Revit Will Shit On You

It's time to get the fuck back on track - I cannot express this any more clearly:

Revit is a useless piece of shit that has been foisted on the electrical design community by the degenerate fucks at Autodesk.

It has done nothing but get in the way of my ability to clearly and quickly represent the information that various planning/building commisions, city/county/state/federal reviewers, and other authorities need to see before construction can even start - and that a contractor needs to price, bid, install, and connect all of the electrical, lighting, HVAC, fire alarm, communications, security, and other systems/equipment.

I've been looking at some drawings that were generated by another firm - one that doesn't have an Engineer so they are dependent on us to review, modify if necessary, and then sign/seal their drawings.  At first glance they are an impressive set of drawings, all keynoted, and tons of references between details on various drawings - but the first thing our Engineer does when he looks at it is to laugh because of the amount of effort someone put into making anyone else who looks at the drawings have to put forth an equal amount of effort in order to decrypt what the intent was.

The notes themselves are even more cryptic - showing a lack of understanding on the part of the one who wrote (or cut/paste) them.  I see this all the time - it's like people think that their job is just to take information and spread it out across as many sheets and keynotes as possible rather than keeping it concise, easy to read, and most of all - incredibly hard to misunderstand the design intent.


There's a lot to be said for the use of keyed or numbered notes to keep the drawing clean (especially if the same piece of information is going to show up in dozens of places) but in a lot of cases, I see entire sheets that are almost blank except for keynotes - when the information could have simply been placed at the location it refers to.  Even if you do use keynotes, some things really just need to be labeled, otherwise the first thing someone working on it (reviewing/pricing/building) will do (and I've seen this on repeated occasions) is to start hand-writing the information on the drawing to keep from having to constantly refer back to a fucking keynote (and while I'm at it - who the fuck puts their keynotes in a shaded square?)

What a clusterfuck of keynote symbols (and vaguely worded notes) tells us is that they haven't actually put as much thought into the design as their spiffy drawings would lead you to believe.  As someone once said 'If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance - baffle 'em with bullshit'.  This problem preceded Revit, but the people who took this half-ass approach to design apparently had the ear of someone at Autodesk - because rather than give us software that can actually allow you to keep track of the vast amount of detail and equipment in a job, they spent all of their time developing a shitty system for tagging things.

Instead of giving us functional software, they gave us a glorified spreadsheet (and then convinced idiots that a glorified spreadsheet was what they needed to do their jobs).  I re-read a comment someone left on a previous post - where he was referring to the 'petulant' (perfect word for it) attitude that his Revit monkeys took whenever they were forced to work on a project in ACAD.

Their argument (made over and over again by Revitbots) is that you can make a change to a floor plan, and 'voila' you don't have to take that change all the way through your drawings because Revit magically does it for you.  Except when it doesn't.

After watching dozens and dozens of projects (both in-house and otherwise) have problems because some idiot moved a wall without realizing that they had just fucked up every detail that referred to it (ease of doing things also means ease of breaking things), I call bullshit.  Yes - it is possible, if you have a team of dedicated COMMUNICATING people you can make a project that is fully Revitized so that you can tweak whatever, whenever, with no fear of fucking up infinite amounts of shit.

Instead we have disparate bands of ragtag motherfuckers all attempting to work on 2-3 projects at a time and half-assing all of them - despite the 'promise' (read: lie) that Revit speeds up their work processes.

The reality is - none of them know how to do their jobs.  All they know how to do is the Revit two-step jerk-off shuffle.

And I've watched enough of that to know it ends in a bloody fucking mess on the dance floor.  Fuck all Revit users, developers, sellers, and anyone profiting from forcing it down the throat of the industry.

Fuck 'em.