My vote is "bad management". I've had jobs where things took longer than expected and I had to work overtime, but have never, ever been expected to donate time. An established practice should have a good idea of how much time and money a job will take, and if the client doesn't have the money to pay for the amount of work it will take, they shouldn't be doing the project.

At our firm, there are always times when folks have to work weekends or late at night to get the design or documents where we want them - especially if we make a change late into the game. That's fine, everyone is invested in the project and wants it to work well. At my last firm, however a large, design firm with one well know asshole at the helm, we were asked to work long hours because apparently the firm low-balled their fee and was trying to make it up with a tiny team who were not paid overtime (although I know for a fact that the firm billed for those hours). Not cool. If you think that's the case for you, I would go elsewhere. Even good firms are in hire mode here in Los Angeles.

As an hourly employee, keep in mind that "donating" time is actually time card shaving, something that Walmart just got nailed on by the DOJ.

don't know the situation of your firm, strawbeary, but it's probably a little of both and probably leans to the side of needing to do more, faster.

realize this about most architectural fees: the rough percentage that an average architect can get per project (anywhere from 6-10% on most institutional work, for example) hasn't changed in 50 years. the only thing that allows the architects fees to increase, year over year (under that method of computation - i'm trying to simplify this so no griping) is the increase in construction prices themselves. so, if the hourly rates that need to be charged (to keep up with inflation, promotions, etc) rise faster than the amount of income that you can generate through your fees, then you have to get more, faster, from everyone in the office in order to maintain your level of profitability.

the amount of time you get to spend on a project will always depend on the project itself. if you get a project that has a good budget and no real time pressure, then, sure, you might be able to spend a lot of time on design, resolving every square inch. most of the time, this simply isn't the case, even with the highest end firms. where they excel is in being able to raise the bar higher from the beginning, so that the time available to spend on a design is even more. others, like renzo piano, for example, tend to just tell clients "it's just going to take this long" and may have more of a 'if you want me you'll pay up and go along with our schedule' type of attitude. the list of people that can pull that off, though, is very short indeed.

as to 'donating' time: your call. your employer should either make it clear upfront that that kind of commitment is expected (and you can make the decision as to whether to go there or not) or you shouldn't be expected to work like that. if you are learning more by putting the time in and it will help you advance faster through the firm, then figure out whether that benefit is worthwhile. i put in a lot of unpaid time early, early in my career but the reward was being promoted up the food chain very quickly after graduate school. better pay, more responsibility, better access to clients.

SO...donate time or rush through? was my real question. perhaps I need to learn to rush through things a little more. I probably tend to overthink everything but I believe I do a good job and the project would not be as good if I didn't take the consideration that I did. BTW - all our projects are highly original and all different types, sizes, kinds of construction, programs etc.
Many projects I have worked on have lost money, but I have never been told this while working on the project, only heard it through office gossip many months later. One project lost 80k - I ain't kidding you - but it was a huge mess, an addition and remodel. No one is blaming me or anyone else but I have to wonder what is going on here? Since I don't do billing/invoicing, nor was I a manager, I don't get to see the impact of the hours I spend and how it divides out.

go talk to the person who dropped the load - tell them exactly what you said above in a very calm manner....this is the intern part of the realationship, they should be happy you care and that you want to do the right thing....at that point they should at least give you enough info to get moving in the right direction.

jobs that lose that much money need to have a more proactive project manager involved real time, it's too late to figure out that you've blown the fee after two weeks...they should set up a series of short term goals for you to reach so that you'll be on track - somebody needs to herd the cats.

my guess is if this starts to happen your design will remain strong and you'll start to move through it at a faster rate - best

Architecture Buisness 101

Speed is king!

The faster you can get the project out the door the better, doesnt matter if its a dog of a design. Get it to the client, if they want changes then theres more fee. Most contracts will have a limit on revisions before the work goes to an hourly addition. The less time on the project you spend to get it to completeion the less overhead the company/firm is spending and more they make in the end. I think this is one of the big clashes you encounter coming out of design school. How a real project is considered sucessfull versus one in school. I think that its one of the things that you have to learn to balance. Its funny that the guy in studio that pulled a project out of his ass in 2 days got laughed at in school but makes a killing in the field. Could have been sited better, wasn't to inventive and lacked a real parti but all the drawings were there.

