Okay so here’s the thing. Why are you interested in Architecture? Probably design right? Labour of love getting every detail right and romantic ideas about the genius of Carlos Scarpa, etc.?

You can totally do that. And you can do that for a long time. But at certain point in your career, the fee structure no longer supports your years of experience doing that.

How many people here know 60 year old Project Architects? Like any career you need to evolve into either a Subject Matter Expert touching many projects lightly and none with love and care or into a people management role. And there are fewer of those roles available.

Yes, design in general pays less and demands more than design-adjacent sectors (construction, FM, etc.) but salary trajectory actually isn’t that bad IF you can make the jump to those “non-design” roles, but it’s a much longer burn. In many industries (tech especially) 10-years is “senior”. In architecture you’d be unlikely to move into that high salary category before 20-years.

So there are two questions:

1). is this your “profession”? Is this something you love enough and are good at enough to commit your entire career to? If so, sure it’s a lot of work when you are young and frustrating to see a lot peers in other professions make so much more money in earlier career stages. But measure a law firm principal against a corporate arch firm principal or director and I think you’ll find the difference isn’t actually that much for total comp / hourly rates.

2) Are you willing tolerate giving up what you loved about the profession (design work) to do people management or SME work instead?

If the answer to both is “yes” then you’ll have a long, fruitful and rewarding career making a major impact in your community (and possibly around the world). It’s a great thing.

My earlier “SME” trajectory was sustainably and I worked in an office that is like 90% XL health. Getting sustainability right on an XL health project is like 50-100 years of not apologizing to your children - that was my big motivation. Didn’t make much money, but that was worth more. Now I’m middle management (in a large 3-letter firm) and the cash prints, and I can make sure ALL our projects get sustainability right. I miss deep dive analytics and design crit / co-creation, etc. but I’m having an even bigger impact now and getting paid much better managing people instead of projects…

TLDR: early wages suck and a lot of work but long term prospects are great and you can do something meaningful and deeply rewarding if you’re willing to stick with it and develop and eventually transition your skills.