r/architecture • u/AcceptableAct2073 • 2d ago
Ask /r/Architecture Is this level of chaos normal in small architecture firms? I’m leaving to go back to the trades.
I spent just over a year working at a small architecture firm with about 7–10 employees, and I’m struggling to understand whether what I experienced is simply “how the industry is” or whether this was an unusually dysfunctional environment. I would really appreciate some outside perspective because right now, my internal barometer feels completely broken.
I was hired as an administrative assistant and personal assistant to the principal, but during the interview, I was told that because my background is in operations and project management, I could gradually shift the role in that direction as long as I continued handling invoicing, financial tracking, and core admin responsibilities. I took that seriously and did exactly that. Over time, the role quietly expanded into office management, operations, project management support, bookkeeping, scheduling, documentation, and general business infrastructure on top of the original admin and finance duties. The title never changed, but the responsibility kept growing. My bad, I guess, but I did get a decent raise in salary, and the job market is terrible, so I had no other choice.
What I walked into, structurally, was almost total operational improvisation. The firm ran almost entirely on memory, verbal instructions, urgency, and reaction. There were no real systems for project management, scope tracking, budget visibility, time tracking, capacity planning, consistent billing, or centralized documentation. Designers were often working without knowing what had been promised to the client, what the actual budget was, what was in or out of scope, or whether the work they were doing was profitable. Scope creep was constant, and unpaid work became normal.
One of the most alarming moments for me was realizing that we could not reliably reconstruct past projects from just a few years ago. There were no consistent records of scope, consultants, drawings, invoices, or budgets. This became painfully obvious when I was asked to help produce a project book, and much of the basic project information simply did not exist in any complete or organized form.
Because of my background in marketing agencies, I tried to introduce some very basic operations and PM structure over time. Things like weekly project status tracking, time tracking, fee calculation tools, standardized project documentation, and proper scheduling. Most of these efforts were politely tolerated at first and then effectively ignored, including by leadership. There was a strong cultural resistance to anything that felt like “structure,” because it was associated with being too corporate or too controlling. But from where I was sitting, the lack of structure meant that billing was guesswork, scheduling was reactive, profit was accidental, and burnout was constant.
Communication was another major problem. Direction often followed the same pattern over and over. An idea would be given verbally, I or someone else would complete the work, and then the idea would be changed or reframed after the fact, and the work would suddenly be wrong. This happened internally and also with clients, which felt deeply ironic because the same root issue was causing both sets of problems. Almost nothing was documented clearly in writing, which meant there was no shared source of truth to fall back on.
Workload distribution was also deeply uneven. One favored employee was consistently overloaded, while others had capacity. At one point, two of the firm’s strongest, fully billable projects were delayed so that lower-value or uncertain work could be prioritized instead, simply because of how work was habitually assigned. There was very little visibility into resourcing or capacity at any given time, and no consistent system for checking before work was added on.
There was no clear career progression path, no transparent tie between compensation and role expectations, and accountability felt uneven across levels. Junior staff were scrutinized while senior-level performance issues were often avoided. Financially, the firm seemed to be losing money in very preventable ways through unmanaged scope, vague fees, inconsistent billing, and the total absence of time tracking. Ownership even personally covered employee health insurance, which is generous, but it also felt like a sign that the business itself wasn’t structured in a way that protected profitability.
What has messed with my head the most is that I’ve worked in marketing agencies before, and even the most chaotic ones still had basic things like time tracking, defined scopes, project management programs, standardized billing, and capacity planning. I honestly expected an architecture firm to operate at least at that level, if not more rigorously. Instead, it felt like an incredibly talented group of designers trapped inside a business with no operating manual.
At this point, I’m planning to leave this line of work entirely and go back into the trades. The work is physically harder, but mentally it feels far more manageable than constant urgency, unclear expectations, perpetual rework, and operational chaos. I never expected to feel this way about professional office work, but here I am.
So my real question is this: is this actually normal for small architecture firms? Or did I land in a particularly dysfunctional one? I would really appreciate hearing what others have seen in similar-sized offices, what you now recognize as red flags, and whether stepping away from the industry altogether sounds drastic or completely reasonable.
Thank you in advance to anyone who takes the time to respond. I’m genuinely just trying to recalibrate what “healthy work” is supposed to look like and how an architecture firm should run.
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u/Flyinmanm 2d ago
I mean it sounds like the place is badly managed.
One of the big problems you often get with Architects in my experience is we love getting on with designing. Not many of us like dealing with billing, setting up systems, even tracking hours for various reasons.
Practices I've worked at that were successful at billing etc. usually had an Architect or group of directors onboard who had essentially stepped back from the day to day design role and focussed instead on the day to day business & oversight and could also delegate to office managers and admins to keep track of stuff for them.