Not the prettiest picture but tends to be true. The fact that architect cuthroat each other on pricing hasnt helped with fees or pay in the feild in general. But thats another story and i have deadlines.

strawbeary, given that you are paid hourly, i believe you should not be donating your time. i have a friend who works at a firm in seattle. he is paid hourly and often talks of donating his time. i think once you do it, your firm sees that you are fine with doing it, and thus will expect you to do it again and again. you don't work at walmart. you are a professional and should be treated as such.

I agree with e, in line with previous discussions we've had here about working for free, you should be paid for the work you do. Whether it's included in the salary and you understand up front how many hours you are expected to work, or whether you are hourly and get paid for every single hour you put in.
There may be several things going on here - management is not properly allocating labor, they don't know how much time it takes to "design" a project (rather than re-creating something similar to previous projects), you want to spend more time on design than is allocated for in the budget, co-ordination or inter-office communication is not clear and thus wastes time, etc. But they should be able to charge a reasonable fee and make a profit at the same time as allocating labor resources so you don't have to work for free, or they shouldn't be in business.
We have a small company and with only a few people it's difficult to do, but still possible. The more employees you add to the picture the easier it is to make a profit (at least the way I see the numbers). So if this is not a small firm and they have been in business a while, I only see that they are taking advantage of the fact that you are willing to work for free to make extra money off the project, OR they are grossly mismanaging and perhaps have taken on project types that they didn't deal with before or a new way of designing that is not accounted for in the fees.
In any case, I think it you set a bad precedent for yourself if you choose to work for free for a company that you have no financial stake in or long-term goals with (I could be wrong about this...). If you were a partner or even associate in the firm, it would be a different situation. You want the projects to turn out well and to a certain extent you do benefit from that - being able to add them to your portfolio and potentially create good relationships with the clients (if you deal with the clients), but you should also understand how much time is allocated for the project given the fees and learn to work within that.
The company will never tell you to stop working for free, any extra productivity you give them is more money in their pocket. But they should make clear to you what the staffing and management arrangements are and why they are asking you to pick up the pace.
Learning to budget your time and work with the resources you have is an invaluable skill - don't sell yourself short! It's hard to know your situation without specifics, but if they are asking you to make design decisions faster or come up with less schemes or less complicated details I would take that as a challenge and try to be more efficient rather than just working more, because you'll end up in a never-ending cycle of working all the time...

Oh great archinectors, I think I try too hard, therefore spend way too much time contemplating design considerations which are probably beyond the scope of the project. This particular project is very unique as far as program goes and the building shell is a type of construction that no one in our office has worked with before. I guess I want to feel more competent that perhaps I am by biting off more than I can chew, and I want to take pride in the project and use it in my portfolio so I would feel like a failure if the project was anything but exactly what I want it to be. I am also very design oriented and design the crap out of everything like architects are supposed to. I also go down the wrong roads and spend time on things that don't make it into the project. But I want to think all this is typical.

Do any of you ever do something and then think, Damn the client just paid how much for all that time I just took to do that? I find myself doing this often and actually feeling guilty.

I find myself going into work for a power hour at night about twice a week the last few months. I get so much done during this hour after I have eaten dinner and changed clothes and am there by myself.

Most other nights and weekends I redline sheets while watching TV or sketch details and revisions, I color stuff with colored pencils and even browse for light fixtures and other materials online. These are the donated hours.

Work hours themselves are full of dealing with the technicalities and delineation and answering questions and talking/e-mailing to whoever talks to me.

We all do it... and I think it's really important to learn that the client deserves good work and a well-thought out design, but they get what they pay for and if the fees don't support something that is highly detailed the construction budget won't either.

i only work for free if i feel that i have screwed the pooch somehow and should fix on my dime. otherwise, the hell with it. maybe if i was working for myself i'd feel differently, but as an employee i don't. it also helps if you don't have keys to the building...

also, this professor of yours? did he/she ever work in an office??? speed and accuracy and the ability to make the best decision quickly are what its about. oh yeah, all the things you don't learn in school(again)

That prof was a practicing architect. Just him, no employees, designed rich people's houses. Maybe it did apply to him.

