The volume of construction projects has shrunk, and salary cuts and layoffs have become common anxieties in the construction industry. Different from the "middle-level dilemma" that often appears in the report, young people are at a low point when they enter the industry, and they have not felt the dividends of the times, "busy and poor" is a common phenomenon, and there are few opportunities for promotion and development.
However, the benefit of not enjoying the dividend is that there are no high expectations, and there is not much baggage, and in the initiative or force, young people who study architecture begin to look for a new way out.
1
On some platforms, the construction career change has become a course that is packaged and sold. If you think about it, the term "construction winter" has been mentioned since 10 years ago, but everyone was still noncommittal at the time. It's like a giant ship that has been on the sea for years, and no one thinks it's really going to sink until the water actually floods the ship's hold.
I was one of the earliest among my peers to change careers, and it doesn't seem very accurate to say "change careers", because although I have studied architecture for many years, I have never officially entered a design institute. Since I was an undergraduate, I was vaguely aware that taking architecture as a profession was not suitable for my personality, and drawing every day was too boring, so I consciously came into contact with other planning, media, and Internet industries, and gradually focused on a wide range of topics.
Stills from "To Our Dying Youth".
In the past, when teachers and classmates talked about me, they would think that I was a bit "rebellious" and regarded me as a maverick model. In the last year or two, when I meet friends in the construction industry, everyone will feel that I am "wise" and think that I am fast enough. In fact, I didn't have the foresight, and I hesitated for a while a few years ago when faced with an offer that matched my major. At the time, I certainly didn't have a way to predict the decline of the built environment, I just knew what I was more interested in.
Compared with my voluntary reversal of direction, more people are persuaded to quit by the sick industry model after work. When I was in graduate school, I had a group of friends with the same major, and we all had a passion for architecture, and we would occasionally chat in it after graduation. Some time ago, everyone took stock and found that most of the people in the group were not in the construction industry, and some of them went to the retail industry, emerging industries, some entered schools, and some were working as intermediaries.
2
I feel the deepest about Li Xiao, a girl who transferred to the lithium battery industry. When she was in school, she was the type who loved life very much, liked to do handicrafts, and would take pictures of similar things she encountered in life and collect them to make interesting atlases. Three years ago, she graduated and joined a large architectural design company in Shanghai, and soon began to complain frequently in the group.
Her leaders at the time would strictly control the amount of time employees spent in their seats. She hopes to maintain a basic combination of work and rest, and every two hours of work in front of the computer, she at least goes to the terrace to stretch her back, look into the distance, relieve the fatigue of sitting for a long time, and breathe some fresh air. When the leader found out, he talked to her and asked her not to leave the workstation casually.
A still from "Dear Designer".
Because she frequently worked overtime until late at night, she put toiletries, towels at the company, and brought a badminton racket. Once, after dinner, she played badminton for a while during the prescribed rest time, returned to her workstation to continue working overtime, and when she opened her mobile phone, she saw a message from the leader: "You came to the company for a vacation?" ”
She analyzed that this situation is due to the continuous prosperity of the construction industry in the past few decades, and many people have been pushed to leadership positions by age and qualifications, rather than ability, and can only manage their subordinates simply and rudely. Including a lot of overtime, it is also a direct manifestation of poor leadership ability, and the inability to control the nodes in project management or poor communication with Party A will lead to a lot of useless work for subordinates.
At that time, her roommate was in a different group with her in the same company, and Party A frequently proposed changes to her needs, and the leader responded positively, causing her roommate to work overtime until 2 a.m. every day before coming back. But even if you work overtime until the early hours of the morning, it is not allowed to arrive late at the company the next day, especially when it comes to reporting in the morning, people have to rotate like a perpetual motion machine.
At the design company where Li Xiao works for projects all over the country, each team has to calculate the working hours, and the whole company has to evaluate it every week. In the case of someone taking time off, the average working hours per week can reach 70 hours, and according to the weekly single break, they have to work nearly 12 hours a day. And such working hours are at the bottom of their company, and they need to be notified and criticized.
In such an environment, no matter how efficient a person is, there is no respite. Even if the work in hand has been completed, you need to go to the company to work overtime, and if you want to leave early, you will either be stuffed with more work or be interviewed by the leader. The company is very mobile, and it occurred to her that "every day someone joins the company, which means that someone leaves every day".
