Lulu's Mailbag: burned out and micro-managed

The lament in R's email is probably familiar to some of you.  Oh, how I wish it wasn't:

I feel like my work life has completely consumed my personal life.  I have been working for a large firm (500 + employees) for over two years and workload is unrelenting, unappreciated, and micro managed.  My work load has average 70+ hours, consisting of a  6 or 7 day work week over the course of two years.  My skill set varies from advanced computational design, rendering, and being able to complete several project types of construction documents with minimal oversight.   I've graduated in the past five years and completed several parts of the ARE, but my work load prohibits me from being able to successfully study to gain my professional license.

It's not the unrelenting hours and unappreciated part that upsets me, but being micro managed to the point that I feel completely incompetent in the most menial tasks.  My senior designer is one of those "personalities" that can not consider something complete until his fingerprint has been cemented in every facet of the design.    It  has gotten to the point that normal dialog becomes combative just on the premise of winning the argument, not about right or wrong or even design.  I feel completely helpless and taken advantage of in my current situation.  Is their a way to address this without being too aggressive?  Or is time just to cut and run?

Your question deserves multiple posts, R., but for now my super-short answer to you is to either ask to work for someone else in your company (since it's so large), and if that fails or doesn't seem to be an option, it's time to look elsewhere.  Super-high workload + micromanaging = burnout.  No proper, sane company of ANY KIND, architectural or otherwise, can refute that essential truth of humankind.  The unrelenting hours and lack of appreciation should upset you, though.  If someone has been able to keep you busy for 60 hours a week for 2 years straight, then they had the workload to hire another person.  If they didn't have the cash to hire another person with that kind of workload, then they're shitty businesspeople, and they deserve to lose talent.


As for the micromanaging, there are certain things you can do to try to stem the flow that behavior, but it sounds like you might not care to have that dialogue any more, and with good reason. The reason you feel taken advantage of is because YOU ARE BEING TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF.  You have no personal life and no way to finish taking the ARE because you spend all your time working. If you like the company otherwise, I would recommend going to HR or whoever is in charge of making the teams and asking to be put on a different teams (and explain why in a professional manner).  If you've tried this with no avail or you're just done, then polish up your resume and start looking.


I would like to address your concerns in some future posts in more depth, but for now, please take care of yourself and keep me posted on how things progress.


All the best,
Lulu

Lulu's Mailbag: I'm doing everything I can to get a job but nothing works--what now?!

I got a letter from M in Boston who has a dilemma that's likely familiar to many of you:

I am writing to you today because I feel very frustrated, demotivated and anxious about how my career path lately. A quick run down of my background :

Bachelor of Architecture, 2005 - Virginia Tech

Master of Architecture , 2007 - Virginia Tech

2007-2009 Architectural Designer job in a firm

2009-2010 Visiting Lecturer Position in Architecture at an international university for a year long contract.

2010 - 2011 : Hard time finding full time positions , upon returning from my international contract, so got back in to school.

2011: Associate in Construction Management - local community college.

2012 : Move to Boston and seeking full time position again, not only as Architectural Designer, but also as entry level construction manger, project coordinator or anything that will help  pursue my recent diversification towards construction management.

I am very interested in finishing my IDP and taking my AREs as soon possible. However, I am finding it very difficult to land a position in Boston as an Architectural Designer with my experience level. I have taken Revit classes and I know AutoCAD very well. I am great with Adobe CS - Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. Sometimes, most job postings make it seem like knowing Revit is the only prerequisite of getting a job as an entry level and it feels as if my education is not worth anything, even as a starter.

I have been very frustrated lately because of the lack of response I have been receiving from the firms around here. I doubt NYC will be any better for me because of the fierce competition and relocation issues. Friends and family know of my financial situation with colege loans piling up and now high costs of Boston living and they suggest branching out to "something else that will pay your bills for now". I get scared of moving away from architecture since I am already falling behind my regular Intern path towards registration. Is it going to be harder for me obtain positions because of the gaps I will have in my resume?

