110%

This guy nails a concept I've been railing about for a while:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-system-rigged-a-guide-grads/
He talks about the futility/necessity of taking on massive debt to pay an obscenely inflated price for college so that you can work your ass off for what might turn out to be a useless degree, only to find out that you are competing in a flooded job market against people who are willing to work for free (or a pittance) in order to get experience, and that getting hired (and keeping) a job has a lot more to do with who you know, and various other factors that you may or may not be aware of (or be able to control).
 

He also points out the massive number of people who have found themselves having to go back to school later in life in order to become/stay marketable (or increase their marketability), all while having to listen to the older generation who babble nonsensically about 'bootstraps' and 'gumption'.


This is where he really veers into territory relevant to this blog though:



"The economic theory behind it is that you will work harder if you're kept in a constant state of uncertainty and fear -- they don't want you to get complacent, after all. Otherwise, you might not take that work home with you and do it on your own time. You might not give 110 percent."

Part of the expectation is that you will do whatever work is handed to you (often without extra pay), but that state of uncertainty and fear is exactly what the Reviteers and Autodesk have relied on in order to force feed their software into disciplines that already had proven systems for profitable results.

I knew people who had been in the field for years who were now having to spend several hours a day either in a class (often at their own expense - and a waste of money, since 90% of Revit 'training' is fucking trash), or staring at endless 'tutorials' that aren't worth shit.  They all had to learn it on the fly, while still being expected to crank out projects on schedule/budget.

The result has been a handful of 'Born of Fire' Reviteers who now feel compelled to apply their dubious 'skills' to every project (often when the project has absolutely no Revit component, deliverable, budget, etc.), and a whole fuckload of projects stalled or limping along with duct-tape and baling wire 'workarounds' holding them together.

What's really sad is how they will tout the scope of what they have accomplished - which is not unimpressive, just wholly unnecessary.  The buildings are still getting built the same way, and the same coordination problems are still occurring in the field - the only change is that we are left with less profit at the end of the day (the irony of ironies is that profits are supposed to be the whole point of abusing employees).

I've probably drawn a similar comparison before, but this is like a mechanic having someone bring their car in for an oil change, talking the customer into paying to have the tires rotated, brake pads replaced, etc. (happens almost every time you take a car to a mechanic) - only when the customer gets their car back, it is three weeks later, and it has been given a complimentary engine rebuild, paintjob, and new tires/rims.

Some of the 'justification' (other than the sad belief that Revitards keep clinging to that they are able to complete their work faster or more accurately in Revit) is that by doing everything in Revit, they are giving themselves the advantage of having another Revit project under their belt (like more on the job training).

Now, we do get some projects in the door because we are a 'Revit Firm', and I can't deny that - but I can't stress enough that if it weren't for Autodesk using the money they should be spending developing their software on advertisement  - and doing an end-run around design firms to get Revit (or BIM at least) chosen as mandatory for Govt. and other projects, that 99.9999% of our clients don't give a shit what software it gets done in, as long as it gets done on time.

The simple fact is - if I had jumped in on day one with both feet, no life preserver, no lifeline, and with the attitude of 'Revit or Die', it would have fucking paralyzed my ability to do my job (not to mention my personal/family life).  I would have been dependent on a whole building full of people who were just figuring out how to use the software without it blowing up in their face (and failing).

I am still dependent on these kinds of people as they rotate into newly minted Reviteers who not only don't know how the fuck to do anything (in Revit or otherwise) and are having to repeat the same process of fucking things up, but are also like deer in fucking headlights when it comes to the process of getting projects out the door.

Most of the older Revitshits (i.e. the ones that fucked up the system in the first place) have moved into positions where they don't even use the goddamned software anymore (leaving that to unpaid interns and low-level Revitbots).  Some are becoming acutely aware that the drawings they are reviewing are low-grade shit - with details/sections that were supposed to 'automatically' update when changes were made being left in complete disarray (but the Revitbot fucking it up doesn't know that, because they don't actually know what the fuck it is they are looking at).

Fuck 'em.