3
Internet giants are also known to be serious overtime industries, but high-intensity work is at least linked to high wages, and the situation in the construction industry is "busy and poor".
When he worked in a design institute in Shanghai, Li Xiao's salary was only a few thousand yuan, and it was difficult to maintain his basic life except for rent. A friend in Beijing is even more so, squeezed into a well-known compound, looking like he was doing big projects, working for four or five years, and his salary barely exceeded 10,000 yuan.
Another friend also works in a well-known architectural design company in Shanghai, not only the work intensity is high, but the male leader is also hot-tempered, often scolding him in public, and even using insulting words, the voice can be heard on the whole floor. He always thought that he was not good enough, and talked to the people who came to the company later, and after he left, another young man became the target of scolding. And now the market is getting worse, and the company has shrunk from more than 900 people to more than 300 people.
A still from "Introduction to Architecture".
The high intensity and low salary are related to the work model of the design institute. I met with a classmate last month, and he worked at a large old design institute in Shanghai, and came to lunch in a hurry at noon on his way to the drawing review. He said that their current work is basically the post-service of the old project, and the leader has a new model, that is, when he sees which plot is idle or has a new project intention, he asks his subordinates to come up with multiple sets of plans, and takes the initiative to find Party A and asks: "Do you think it can still be built like this, do you like it?" If you like it, leave it to us. Another friend at a large design institute in Xi'an also mentioned this practice, if you don't like it, you can redo it for free.
However, even if many Party A gets the plan they like, they may turn around and find a familiar company to do it. More importantly, the wage model of the design institute is not more work and more pay, but is linked to the actual output value and efficiency. This means that a large number of young designers are being forced to do unrewarding work, and the sense of desperation is comparable to Sisyphus's daily push of stones up a mountain.
Li Xiao and his roommate both left the award-winning design institute in Shanghai with the slogan "Building a Better Life".
Li Xiao transferred to a small architectural firm and was a little freer, but after her family fell ill, she asked for leave several times and caused dissatisfaction with the leadership, and she also left. After the naked resignation, she began to think about what was really important to her.
Stills from "Ideal City".
4
In chats with friends, many people mention the importance of "sense of worth" and "positive feedback".
When chatting with some well-known senior architects, many of them recall that they have been able to work on different projects since their college days. At that time, there were many architectural projects, but there were few professionals, and Party A would even go to the architecture department of the university to find someone by itself, and ask the students if they could do the design. Students who are more active can earn their first pot of gold in college, because the project comes from a wide range of sources, and entrepreneurship is a natural thing.
Now, the number of projects is limited, and it is difficult for young people to start a business through construction. And staying in the design unit, the ceiling is visible to the naked eye, and there is no hope in sight.
Stills from "The Covenant of a New Home".
In the past, obtaining a Class 1 Registered Architect (referred to as "One Note") was a clear sign of maturity in the construction industry. This exam is difficult and has many subjects, and in the case of a huge amount of projects and the need for qualifications of various construction units, after the examination, you can choose to be affiliated with it, and you can have a gray income of more than 100,000 or even hundreds of thousands every year. In recent years, the architect's lifelong responsibility system has been stipulated, and the project will be held accountable for life if there is a problem, and the personnel and certificates are required to be unified, so that there is a lot less chaos in affiliation. But in addition to economic gains, "one note" used to be a necessity for promotion and independence, and the gold content is self-evident.
Now that I have taken this certificate again, many people feel that their feelings are greater than their practical use. One of my undergraduate classmates, after graduation, went to the design compound in the southern provincial capital, worked hard, and may be the first batch of his peers to take the next bet. I asked her if she had been promoted after taking the test, and she said that it was only a few hundred yuan more per month. Normally, her qualifications are enough to move to a management position, but the unit can no longer retain fresh blood. She said: "Promotion is essentially about stepping on people, and when there are no more people below, it means that I will always be at the bottom layer." ”
In recent years, the construction industry has cut salaries and laid off employees seriously, and many reports have focused on middle-aged people, describing them falling into the predicament of a family's livelihood, unable to pay high mortgages, and unable to pay their children's school fees. But in the eyes of young people, those who have at least tasted the sweetness and caught up with the dividends of the times, their strong sense of gap and collapse comes from the fact that they have had good treatment and expectations. For graduates in recent years, entering the industry is a low point, making it difficult for them to empathize with those mid-level difficulties.
