Oh wow man.
I'm under the gun, and dealing with some of the most incompetent fucking people in the world, bullshit artists of the highest degree, and cocksucking motherfuckers the faggotry of which has never been seen before.
The sad part is - they are winning. At least where it comes to sucking the Revit cock (which is all anyone fucking cares about anymore). Choking it down with a smile on their face, then shitting all over everything and everyone they come into contact with.
It's always been the suck-ups, brown-nosers, and other ass-kissing fuckwits who create the most convincing illusion of having their shit together to those who are removed from (or don't have an understanding of) day to day operations.
That's standard operating procedure at most firms though, and it's something I both identified and decided I wasn't going to be a part of, a long fucking time ago. I certainly don't give a fuck if someone doesn't think I'm a 'team player' (especially when that person is responsible for shoveling massive amounts of profit down the Revit sinkhole).
The idea that a clusterfuck like Revit (or any other clusterfuck for that matter) should just be accepted as a fact is anathema to the way my brain is wired. A good example is the revenue cameras that used to be scattered around the town where I live (I've probably bitched about them before).
I say 'used to' because once enough people in town got fed up with the bullshit - they mobilized and got the fucking things taken out of service by getting the city to not renew their contract with Redflex (despite some people fighting tooth and nail to keep them).
If you had asked just about anyone prior to their removal - they were just 'a fact of life that you better get used to', and 'getting angry about it is a waste of time'. They were half right - people got angry, and then they got to work.
One of the people fighting to keep the camera had a child killed by a car - and while I wouldn't be so callous as to disregard the opinion of someone who had lost a child, the fact was - her kid was killed by someone who straight up ran a stop sign and plowed right over them, not someone going through a yellow a little too late.
It was the blatant cash grab that made it a target - if they had simply backed off a little on who they ticketed they might have flown in under the radar. Even before they were wiped out altogether, a bunch of people joined together and successfully forced them to stop ticketing people for perfectly legal right-on-red turns - but after how many people just shrugged and paid the ticket? Or went to court to fight it and had their ass handed to them?)
I'm not big into gloating, but I would LOVE to have every single 'it's just an unchangeable fact of life' motherfuckers lined up in front of me so I would walk up to each, flash them a shit-eating grin, and scream 'WHATTHEFUCKDOYOUTHINKABOUTTHATSHITMOTHERFUCKER?!?!?!!?' while spraying copious amounts of spittle onto their sheep faces.
I hate a lot of stupid shit, but blind and/or willing acceptance of arbitrary bullshit is abso-fucking-lutely where I draw the goddamned line. If someone tries to force feed me that same bullshit, they've crossed that line so hard that they aren't risking a fine, they are risking the future of their facial bone structure.
Fuck Sheeple, Fuck Revit, and FUCK YOU REDFLEX! :)
-SkizzleFizzle
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
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.
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
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.
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.
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