Please suggest how I may change things for myself so that I can still use my degrees and pursue my passion for architecture. I use Archinect, Indeed and Boston Society of Architect's job boards for my job search and am willing to relocate to NYC, Washington DC for positions as well. I have started studying for my AREs even if my IDP hours are not done because Massachusetts allows taking the exams before finishing hours.

Good question, M. I shared your email with a few colleagues that are professors/instructors and architects to get some additional input.  The sum total of my advice to you is this:

1. Welcome to the club--you're in good company.
2. Be willing to move to more than just Boston, New York, or DC.
3. Whatever you decide will be okay.

Regarding item #1: Architecture is still taking a pounding in the economic recovery.  As a field in general, we haven't recovered as much as many other fields (insert any other profession here).  There are a lot of qualified, solid graduates and young professionals that can't find work in their field.  That's especially true of architects, who are waiting for developers and owners to release the capital to start designing and building; and of teachers and professors, who are seeing their positions and benefits and salaries get cut due to a lack of local, state, and federal revenue.  But some places are indeed growing and seeing some action, which leads me to Item #2. 


Item #2 is in your favor.  The fact that you've been willing to teach outside the U.S. tells me that you're not particularly having to live at home with your parents or other family members in order to get by, which is good.  You clearly have the guts to go out, see new places, and make things happen for yourself.  But I'll tell you that the two coasts--East and West--are mighty crowded right now with people trying to find jobs in areas with high costs of living.  If you're willing to live somewhere other than the three very large, very East Coast places you listed, you might find some great opportunities in your field.  NYC has a lot of competition, but what if a firm in Des Moines, Iowa, or Houston, Texas, or Casper, Wyoming suddenly had a need for an intern with both an architecture degree and experience and an understanding of construction management?  No, those might not be super-urbane places, but there's a lot of potential in between the coasts.  These smaller, un-Coast-ish markets might be excited to have someone as well-traveled as you.  Plus, your cost of living will most likely be less than it would be in Boston/NYC/DC. 


Item #3 is about ultimate reality.  You might prefer to live in NYC and wait tables rather than be an intern and construction estimator in Omaha, Nebraska.  That is your choice.  And whatever that choice is, you'll be okay.  The truth about architecture is that your education is the cover charge that gets you into the nightclub that is our profession, and knowing Revit gets you a seat at the bar or on one of the nice cushioned benches.  Revit and rendering skills, or even Revit and construction management skills, gets you a spot in the center of the dance floor or even up in the DJ booth.  The real value of your education is that you've learned how to think like an architect, which is a skill that few people in proportion to the overall U.S. population posess.  You can look at a problem and think of five ways to solve it, whereas most people only can see one or maybe two.  Your education and experience so far has equipped you in a weird way to do well no matter what you decide, as hard as that is to see right now.  You might end up as a clerk at a department store...and with a little time and initiative you're doing the store windows for a three-state area because you have amazing ideas about space and color and design and adviertising.  You may become a vendor for a lighting company, and you eventually parlay that into something involving lighting for commercials and theater.  You may move to Cheboygan, Wisconsin to work with a 20-person firm to do cost estimating, and you turn it into your own estimation consulting firm once you get your license.
 
Whatever you do, your initiatives and effort won't be wasted.  Take a deep breath, consider your options, and flip off the naysayers.


All the best,
Lulu

A company blog worth reading

While surfing the web with a glass of Riesling this week, I happened upon the employee blog for architecture and engineering giant HDR.  BLiNK is a blog written by various HDR employees on a wide variety of topics: design, culture, planning, photography and art, recent projects, and even using Revit to design a quilt pattern.

As would be expected from a company blog, the posts aren't particularly incendiary.  They are, however, well-written and edited and even thought-provoking, such as the notion that using the auto setting on your camera is akin to cheating, or the acknowledgement that architecture as a profession is about careening from one deadline to the next.  It's interesting to read other people's thoughts about design and culture in a way that's clearly written for nonarchitects or those new to the profession.  I'm not sure how much (if any) veto power HDR has over its bloggers, but the posts are overall an excellent way to engage staff and possibly even engage the general public with architecture.