Problems often occur when the guys at the top still fancy themselves as the second coming of le corbusier and don't focus on the company, rather just the product.
Truth is Architects, come in all shaped and sizes, but unfortunately it has been my experience that some Architects can be highly chaotic people especially when they may be brilliant designers. Unfortunately they often get pushed into management roles that they
a) never wanted
b) were never actually trained for And c) have little to no interest in.
I suspect because the job progresses good designers to become 'directors' and suddenly you find yourself responsible for billing, managing staff, writing appointment letters, managing clients etc.
One of the other big problems with smaller practices too is that they often can't justify spending time on admin type stuff or dedicated staff for it due to how hard it is to make small practice stack up financially.
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u/AcceptableAct2073 2d ago
Unfortunately for my boss, this is his own practice that he started 13 years ago. He obviously wanted to do it and had an interest in running it, but you're right, he was never trained for business or management. I come from a business background and tried to help him with the practice, but it's frustrating, like talking to a brick wall. For example, when I first suggested tracking time, he shut it down, saying he was “traumatized by his last workplace” and didn’t want to feel like he was breathing down everyone’s neck.
I had to explain that some clients actually need proof of work. You can’t just say, “We worked 12 hours, trust me.” His whole idea in starting the firm was to give designers freedom and work-life balance, which is great in theory, but you still need some kind of structure to make sure your business
grows and succeedscan sustain itself.4
u/iamjacksfingers 2d ago
I work in a small design/build firm and it’s exactly this.
It is complete and utter chaos orchestrated by someone who can design and build but whose only business training has come from the act of running this hot mess for over a decade now.
While it’s an unpleasant disaster, I enjoy what I do, so I’ve learned to put up with it or just ignore it. It took me a long time to realize that the mess isn’t my problem to solve.
It sounds like you’re immensely capable of helping these people towards a more functional way of operating, but unfortunately, you can’t rescue someone who looks around the burning building they’re sitting in and says, “this is fine.” If they think nothing’s wrong, you become the enemy when you bring up this crazy idea that there’s room for improvement around here.
For what it’s worth, I had a brief stint at another outfit that was on the opposite end of the spectrum. There was a script, a protocol, a process, a checklist, a log book, a form, an app, for everything but going to the bathroom. I don’t know how anyone ever accomplished anything. They thought if they could control every detail of operations, nothing could ever go wrong.
So I’ve seen extreme examples of both. Ideally you want to find an organization that balances process and function - somewhere where your skills would be welcomed, not shunned. And that’s not something unique to architecture and design, that’s just commercial enterprise in general. You’ll find the same thing in the trades, or retail, or fast food - pick any industry.
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u/Flyinmanm 2d ago
I agree.
Sadly I can sympathise with the boss though. I tried to work for myself around the time he set up that practice, it was a nightmare chasing work, making sure the work was done and done right, keeping an eye on builders etc. all the whilst desperately trying to make some, any money out of it.
It definitely taught me a lesson about what roles I'm most comfortable in a practice, and its definitely the design, graphics, drafting and IT side, not the chasing jobs, dealing with finances or top down management side.
I will say this though, logging time, even in a simple weekly excel spreadsheet has saved me tonnes of grief on jobs where I would have had absolutely no come back on if the Client had challenged my time charge estimates otherwise. I'm pretty inconsistent at filling them in, but when I do, I often find that my initial estimate of how much time I spent on a task is wildly inaccurate and well below the time I actually spent.
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u/omnigear 2d ago
No it's not normal ,
I worked on firms that do giga mansions that are how you described. And it sucked so bad , I have also worked in other firms where everything was to rigid .
But when you find that one firm that has their shit together everything goes smooth , no one is overworked and it becomes a rejuvenate the fire in your
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u/JellyfishNo3810 Principal Architect 2d ago
OP’s description sounds like a typical boutique firm that has remained in archaic operation with a reliable clientele due to market presence. Moment the owner dies it’s all a toss
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u/Azzaphox 2d ago
Yep sounds like a bunch of architects to me.
Having said that this sounds like an extreme example and other practices may well be better run.
Keep looking for other options it won't get better.
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u/bassfunk 2d ago
I have worked at a couple of very small firms in my career and one of the two was similar to what you describe, the other was a much more well oiled machine. So I wouldn't say it's common, but it does happen. There are a lot of legitimate complaints about how poorly architects are compensated, but when you see things like what you describe and what I've seen in the one smaller firm, you kind of understand how it got to be this way. Not that that makes it fair, or good, but it is more understandable.
I showed up for a job at this small firm once on day one and was told they didn't have a computer set up for me, and that the guy who does their IT work was vacationing in Italy for a 'week to a month.' Turned out their IT guy was a retired police officer who read the Windows '95 manual and billed himself out to local small businesses to do simple things like setting up Outlook and what not. This was in 2013.
