really cant complain.
One thing that makes all of the above more viable is that the building code is parametric and mostly as-of-right. Meaning there is lots of variability within a fixed range, but it must all be proven with drawings and math, and negotiation beyond the normal rules is not common except for very large projects (like a 60 story tower or a complex of buildings). Neighbors have no right to complain unless laws/regulations are demonstrably being broken.
By comparison our experience in Europe (UK and Belgium so far) has shown us the power of NIMBY to slow things down, and revealed a kind of "feelings" driven approach to planning approval that is fascinating because it is so unpredictable. Speaking only for myself I find that approach to be inefficient in the face of a housing crisis, though I understand where the regulations are coming from.
The bureaucratic mess described by the OP is much worse and reads as a pretty good explanation for why housing cant happen in some parts of the USA. Not a good recipe for building the future.
There is a third-party-review system in place here in Paradise, but when they got audited en-masse by the local government (as part of the post-FBI-investigation and prison-sentences clean-ups), over 90% of the electrical drawings were rejected. I heard snippets that Mechanical drawings audit went a similar way. In my conversations with the third-party-reviewers we work with, I get the impression that in my three years here I've read and understood more of the codes and regulations than their PMs do. Sometimes they end up being slower than the government reviews, and so I end up feeling like the whole third-party-system here is just more middlemen inserted into the system as make-work cream-skimming jobs. Some of their reviews end up being conducted by subconsultants in other regions of the country because there's a shortage of local talent.
There's not much competition driving professionalism because 1) locals don't trust people from the rest of the country (for some very legitimate historical reasons), and 2) the nearest professional competition is over 2000 miles away.
The City just dumped $2M into a contract with two of the bigger local third-party-review firms to provide plan reviews to reduce the backlog. That really smells bad, especially since I can only find one painfully brief news story about it.
Ultimately, "lack of talent" is the core problem for the entire state, public and private, as people with only high school diplomas are filling seats in the permit review departments now. Local kids who get college educations in other states typically don't come back. This is also why my constant curmudgeonly attitude about the state of the state isn't going to have any effect on my job security. The "thousand yard stare" I get from locals followed by "we have to work with what we have" is irritatingly fatalist.
Pay enough to offset the obscenely-warped cost of living here and talent might stay. Private business can barely figure that one out to keep its professional workforce housed in rental units and fed, let alone the local government figuring out how to pay enough to attract and retain competent talent from elsewhere. The very high per-capita number of luxury vehicles in town makes my hillbilly-brain tingle with very non-PC thoughts on the cultural roots of the problem.
I just got comments back yesterday with a "plot plan" markup on the site plan from "Prescreen Review" showing that we apparently need to include Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So's house on the property adjacent as part of our commercial client's property. Plans were rejected for not showing the "entire plot plan." A simple GIS parcel map check shows this is erroneous. Will be another month in the system to get to the actual reviewers' desks. Gawd!
I can't say I was surprised when a whole town burned down last year and a whole lot of people died.
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