How contradictory that the architect's education encourages long hours spent, the longer the better. And in practice, it is all about getting effect for less hours. I have gotten over all the other differences fairly easily, but this one is hard to take.

I reviewed all the stuff I have done over the last few years since graduation last night. A lot of the jobs I worked on I blew the fee. One job I had 2 weeks to do. It was a high end ladies boutique and I did 90% of the design at home - off the clock, and worked my ass off during work hours to assemble the whole thing, draw it, do estimates that kinda stuff. And I still blew the fee. It turned out great so I considered it a sucessful project. But again, I overdid it. I get no reward besides the occasional compliment (not from within the office of course) and perhaps some portfolio material. I cannot keep up this pace. No wonder I am burned out.
Next project I will try harder to be a slacker.

Oops - that above post is Strawbeary. My husband signed in and I didn't change the log-in. Now you know.

STRAWBERRY-

I skimmed over all the posts and went right to posting my own comment, sorry if I repeated anyone:

NEVER 'DONATE' TIME TO YOUR EMPLOYER.

DONATE YOUR TIME TO CHARITIES.

If this employer is ethical and knows you are doing this (you may do it, because you sense you need to, and have not been told to...) then find another job. You are a professional. You get paid for your time. You get paid for your ideas and brain power and knowledge.

Experience helps you discern when experimenting is the thing to do, or to just bust something out. And that is why more experience = higher billing rate.

I did some investigating and some thinking. This is the deal. We have a 15,000 s.f. facility with an unusual program and an atypical structural system. The project started out fairly simple and I have make it more complicated and the owner has increased the budget according to these things I am designing into the building. There are also multiple large donor items that are to be design, coordinated and approved by the donors like a fireplace and a kitchen. I am dealing with two seperate committees to meet with and get approval from. The project architect initially promised colored rendered 3-d interior and exterior images. We are getting a 5.9% fee for all phases of architectural and interior design and construction, and we pay our consultants out of that. We are helping with furniture selection. The "mezzanine" has grown into a small second floor. I don't think the principal architect feels he can increase this fee even with the onset of all these new items such as the donated areas because of the personal nature of the relationship he has with the owner - in fact he is part of the "owner" as a committe member that instigated the whole project! The other committee members have already given him a hard time and want him to actually donate full architectural services and they don't understand why that's not feasible. The owner is not a church, but we are feeling mighty darn sorry for them. It doesn't help that one of the donor items is from some family members of mine.
It is entirely my fault that I increased the scope of the work when the project was turned over to me because I played the "wouldn't it be neat if..." game and made the building more complicated than it ever had to be. The committee/owners love my ideas and are raising the extra bucks to do it. These ideas are big and change the building scope entirely. I didn't realize what I was doing and thought I was doing something good but really I am screwing myself over because I don't understand project structure, what a project takes, nor fees and how to turn a profit.
Now I've found that the project deadline for releasing to bid has been moved up on me by 5 weeks (more than cut in half) in order to save some hours for const. admin. phase.
I can't help but think that we feel so sorry for the client that we are hurting ourselves and I am taking the bulk of the stress because our fee is too low. I also know that the principal architect is/has donated lots of time to the job, if not MOST of his time. When we talk about the job, he encourages me to design it good and don't sell myself short and said "if they wanted a detailess box they woudn't have hired an architect they would have put up a morton building" so this is what I am doing.
I hope I accurately portrayed my situation.

Sounds like you're acting conscientiously, in the best interest of the client (and project), and your firm has not followed suit in their best interest (that is - negotiate revised fees).
I understand quite well the reluctance to address additional fees with a client who is personally invested (it's their money, after all).
It looks like all you can do is finish the project as well as you can, balancing your needs (paid time) with the needs of the project (hopefully not with unpaid time), and chalk it all up to a valuable lesson.
I recently took steps toward resolving my reluctance to address additional fees by re-negotiating a contract when changes were required. It happened to be with an institutional client, with a somewhat arms length relationship with the financing. Because of this, it wasn't personal (I'm not taking money from YOU). It went very well, resulting in the project fee being revised fairly, with no hurt feelings.
It has helped me to be less apologetic about the fees we require to provide quality services.
Good luck...

