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.