Interestingly, many of the construction graduates in recent years are also engaged in the construction industry. It was they who went through that hot period before they had the confidence to let the next generation enter the industry, but they didn't expect that the glory would never return, and many young people still needed family help because the wages in the industry were too low. When I needed funding, some friends joked with my family: "Who told you to finish my project early?" "In the past, it took a long time to build a lot of debt, and the rise and fall of the construction industry has formed a small reflection of the times between the two generations within the family.
5
However, the advantage of not catching up with the historical opportunity is that there is no baggage, at least not too much debt. I flipped through the circle of friends of those architecture graduates from famous universities at home and abroad, who were slightly next to their original majors in the career change, doing shopping mall exhibitions, furniture design, interaction design, architectural technology, and homestays, and those who were a little farther away were doing creative planning, product managers, children's education, and video shooting, and even more liberating were artist agents, e-commerce sales, medical beauty sales, and several graduates from Tsinghua University, Tongji, and Hong Kong University were selling insurance and engaging in finance. Some of them have entered relevant construction and cultural protection units, or have become teachers in schools. When I asked them about their current situation, almost everyone said that they were very satisfied with their current state and that their lives were at least going forward.
After leaving his job for the second time, Li Xiao watched and listened to a lot of books and podcasts on psychology, humanities and social sciences, and found that he still "wants to cherish the people and things he values", such as spending more time with family and friends, and spending more time on things that make him happy.
Stills from "The Story of the Boat".
She returned to Changsha, and after a period of rest, she submitted her resume on the recruitment software, and accidentally entered a completely unfamiliar field to do process design. Compared to the established construction industry, she likes the feeling that she is constantly developing and exploring, "learning new things every day, and feeling that she is improving".
Her current salary is the same as when she was in Shanghai, but the rent is mostly less, which is considered a salary increase. And she soon found that her design experience can also come in handy in the lithium battery industry, colleagues sometimes have a clear description of the process and equipment, and need to find a lot of reference drawings, but she can communicate by hand, and the efficiency has improved a lot.
Another undergraduate student has exactly the same idea as Li Xiao's career change. After completing graduate school at a well-known university in Japan, he went to work in an architectural firm in Hangzhou, where overtime was commonplace and he didn't get much sense of accomplishment in his work. What really made him decide to quit was a breakdown of his girlfriend. At that time, he had been working overtime until the early hours of the morning for more than ten consecutive days, and it was difficult to see each other even in person, even though the two of them were in the same city. Work itself is for a better life, but even the time for life is completely squeezed out.
Stills from "Ordinary Glory".
It happened that the new house needed to be renovated, and after he resigned, he concentrated on his family's affairs, preparing to rely on home decoration to become a self-media blogger. Although the number of likes is not much, he likes this kind of instant feedback, and can revise the design at any time, after all, in the company, the boss meets the needs of Party A, and he can only accept the instructions of the boss, and even the real user can not be reached.
A few days ago, I chatted with a friend who went to the United States to study CG technology after graduating from undergraduate, and used to go to school to do design, his favorite part was to draw renderings, and then he came into contact with digital engraving software, and he was out of control, and found that visual performance is his passion. I often watch him in my circle of friends tweaking his model without sleep, and he says that the current employment in Hollywood is not optimistic, but he is satisfied to be able to do what he likes.
Regarding the change of career, he and I have the same feeling, that is, after the decline of the construction industry, those of us who had been half-pushed and half-entered, on the contrary, had a lot less worries and psychological pressure, and finally left generously. When I changed careers a few years ago, my family complained that what I had learned was too wasteful, and often told me to take a test, and I haven't mentioned it again in the past year.
Those friends in the design compound all had the idea of quitting, but they came all the way step by step, and when they found that they were tired of their work and life, they didn't think about what to do. In the words of one of my friends, "self-consciousness has awakened too late", and it is not a good thing to be forced to explore oneself and find a more suitable field.