This is tricky because your employer is treating this as a PARTIALLY pro bono job, and also doesn't seem to be communicating well to you and others as to how much of it is donated...

Lots of firms do pro bono work - and sometimes that work is some of their best, because the project is treated as more of a chance to experiment - as well as a good source of marketing exposure. If these projects are treated the way that a theoretical competition would be - as a chance to work out some ideas, break out of routine, and get some publicity - then they can work well in some firms.

But in this case it seems your firm expects your part to be profitable but the principal's part to be donated. It seems to me that it was at least partially his responsibility to reign it in if he saw you making sweeping changes that would seriously affect the budget.
But it also doesn't sound as though you are in a role in which you're directly involved in fee negotiation or the schedule for the project.
That being the case, I wouldn't beat myself up over the problems with this particular project.

I agree with others that donating huge amounts of your own time to this is not a good idea (or precedent for future projects and their schedules.) On the other hand I think that strict clock-watching can come in conflict with being taken seriously as a professional rather than an hourly CAD monkey - so I wouldn't sweat the occasional extra hour here and there.
I wouldn't take work home, but then most of the firms I've worked in have had policies against taking work home in the first place, over worries about security, document duplication and loss, etc.

It's up to your firm (principals and project managers) to figure out how to manage the people they have, the contract fee, and the available time.
It's not your problem unless you're reponsible for extending the schedule, budget, etc. (but it sounds that you are in part responsible for that.)
It should be possible to "design it good" without "designing it bigger." Make a promise to yourself NOT to add anything more to the scope of the project and stick to that.

In the general scope of things this is not an especially large project, the fee is low-ish but not unheard of, and from what little you've said about the schedule it doesn't seem unusually short, even with a 5-week cut (sheesh, we did a similarly sized institutional project last summer in 6.5 weeks from schematics to bid.) This is the norm for a lot of firms - so it would be better to find a way to work and not feel frustrated all the time than to feel that every project is a crisis of bad management.
If every project IS a crisis of bad management then you need to find another job - but that has been covered to death in other threads.

That comment from your professor is very strange. We were usually told in school that SCHOOL was where we had the luxury of time and that practice was much more fast-paced and schedule driven. Did this professor actually practice?

Stawbeary,

I'm not negating the above suggestions, but you're a star poster on archinect. Perhaps you need to manage your time better at work. I'm still in school and work in a job that allows me the opportunity to sit and surf the web all day and I still can't keep up with your posts.

Just a thought

fair enough. i do spend some time posting here. maybe that's one of the reasons I think it's OK to "donate" time to my work.

Strawbeary;
From your past posts, it seems that this is a constant theme with you. You view yourself as very careful and concerned about design, therefore slow. I recall a discussion about your frustration with co workers who would not answer your questions sufficently. I think part of your problem is that you are very slow at things because you go off on tangents, explore way too far down a path before realizing that it is a bad path, question things a bit too much, and spend WAY too much time on the internet. You sound like a nice enough person, but realize that you need to justify your existence in the business world too. I had an employee just like you (in fact, she had strawberry blonde hair- its not you, is it?) anyway, I was really glad when she quit and moved on. I found her exhausting to deal with, and every job she did lost money. I say she was exhausting because she was always coming up with ideas that the client did not want and did not have the money to pay for, always wanting to explore some option that was 'out there' for some reason; hard to build, costs too much, didn't meet code, etc. It was like nothing was ever easy, every single decision had to be agonized over, re-analyzed, etc etc. She was frustrated here because others got promoted above her, and got big bonuses. I just could not justify promoting her and giving her cash when she lost money all the time. I realize that you are young, so take this advice not as criticism, but as a suggestion from someone who wants to help you. You need to put in extra time to make up for your internet time, your wrong path time, etc. This is a learning experience for you, not one that you should be paid for. You also need to work (HARD!) on refining your decision making skills, and responding the the realities of the work place if you want to advance in your firm. Believe me, as you get experience, it will get easier, but you need to stop blaming your firm, or the managment, or your co workers for the shortcomings in your work style, and work on improving your self. I wish you success!