Women in architecture: a global perspective

One of my readers recently hipped me to Parlour, an interesting blog/website regarding women in architecture. Parlour's articles and discussions are the best kinds of posts in that they are relevant to all culture, not just women.  I especially enjoyed one sociologist's post of why women leave architecture with a tied-in critique of Architect Barbie. Preliminary evidence in the sociologist's study revealed that women generally don't leave architecture to become stay-at-home moms but rather to take on another profession or to turn a hobby into a new job.


I find this relevant to both genders and all age ranges in architecture, but especially to our younger colleagues.  If we cannot rethink how our profession treats its future practitioners such that they can be suitably trained, challenged, and enriched, how can we foresee a future at all?  To be sure, some folks (of any age) leave architecture because they realize they aren't very good at it, but other leave to use their highly-coveted skills in another field altogether for a variety of reasons--more money, better hours, or perhaps more rewarding.  Preventing brain drain may not seem to be a real problem right now when the economy is bad and the market is flooded with qualified applicants, but it could be a major concern a year from now when things have improved.  After all, if all the good architects leave, who's left to run the profession?

Navigating the Tweetaverse

I was asked in a comment from last week's post if I have a Twitter account, and the answer is yes. (I'm @Arch_Intern101 for what it's worth.)  I'm not the most productive Tweeter/Twitterer--I mostly retweet a tweet or article I find interesting. I find that most of my random thoughts require more than 140 characters to impart the full force of my fury.  I also don't want any of my tweets biting me later.


I have an intern who started a side business with a buddy (one that did not compete with our firm in any way), and he was having a hard time getting it off the ground even though this project and side business was his passion.  One day, he tweeted something like "how do you keep going when your dream keeps dying slowly?"


His tweet popped up in his LinkedIn profile, and that popped up in a weekly "here's what your LinkedIn contacts have been doing lately" email in my inbox.  I knew he'd been working on some boring stuff lately (shops and CDs, definitely not the stuff of architectural dreams), so I went to him to ask if everything was going okay, and was he worried about his job or career at our office?  The intern blushed crimson--he didn't realize that linking his Twitter account to his LinkedIn account--which he was using to get his side venture of the ground--was being seen by his non-side-venture coworkers...and bosses.


The internet is so vast and anonymous that it's easy to forget that it is indeed a public venture.  Once you attach your name to something, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, or anything else, it can be traced back to you and can be used for or against you.  Whenever you post something on an electronic platform, make sure you're okay with one of your bosses ever finding that post/tweet/status update and reading it aloud at the next office meeting.

Creative outlets for workaday interns

One of 8,000 things I love about working with interns is that they never fail to surprise me in good ways.  Recently, I wore to work a pair of nicely-made wood and aluminum earrings that I purchased for a handsome price at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival here in Denver.  As I filled my coffee cup that morning, another intern complimented my earrings and said, "Did you buy those from X?", X being an intern in our office.  I said no, I got them from an art fair, and thanked the intern for the compliment.  A few hours later as I was heating up my lunch, an architect waiting for the microwave asked me, "Ooh, did you get those from X's Etsy site?"  Again, no, but thank you for the compliment.  


It occurred to me that maybe I should see X's work for myself. I asked him for a link to his site, and once there I beheld some of the most elegant, well-made, and reasonably priced jewelry I'd seen in a long time.  He did outstanding work. And it occurred to me: how many interns are doing what X does, finding time outside of work for creative endeavors with perhaps even a bit of microcapitalism thrown in for good measure?  X makes time on weekends and evenings to indulge in this hobby-turned-second-income-source. In talking with X, it appears that this hobby/income gives him above all a source for replenishing the well of creativity, which is often lacking in an intern's usual work day.  


Making families and detail components in Revit is nice, and checking shop drawings is educational, but where's the pure creativity in it?  It's easy to get overwhelmed with the dailiness of our profession, and I don't want that everyday-ness to kill your creative spirit.  I've recently started making (bad/horrible/amateur) multimedia collage/art projects in my spare time as a means of getting back to that feeling of purely wanting to express something through a visual means.  I'm still as bad at it now as I was in college (I swear, sometimes I don't know how I made it through six years of studio), but it feels good to paint with watercolors and make tiny designs with ink and cutcutcutcutcut with an X-Acto knife. 