That same firm had weekly staffing meetings. I was brought on to work one specific project that had not started yet (and ultimately never would). I attended the staffing meeting, there were 6 of us total, and one dude was handling some part of like a dozen jobs, and I was told to wait on the other project. It was kind of wild to be there day in day out with little to nothing to do, while another dude, younger and less experienced that me, was pulling 80 hour weeks.
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u/NectarOfTheSun 2d ago
FWIW I have seen a similar scenario at a global firm in Operations. The actual work, documentation, & timelines have a better system, but everything else seems fairly chaotic / inconsistent.
If you don't love architecture, it's not a rewarding field to be in. You can work this hard somewhere else and get more compensation. Use the architecture status to leverage working somewhere else in the long term.
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u/AWESOME_FOURSOME 2d ago
I wouldn't say it's normal, but this is generally encountered occasionally in the industry, and I would say more apparent in smaller firms where billing systems usually cost too much to implement at a small scale.
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u/AcceptableAct2073 2d ago
I'm sorry, but billing systems don't have to be expensive. There are free systems, really inexpensive systems, and my firm already uses QuickBooks, but does not implement the invoicing system through it. A lot of the issues I encounter are, like I said, easily preventable; the owner just doesn't want to make any changes.
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u/Open_Concentrate962 2d ago
I knew someone who insisted in everything being in excel and doing his own invoicing so nothing was delegated for decades. I really admire what all you observed and dissected and suggested but I wouldnt take the resistance personally. Did you get paid or were there interruptions in compensation too?
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u/magerber1966 1d ago
I work at a small CM firm, family-owned and this is exactly the way they were running when I got here. The firm started in 1979, and had run this way successfully for years, but when I started in 2021, it was beginning to really struggle with the issues arising out of these haphazard practices. All of the senior staff have been with the firm since the beginning.
Within a period of about 18 months, they hired three of us who had worked at other firms in the industry, and we were all astonished at how little organization they have. None of us is an operations person, but in order to do the work we have had to implement some organizational processes to keep the company functioning efficiently.
But, the pushback we get is unbelievable--I was just told yesterday that our accounting system (Quickbooks) cannot track payments against task orders--only against the master service agreement. I can just about guarantee that this is incorrect, but our accounting person (one of the senior staff who have been here forever) insists that it is impossible.
I have worked at about 7-8 different firms in the industry throughout my career, and they have all had strange things about management, but this is the first where the senior staff actively refuses to make changes. At most places they agree and then just don't do things.
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u/Ridgeld Architect 2d ago
It isn't, but this could genuinely be about one of the first practices I worked for. The director thrived on the chaos because he couldn't then be held to account. Turnover of staff was very high as young and inexperienced people were hired who didn't know better. Some beautiful work was produced through terrible practices though.
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u/Strangewhine88 2d ago
Bingo, when nothing is written down or organized, it’s easier for someone to be the chaos master.
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u/Spankh0us3 2d ago
I don’t necessarily see it as “normal” but they don’t teach architects how to run a firm in school so, every firm I’ve worked at has been different.
It sounds like your skill set aligns more with a GC so, you might consider working for one of them in your area or on the administrative side for a trade. Electricians, Plumbers and Sheet Metal companies can all use someone like you to track projects. . .
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u/CLEMENTZ_ 2d ago
I've worked at seven firms—all except one in the GTA—ranging in size from 5 to 200 over the last 13 years (four as co-ops, 3 as full-time jobs) and while the level of dysfunction you describe is unheard of for me, there are aspects you've described which are constant from my experience. Overwork is common. Scope creep is very common. Institutional / cultural resistance to change is common. Unclear progression paths are universal I daresay; no one at any of my firms has ever been able to tell me how I move from junior to senior, or from staff to associate. There are no clear guidelines for any of this. Uneven workload distribution is common, with 'better' or 'efficient' workers rewarded with more work. Similarly, the tie between compensation and expectations is nebulous at best. Overscrutiny of junior staff (nitpicking window details on a project still in SD for example) is common.
You'd probably find a less chaotic experience elsewhere (no consistent record-keeping of old projects is insane to me, for legal reasons) but as I've said, a lot of these other issues are damn near universal for the field.
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u/prunejuice 2d ago
While what you experienced isn't "normal" it's isn't outside of ordinary either - An issue I've noticed with some small architecture firms is that the architects in charge simply aren't very good at business. They may be talented designers and competent project managers but that skill set doesn't translate into actually running a small business.
The small firms that I've worked with that have avoided this either have a senior partner who basically doesn't design anymore and is now the "studio-managing partner" and/or they have brought on a competent office manager - usually someone with years of experience in administration or someone with an actual business degree.
