Battle Hymn of the Revitpublic

GUTEN TAG FUCKTARDS!!!

I've been in an inexplicably good mood lately.  Not having to use Revit or deal with Architects/Engineers - other than tangentially (and getting a raise) probably has a lot to do with that).

Then, out of the blue, some faggots start babbling about how awesome Revit is (see comments in: No Wonder This Revit Shit Eats Itself).  As you can see, I made the distinct mistake of trying to defend my attitude towards Revit, rather than simply reminding myself that anyone extolling the virtues of Revit is likely to have sustained multiple severe head injuries.

They will agree with me that Revit has "a lot of messed up functionality", and have run into times where they are "wasting hours trying to figure things out" or having to "fake it" (kind of like any women unlucky enough to find themselves on the receiving end of attempted penetration from their micro-penises), but  listening to them make excuses for Revit - and blaming themselves when things don't show up on a drawing (which is fine if they are only fucking themselves over - but when other people rely on your shit to be right, it's not fine) is a reminder of just how masochistic someone can willingly be.

One of my favorite bits was the claim that "when everyone is working in CAD, everyone is dumb, all the information is dumb, nothing is connected, and everything is manual input, unless you are using add-ins or other MEP functions with it, either way information is not typically active. You have zero ability to assign parameters to information, filter information efficiently, actively schedule information, or even assign formulas for schedules or blocks to add more intelligent useful information".

Holy Fucking Shit.

It's almost hard to believe that much bullshit can pour out of one person's brain - like they are repeating the Revit sales pitch they were given verbatim.  Now, in theory - some of these things are great 'it's all connected', yeah - until 'it's all fucked'.  Revit was ALLOWING people to fuck themselves (and by extension - me) into a hole in the ground on every single project - which is why I didn't really differentiate between Revit problems and user error.

So much of what was being done with Revit at my old firm was 'cutting edge', meaning that they were constantly experimenting with it - leading to all kinds of new and exciting ways for things to fuck up.  I knew the fun was about to start anytime I saw the Revit Buttfuckery Team huddled around somebodies desk discussing something along the lines of "we've determined that the way we've been doing things doesn't open enough people up to the risk of having their whole day wasted".

Another gem is "I have found if you use just about anything third party for Revit, especially for electrical, you are definitely going to be doing it the hard way".  So, in addition to being responsible for figuring out how to use Revit, I was now responsible for generating content as well - with little to no way of knowing whether something that I was doing wouldn't decide to fuck me later (as bad, if not worse than 3rd party content - or content included with Revit would).

The other problem being that I wasn't in control of what other people put into a model.  I had a mechanical designer who was convinced that (at some point) they would slap mechanical units onto a drawing and it would magically populate my panel schedule (he actually said this so many times, I was starting to question whether he hadn't been replaced by a recording).

By the time I left, I was still manually entering information into my panel schedules (CAD) or manually entering information into a disconnect switch (Revit).  Half of the time I would get their mechanical schedule, and immediately start spotting inconsistencies, errors, etc. (none of which I would've noticed if I just let a program fill shit out for me - and at least some of which the person making that schedule would have noticed if they were paying attention to scheduling units instead of expecting that to happen automatically as well.

Now - Revit vs. CAD stability.  Revit fucking crashes - that's just a goddamned fact.  It doesn't matter what kind of machine you have (the one I had before I left my last firm was a FUCKING BEAST), and while they might've managed to make it 'more stable' over time, I don't think there was a day that went by where I didn't have to deal with it locking up, throwing up some apocryphal error, or just plain eating itself.

Again, I had little to no control over how projects were started, especially after the 'one file for all' revolution.  When I would bring up problems with stability, they were consistently met with an indifferent 'yeah, it does that'.  Could one of you fucktards have been able to show them how to do it better?  Maybe. Maybe fucking not.

In the rare event that ACAD crashes, locks up, etc. (and it is rare), in the time it takes to fire Revit up and load a model, I can have CAD up, file open, and replace any work I've lost (15 minutes max between autosaves - which still always seems to be the most productive 14 minutes and 59 seconds of the day) and then some done.  Oh - and rather than 'putting my computer into a coma' pressing 'shift' while I pan does 3D orbit in ACAD - not that I ever need to do that.

Just this morning, I received a CAD file of a site plan for an almost 700,000 s.f. industrial building (that I had already designed systems for - and was waiting for the owner to quit fucking with the location of the guard shack/entrance gates so I could finish the project).  I had it cleaned up and ready to issue within an hour.  Revit wouldn't have even known what the fuck to do with it.  Then I dove back into the 164,000 s.f. middle school I've been working on for the last couple of days (after issuing a 267,000 s.f. high school earlier this week), and at no point did I think 'Revit would've improved my ability to do this job' (even if it worked as advertised - which it doesn't).

But hey, keep on assigning formulas for schedules or blocks to add more intelligent useful information - I'll be busy putting projects out the door.

Fuck Revit.

-S.F.

Next Time: Somebody probably tries to convince me I'm wrong.

Getting Down To Business

Knock Knock Fuckheads!

Last time we had a little fun bitching about Microsoft Word - which, in the meantime, I used to fix up the formatting on a few more papers for my wife.  Unsurprisingly it came up with new and exciting ways to fuck things up, every one of which I was able to overcome.  She actually used the template her professor provided, which (ironically) had things broken in it (sheets weren't numbered correctly, etc.), so I got to learn a bit more about how things work.  It had one fairly impressive feature - a table of contents that automatically populated based on headings (although nothing I couldn't do in a few seconds and not have to worry about it automatically fucking things up).

Back at my job, It's amazing to think that I've been here for an entire year - which (combined with the two months I took off before jumping on this opportunity) gives me just over 14 months of Revit clean time.  It's still inconceivable how much damage was done to my psyche having to deal with an army of fuckwits trying to convince me that the poorly designed and implemented piece software that they've had jammed up their ass would be a good fit for me as well.

This company is configured quite a bit differently than my previous one - which did reviews twice a year, one of which would be accompanied by a raise based on performance (and, despite having two middle fingers up at Revit the whole time, I would always get one).  Here, it was up to me to go to the owner and convince them that I deserve more money.  Fortunately I've made a good impression on everyone I work with, and I'm on good terms with the owner (we ended up talking about classic cars for the majority of the time).

I didn't get quite what I was hoping for, but it was still fairly substantial (enough to keep me from immediately going back to job hunting), and since we've been busy, I've been averaging 5 hours of overtime a week, which puts me almost back to where I was at before (especially since my old job had switched me over to salary - meaning no more overtime).  And, of course, the fact that I can simply do my job, and not have some moron standing in the way of my ability to be productive is worth an almost incalculable sum.

I was also surprised a few months back to find out that I have been amassing considerably more paid time off than I was originally led to believe - which means I'll be taking off damn near the entire end of the year (and still rolling some over).  This job isn't the be all end all, but it's been a good opportunity for me to learn more useful stuff to add to my resume (as opposed to just slapping a piece of software on my list of skills - which I will most likely remove at some point in time in the future).

One of these days I'm going to figure out what I want to do with my life, but one thing I can guarantee - it won't involve Revit, because fuck Revit.

-SF

Next Time: Bring the Butthurt