And something else occurred to me: I have a blog that's read by interns all over the U.S., and indeed the world.  What creative outlets do you pursue?  Would you want to show them on this site?  And would you want me to link to your Etsy site or to a brick-and-mortar store that sells your goods?  Let me know via email from the sidebar or in the comments below.  I'd love to get a community going here for interns's creativity and entrepreneurship.

You are not John Cena.

Architecture offices are busy places, between project meetings, deadlines, in-house reviews and critiques, and various conference calls and overhead paging from the receptionist.  Bosses are in and out of the office, running to interviews and meetings and site visits.  As the economy slowly improves and work starts coming in, staff in a firm are moving faster, and managers are barking orders and then running out the door to go get or hold onto a project.  If you're an intern staying back in the office and doing the work, it can feel like everyone's forgotten about you.  People just yell at you, throw some redlines and a research task in your direction, then head into yet another conference call or meeting.  No one even sees you because they're so busy.  So if the boss is gone all morning and then off to another meeting and then out of town for two days for a project interview, who's gonna care if you take an extra long lunch, or do some online shopping and fantasy baseball updates all afternoon, or even leave early?  I mean, no one can see you, right?


Folks, I'm here to tell you as a former intern and a present-day project architect: you are not John Cena.  I can see you.


I know you're out at a long lunch, because I call you four times between 2pm and 2:30pm to have you look up something for me in the IBC, and you don't pick up the phone.  I didn't leave a message because my request was urgent and immediate, so you don't have a record of the missed connection, but I do.  It's in my memory.


I know you're fiddling around on the internet without ever having to call IT, because when I come out of my meetings, I see you Ctrl+W nearly every time.  If you were working on work stuff, you wouldn't be minimizing your entire screen several times a day every day.


I know you're texting constantly, because my colleagues tell me about it.  I lament that you hadn't finished a task yet, and one or more of my fellow project architects say, "yeah, because s/he was texting all day like a twelve-year-old in line at a Jonas Brothers concert."


This isn't about needing to leave early or come in late because you have a life outside of work.  This isn't about needing to deal with something during work hours either.  We know these things happen, and the infrequent need to deal with something is okay.  This isn't about the day you have now and again when you just aren't at your best and are feeling scattered or goofy--we're all human and have those days occasionally.  


This is about a constant pattern of wasting time and taking advantage of a firm. This is about abusing the trust your supervisors and coworkers have in you.  By leaving the office and leaving you to self-monitor your behavior, your managers and firm are saying that they believe you have the ability to focus and to get work done. They believe that you'll be available if a call should come in from the field asking you to save the day with some research or information on which your boss cannot readily get his/her hands.  When you cannot self-monitor day in and day out, you waste time and resources.  You also waste goodwill--like it or not, fair or not, you give interns a bad name by betraying this basic trust in one's coworkers.


Maybe you're feeling burned out.  You're tired of working on this project/that task/so hard for so long with little to no acknowledgement.  It's been a long haul, this recession, and interns take the brunt of it.  Maybe you have lots of responsibility and no authority, and that will burn out the best of us.  Maybe you're dealing with the loss of a parent or sibling or dear loved one, and it's left you unable to really focus on anything anymore.  Instead of floundering and goofing around, tell someone about it.  Your personal problems are no one's business until they disrupt business, and then they're everybody's business.  If your daily flakiness at work is a recent development, then let someone know so a solution can be found--different assignments, decreased hours, change of manager, whatever.


But don't for a moment think that you can flake out multiple times a day, every day of the week, and keep your manager's confidence in your ability to get things done.  S/he will see your lack of focus through your lack of results.  His/her colleagues will tell what they've seen when s/he isn't around.  It's said that character is what a person does when there's no one watching.  But at a firm, you might be surprised how often someone is watching.