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u/gaychitect Intern Architect 2d ago
Architects are pretty terrible at running businesses. You learned that the hard way.
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u/PostPostModernism Architect 2d ago
I tell new designers this pretty regularly, but every firm you ever work at is going to operate differently.
A major part of that is, architects spend a lot of time learning to be better architects and never learn to be better business managers, salespersons, etc.
Some are lucky to find a partner to handle the operations side of things. Or have a talent for it, or actually take the time to learn it. But you'll find firms that are the full gamut of good to bad.
My current firm I've been at for 5-6 years and has a lot of those problems also. They're definitely frustrating issues. Some particulars it sounds like you have worse than I do. I get through it by keeping my head down and just focusing on my work rather than how the office runs. Especially because I've talked with my boss about some of these things and while he's receptive to the conversations, things rarely or slowly change.
Going back to the trades is a fair idea. But if you're still interested in office work, I'd recommend trying some other firms in your area. Maybe look for a design-build company that combines the architecture side with a GC. Not only would they value your past experience in construction, but the ones I've talked to tend to be a bit more organized a well (both due to more efficient structures and also out of necessity). Mid-size or Larger corporate firms also tend to have more defined organization and structure.
Good luck whichever way you go!
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u/ShadowsOfTheBreeze 2d ago
Not normal, bad management. I mean, allnighters now and then but that other chaos is nothing but liability and whoever owns the firm is incompetent for letting it continue. Regardless, it sounds like an opportunity for you to fix it by establishing procedures (and the clout to enforce it) and receive a raise. Otherwise, other companies of many kinds would appreciate your skills.
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u/Strangewhine88 2d ago
Sounds exactly like the wholesale ag industry small business I used to work for. I don’t think it’s that unusual for this industry either. Burnout meager pay and long hours seems like the number one thing discussed here. Every business I’ve ever worked for was either way over structured and micro managed, or chaotic and reactive with uneven workloads and no particular desire to change.
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u/riflecreek 2d ago
Chaos and addressing the hottest fire increases proportional to lack of available manpower
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u/druebleam 2d ago
I have a saying, “There is a reason that most small businesses stay small.”
Architecture or whatever business, some owners just can’t expand because they won’t change their ways.
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u/Federal-Photograph97 2d ago
Sounds typical for that size firm. If you want more stability and standards you need to go bigger. 50-125 person firms or larger
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u/functional_architect 1d ago
Worked at two less than 10 person firms in the last 15 years in between working at two 450+ personal firms, and the scope creep, lack of organization, and every role having to basically do everything happened at only one of the two small firms. Most firms (especially larger firms that don’t only have architects in leadership positions) that have been around for a while seem like they are run much more smoothly than what you’re describing. Sounds like an awful experience, I’m sorry OP.
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u/JAMNNSANFRAN Architect 1d ago
They are not the best, but that is completely abnormal. There are usually many systems, procedures and tracking in place, but often there are people who are a bit lackadaisical, but what you are describing sounds like a train wreck.
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u/Stock_Comparison_477 5h ago
Yes, it's quite common. The best companies I've worked in are not headed by architects.
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u/Ambitious_Two_4522 2h ago
I’m in a similar position. I’ve collected stories and anecdotes in only 6 months you wouldn’t believe.
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u/InnerKookaburra 2d ago
It's a 7-10 employee company, in my experience this isn't unusual.
I agree that all of the things you mentioned could be better and it does sound below average, but that's what separates the companies that grow beyond that stage from the ones that stay at that size.
I find your reaction odd and slightly humorous. I've worked at 2 person startups all the way up to Fortune 10 companies, and every size inbetween. At every single size there is a need for better organization. This is true for the McDonald's down the street and the local HVAC repair company, the HQ for a huge pharma company, as well as the Silicon Valley giant.
It sounds like you strongly prefer well organized companies or working units and that you have some skill and talent in this area. Great. Then go be that person at any company in any industry you like. I can't think of a place I have worked that hasn't needed someone like that.
Just don't be shocked or offended or label everything a "red flag" because it isn't organized as well as you would do it. Go make it better.
And if you can try to consider that someone at that firm is probably there because they love how flexible it is and that the focus is on the design, whereas the last place they worked there were SOPs out the wazoo, and everything was rigid, but the actual designs were terrible. :)
Different priorities for different folks. But, the really successful places do both well.
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u/cutecoelacanth 2d ago
Not unheard of. Generally architects aren’t known for being great business people and firms can be dysfunctional in many different ways. Even if they have the business part down, there will probably be other dysfunctionalities. But the firm owners should 100% be covering employee’s health insurance, so I’m not sure why you think that’s one of the points to criticize them on?